Читать книгу Environment and Society - Paul Robbins - Страница 81

But not all commons are local, like irrigation, or regional, like elk herds. This brings us full circle to the problem of governing the climate. The global climate has all the qualities of a common property system headed for failure: exclusion is difficult and costs to defer depletion of the collective good can be high to individuals, firms, or states. By treating the global climate as common property, it is possible to think about it in a new way, however. As a commons, we can imagine climate as a shared good, and that people polluting it might constrain their behavior through some kind of collective agreement.

Clearly the possibilities for collective action exist, and many new systems to manage the problem have emerged in the last decade, including the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 11). That agreement essentially imposes a mutual set of restrictions that countries must follow on their emissions, with mechanisms for crafting rules and making decisions even in the absence of any kind of higher authority; there is no real “world government” to enforce global agreements, after all.

The problems facing the common property of a fishery are largely similar to global climate, of course. It is hard to monitor who is doing what. Sanctions are difficult to impose on free-riders who do not comply with the rules or on users of the resource (polluters) who are not part of the agreement (e.g. the United States). The presence of collective choice systems for setting and revising the rules is also unclear, beyond the fact that signatories participate in negotiation rounds to work out provisions. For these reasons, an institutional analysis of the climate problem sheds light on the prospects for success in controlling climate change by identifying areas where creativity will be necessary to solve it as a common property problem.