Cooperation in the climate commons

Stefano Carattini, Simon Levin and Alessandro Tavoni ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Climate change is a global externality that has proven difficult to address through formal institutions alone, due to the public good properties of climate change mitigation and the lack of a supranational institution for enforcing global treaties. Given these circumstances, which are arguably the most challenging for international cooperation, commitment problems and free-riding incentives for countries to delay costly mitigation efforts are major obstacles to effective environmental agreements. Starting from this premise, we examine domestic mitigation efforts, with the goal of assessing the extent to which the willingness of individuals to contribute voluntarily to the public good of climate mitigation could be scaled up to the global level. Although individual environmental actions are clearly insufficient for achieving ambitious global mitigation targets, we argue that they are nevertheless initial and essential steps in the right direction. In fact, individual and community efforts may be particularly important if local interventions encourage shifts in norms and behaviors that favor large-scale transformations. With this in mind, we discuss the importance of the visibility of norms and the role of beliefs when such visibility is lacking, and their implications for leveraging cooperative behavior to increase climate mitigation efforts locally and globally.

Keywords: social norms; collective action; pro-environmental behaviour; climate policy; conditional cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 F59 H23 M30 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2019-07-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cdm, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Published in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 10, July, 2019, 13(2), pp. 227-247. ISSN: 1750-6824

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100784/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cooperation in the Climate Commons (2019)
Working Paper: Cooperation in the climate commons (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:100784

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