L2 Common Pool Resources & International Environmental Cooperation

Recap: Positioning of This Lecture

• Builds directly on prior discussion of public goods (e.g., greenhouse-gas mitigation).

• Shifts focus from public goods (non-excludable, non-rivalrous) to common resources (non-excludable but rivalrous).

Core Concept: Common Resources / Common-Pool Resources

• Definition: Goods that anyone can theoretically access, yet each unit consumed diminishes what remains for others.

  • Non-excludable ➔ hard to keep users out.

  • Rivalrous ➔ one user’s extraction lowers availability for the next.

• Canonical incentive: “Use it before others do.”

  • Leads to overuse because individual payoff from extra use exceeds individual share of future loss.

• Outcome: Tragedy of the Commons

  • Open access + rivalrous consumption = depletion or outright destruction of the resource.

Mechanism of the Tragedy of the Commons

• Users recognize:

  • If I restrain, others may not ➔ I lose relative gain.

  • If everyone thinks that way, aggregate extraction skyrockets.

• Resource degradation is externalized; costs are diffused among all users, benefits captured by each extractor.

• End state can be complete collapse of the resource (e.g., barren pasture, fishery collapse).

Everyday & Historical Illustrations

• Roommates’ shared space

  • Everyone can dump items; clutter reduces usable space until none remains.

• Shared pasture (original Hardin example)

  • Each herder adds livestock because marginal private benefit > marginal private cost ⇒ over-grazing.

Domestic-Level Solutions

Government-Led Interventions

• Transform resource toward a private good or regulated common:

  • Licensing systems (e.g., fishing permits).

  • Quotas/total allowable catch; fines for violations.

  • Declaration of protected areas: complete exclusion of extractive use.

  • Usage fees to internalize externality.

  • Direct state ownership & management.

• Governments possess coercive power (legislation, enforcement) within borders, making these fixes feasible.

Community-Based Management

• Local users often craft informal norms/rules when government is absent or weak.

  • Shared understanding of extraction limits, rotational grazing, seasonal closures, etc.

• Incentive to cooperate arises because the same group bears both costs and benefits.

• Empirical examples: small-scale fishing villages, irrigation associations, apartment cleaning rotas.

International Dimension: Why Coordination Gets Harder

• No world government to impose binding rules or penalties.

• States are economic competitors; benefits of over-extraction accrue domestically while costs are partially global.

• Domestic political pressures (industry lobbies, consumers) resist restrictions that appear to disadvantage national firms.

• Collective action must emerge via voluntary cooperation (treaties, soft law) rather than unilateral coercion.

Case Study: Overfishing on the High Seas

• High-seas fisheries = textbook common resource: non-excludable (no sovereign territory) & rivalrous (finite fish stocks).

• Observed trend: Significant decline in many wild fish populations; dire media predictions of total collapse.

• Domestic driver: National fishing industries lobby for minimal regulation to maximize catch.

Multilateral Efforts

• World Trade Organization (WTO)

  • Uses trade-policy lever: restricts/negotiates limits on fisheries subsidies that lower operating costs and encourage over-capacity.

  • Idea: Removing subsidies raises private cost of distant-water fishing → reduces pressure on stocks.

• United Nations (UN)

  • Initiated high-seas biodiversity treaty negotiations ≈ 5-year process culminating in 2023 agreement.

  • Aims: Establish marine protected areas, share benefits of marine genetic resources, mandate environmental impact assessments.

  • Limitations: Implementation still depends on national ratification, funding, and enforcement capacity.

Synthesis of Framework (Lectures 1–3)

• Environmental challenges often revolve around goods that are non-excludable (public goods or common resources).

• For both categories, individual (or national) incentives skew toward under-provision (public goods) or over-exploitation (common resources).

• International politics compounds the problem:

  • Decentralized system, sovereignty norm, competitive interests.

  • Absence of automatic enforcement → reliance on negotiation, reputation, reciprocity.

Looking Forward

• Subsequent lectures will examine:

  • How treaty design (monitoring, side payments, flexibility mechanisms) can alter incentives.

  • Role of international organizations (e.g., UNEP, FAO) in facilitating compliance and data gathering.

  • Interaction with domestic politics: leaders balance global commitments vs. internal constituencies.

• Central question: How can we engineer institutions and incentives so that states voluntarily move from tragedy toward sustainable governance of shared environmental resources?

International Environmental Agreement Negotiation Factors

Context & Purpose of Today’s Lecture

• Builds on earlier lectures examining international cooperation problems.

• Focus: factors that enable or hinder negotiation and membership in International Environmental Agreements (IEAs), a.k.a. Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs).

• Central question: How do states overcome collective-action problems & the tragedy of the commons to manage transboundary environmental issues?

Key Concepts & Definitions

• International Environmental Agreement (IEA) / Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA)

  • Formal, negotiated treaty among \ge 3 states to address a cross-border environmental problem.

  • Bilateral Environmental Agreements: only two parties; mentioned but not central today.

• Collective-Action Problem

  • Situation where individual states have incentives to free-ride on others’ efforts, producing under-provision of a public good (clean environment).

• Tragedy of the Commons

  • Over-exploitation of shared resources when property rights & monitoring are weak.

Enormous Variability in IEAs

• Not every environmental issue receives a treaty.

• Wide dispersion in:

  • Topics covered (species, pollution, climate, water, etc.).

  • Number & identity of signatories.

  • Depth/strength of commitments & enforcement.

• Research goal: explain when negotiations start, why they succeed/fail, and which countries join.

Major Explanatory Research Strands

1. Properties of the Environmental Issue Itself

• Visibility

  • Highly visible degradation (smog, oil spills) → easier to mobilize domestic & international pressure → more likely treaty initiation.

  • Example offered: urban haze that is literally seen by citizens.

• Crisis / Disaster Triggers

  • Acute events (chemical spills, river fires) galvanize public & political will.

• Science-based evidence accumulation

  • As data mount, perceptions of urgency ↑.

2. Alignment of State Interests

• Agreement on Underlying Goal / Problem Definition

  • Upstream vs. downstream river users illustrate divergent perceptions.

  • If states disagree on whether a problem exists → negotiations stall.

• Similarity of Stakes

  • Unequal impacts → asymmetry in willingness to act.

  • Convergence can occur over time as damage becomes widespread or highly documented.

• Consensus on Solutions & Burden Sharing

  • Who should reduce emissions? Who bears costs? Upstream vs. downstream parallels again.

3. Role of Other (Non-State) Actors

Scientific Community

• Generates data, forecasts, causal attributions.

• Builds epistemic consensus → narrows uncertainty → fosters common diagnosis/solutions.

• Limitation: internal scientific disputes can slow action.

Global Leaders / Major Powers

• U.S., EU, etc. can act as agenda setters; leverage economic & diplomatic carrots/sticks.

International Organizations (IOs)

• E.g., UN system: convene conferences, circulate reports, solidify terminology.

• Cannot coerce but can lower transaction costs & increase issue salience.

Inter-State Peer Influence

• Allies imitate or pressure one another (both government channels & societal linkages).

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

• Mobilize domestic publics; lobby negotiators.

• Partner with IOs to stage meetings, side-events, hearings.

4. Domestic Political Determinants

Industry & Interest-Group Pressure

• Economic stakeholders lobby for/against agreements depending on cost-benefit calculus.

• Existence of countervailing industries (e.g., renewables) can shift alignment over time.

Governing Ideology / Partisanship

• Ideological orientation shapes belief in regulation & multilateralism.

• U.S. case: alternating presidential administrations illustrate policy swings.

Ethical, Philosophical & Practical Implications

• Justice dimensions: upstream vs. downstream, developed vs. developing world, historical responsibility.

• Legitimacy: need inclusive negotiation processes to avoid power imbalances.

• Precautionary principle: act amid scientific uncertainty to forestall irreversible damage.

Empirical Trends in MEAs (Recent Dataset Overview)

• Dataset aggregates all signed MEAs; two visualizations discussed.

Graph 1: 5-Year Moving Average of MEAs Signed

• Shows time-series escalation then potential plateau/decline.

• Useful proxy for overall tempo of environmental treaty-making.

Graph 2: Thematic Composition (% of Total MEAs by Issue)

• Pre-1960s: majority in species protection.

• Post-1960s: rise of pollution-oriented agreements—aligned with visibility narrative (urban smog, acid rain).

• New issue domains emerge over decades; older ones fade as solved or deprioritized.

Connections to Previous Lectures

• Reinforces earlier material on anarchy, lack of centralized enforcement, & need for institutions.

• Concrete case of how issue characteristics interact with international politics to enable cooperation.

Real-World Relevance & Study Tips

• Track current negotiations (e.g., plastic pollution treaty, climate COPs) to map theory → practice.

• Compare visibility/crisis & interest-alignment hypotheses against ongoing cases (Amazon deforestation, Arctic shipping lanes).

• Create matrices listing: issue visibility, stake symmetry, scientific consensus, dominant actors, domestic politics to predict negotiation outcomes.

Quick Reference Equation-Style Facts

• Collective-action payoff structure: Benefiti<Costi if alone cooperating, but \sumi \text{Benefit}i > \sumi \text{Cost}i collectively.

• Treaty growth function (heuristic): IEAt=f(Visibilityt,Crisist,InterestAlignmentt,IOActivationt,DomesticSupportt).

Topics Flagged for Future Lectures

• Transformation of industry positions over time.

• Enforcement & compliance mechanisms post-signature.

• Quantitative modeling of ratification and effectiveness.