[OPE] Spectres of the future: "Science" magazine wrestles with the core concepts of competition and cooperation

Science 11 September 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5946, pp. 1345 - 1346

Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions

Brian Walker,1,2,* Scott Barrett,3 Stephen Polasky,4,5 Victor Galaz,2 Carl
Folke,2,4 Gustav Engström,4,6 Frank Ackerman,7,8 Ken Arrow,9 Stephen
Carpenter,10 Kanchan Chopra,11 Gretchen Daily,12 Paul Ehrlich,12 Terry
Hughes,13 Nils Kautsky,14 Simon Levin,15 Karl-Göran Mäler,2,4 Jason
Shogren,16 Jeff Vincent,17 Tasos Xepapadeas,18 Aart de Zeeuw4,19

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries;
increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic
resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges
spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the
development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive
effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where
individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each
faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The
nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within
its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions
provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these
solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/325/5946/1345

Brief summary:

The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity,
which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to
cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has
warned. In today's issue of the leading international journal Science, the
researchers say that nations alone are unable to resolve the sorts of
planet-wide challenges now arising. Pointing to global action on ozone
depletion (the Montreal Protocol), high seas fisheries and antibiotic drug
resistance as examples, they call for a new order of cooperative
international institutions capable of dealing with issues like climate
change - and enforcing compliance where necessary.

"Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries,
ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance
are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the
accelerating scale of human activity," say the researchers, who come from
Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.
"These issues are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with
them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing
cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively
gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to free-ride on the
cooperation of others." There are few institutional structures to achieve
co-operation globally on the sort of scales now essential to avoid very
serious consequences, warns lead author Dr Brian Walker of Australia's
CSIRO.

While there are signs of emerging global action on issues such as climate
change, there is widespread inaction on others, such as the destruction of
the world's forests to grow biofuels or the emergence of pandemic flu
through lack of appropriate animal husbandry protocols where people, pigs
and birds co-mingle. "Knowing what to do is not enough," says Dr Walker.
"Institutional reforms are needed to bring about changes in human behaviour,
to increase local appreciation of shared global concerns and to correct the
sort of failures of collective action that cause global-scale problems."

"We are not advocating that countries give up their sovereignty," adds
co-author Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence
in Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. "We are instead proposing a
much stronger focus on regional and worldwide cooperation, helped by
better-designed multi-national institutions. The threat of climate change to
coral reefs, for example, has to be tackled at a global scale. Local and
national efforts are already failing."

The scientists acknowledge that the main challenge is getting countries to
agree to take part in global institutions designed to prevent destructive
human practices. "Plainly, agreements must be designed such that countries
are better off participating than not participating," they say. This would
involve all countries in drawing up standards designed to protect the
earth's resources and systems, to which they would then feel obligated to
adhere. However they also concede that the 'major powers' must be prepared
to enforce such standards and take action against back-sliders. "The major
powers must be willing to enforce an agreement - but legitimacy will depend
on acceptance by numerous and diverse countries, and non-governmental actors
such as civil society and business," they add. "To address common threats
and harness common opportunities, we need greater interaction amongst
existing institutions, and new institutions, to help construct and maintain
a global-scale social contract," the scientists conclude.
http://www.physorg.com/news171883610.html

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Received on Sun Sep 13 15:04:58 2009