Public Choice Issues in Collective Action: Global Warming Treaty Negotiation and Compliance

Abstract

"There is a large and growing body of literature on scientific issues and regulatory instruments, such as emissions permits, in international efforts to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The underlying collective action issues have received much less attention. In particular, the bargaining problem among sovereign states, the associated public choice problem within negotiating countries, and the implications for agreement and sustained compliance have been neglected. This paper examines the problems of international cooperation when the aggregate benefits and costs of the objective are uncertain; the corresponding net gains to bargaining parties are uncertain; when the parties are heterogeneous with respect to the distribution of benefits and costs; and when adherence to the agreement by sovereign states is voluntary. We outline a bargaining framework, including the public choice tradeoffs facing politicians, for analyzing international bargaining to address global common-property resource problems. We focus on the likely net gains from agreement for major negotiating countries and on politicians within industrial democracies, such as the US, and their decisions to respond to constituencies who support global agreements, constituencies harmed by them, and taxpayers who must fund transfers both to internal parties to compensate for treaty costs and to other countries as side payments for participating. We apply this framework to the Law of the Sea Treaty of 1982 (LOS), the Montreal Protocol to Control Substances that Damage the Ozone Layer of 1987, and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. There are similar negotiation and compliance issues in all three collective actions. The analysis provides implications for the success of international efforts to control temperature change."