Cooperation in the Climate Commons

Stefano Carattini, Simon Levin and Alessandro Tavoni ()

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2019, vol. 13, issue 2, 227-247

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.

JEL-codes: D70 F59 H23 M30 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reep/rez009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Cooperation in the climate commons (2019)
Working Paper: Cooperation in the climate commons (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:renvpo:v:13:y:2019:i:2:p:227-247.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy is currently edited by Robert Stavins

More articles in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy from Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().