7.3: Who owns the atmosphere?

Commons, Collective Action, and Environmental Governance

Imagine a pasture shared by several herders. Each has an incentive to add another animal. The additional animal benefits its owner, while the cost of additional grazing is spread across everyone using the pasture. If everyone reasons the same way, the pasture may eventually be destroyed. Welcome to the tragedy of the commons.

Hardin's Warning

Ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized this argument in a famous 1968 essay. His basic insight was that individually rational choices can produce collectively disastrous outcomes when people share a limited resource (Hardin, 1968). The idea became enormously influential. Fisheries could collapse because everyone had an incentive to catch fish before somebody else did. Forests could be overharvested. Groundwater could be depleted. The atmosphere could be filled with greenhouse gases because individual actors benefited from fossil-fuel use while climatic costs were distributed globally. Hardin's argument is powerful because environmental governance really does involve collective-action problems. But there is a problem with the “tragedy.” It is not inevitable.

Ostrom's Reply: Humans Actually Govern Things Together All the Time

Political economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying communities that governed shared resources. Her research demonstrated that common-pool resources did not automatically collapse simply because they were shared. Communities developed rules and monitored use. They also sanctioned violators, negottiated access, created boundaries and adapted institutions to local conditions. They solved problems collectively.  Ostrom's work challenged the assumption that only privatization or centralized government control could prevent environmental destruction (Ostrom, 1990). That changes the question. Instead of asking: Why do commons inevitably fail? We ask: Under what conditions can people govern shared resources successfully? That is a much more thought provoking question.

Here Comes the Hard Part: Scale

Managing an irrigation system with a community is difficult. Managing the atmosphere is harder. Climate change involves nearly every government on Earth, billions of individuals, countless companies, multiple generations, competing development needs, and a resource that has no fence around it. Carbon dioxide emitted in California does not stay over California. Emissions released in China do not remain over China. The atmosphere mixes them. This creates one of the largest collective-action problems humans have ever faced.

But Countries Do Not Arrive at the Table Equally

Suppose two people share a kitchen. One has been leaving dirty dishes in the sink for thirty years. The other arrived yesterday. Now the sink is overflowing. “We all share this kitchen,” the first person announces. “Everyone needs to clean equally.” You can probably see the problem. Climate negotiations repeatedly encounter versions of this argument. Industrialized states produced much of the cumulative carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere since industrialization. Emerging economies now account for significant shares of annual emissions. Poorer countries argue that they still need development, infrastructure, energy, housing, transportation, and industrial capacity. Who should reduce emissions? How quickly? Who should pay? How should historical responsibility matter? These questions help explain the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, embedded in international climate governance. Countries share responsibility for addressing climate change, but their responsibilities cannot simply be assumed to be identical.

Global Environmental Governance: A Messy Architecture

There is no world environmental government. Instead, environmental governance happens through overlapping institutions. States create domestic regulations. Cities establish climate plans. Indigenous nations exercise governance over territories and resources. Companies adopt standards and make investment decisions. Civil-society organizations organize campaigns. Scientists produce assessments. International organizations coordinate negotiations and technical work. Treaties create rules around particular problems. The 1987 Montreal Protocol, for example, coordinated international action to phase out substances damaging the ozone layer and is widely regarded as a major success in environmental cooperation. Climate change has proven harder. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992, established the central international framework for climate negotiations. The Paris Agreement of 2015 asks states to submit nationally determined contributions toward limiting global temperature rise. Unlike a simple global law that orders every country to reduce emissions by the same amount, the Paris system depends heavily on national commitments, monitoring, negotiation, political pressure, technological change, and repeated increases in ambition. That may sound frustrating. It is. Global governance often is. But Ostrom gives us an important reminder. Cooperation does not require one perfect authority controlling everything from the top. Environmental governance can be polycentric, occurring through many overlapping centers of authority and action.

The Commons Question Has Changed

Hardin asked what happens when individuals have incentives to overuse something shared. Ostrom asked how communities build institutions to prevent that outcome. Climate change asks whether similar cooperation is possible at planetary scale. There is one more complication. Even when everyone agrees that a resource must be protected, people may still disagree about whose land should host the landfill, mine, pipeline, wind farm, dam, transmission line, or recycling facility. The environmental question therefore becomes a justice question. And nowhere is that more visible than in the things we throw away.