Global Collective Action

Although the global community has achieved some success in endeavors such as eradicating smallpox, efforts to coordinate nations' actions in others--such as the reduction of drug trafficking--have not been sufficient. Identifying the factors that promote, or inhibit, successful collective action for an ever-growing set of challenges associated with globalization, Todd Sandler applies them to promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars.

This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring collective action. The global community has achieved some successes, such as eradicating smallpox, but other efforts to coordinate nations' actions, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. Modern principles of collective action are identified and applied to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and consequences are dependent on one's own and others' actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory that is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.

1. Future perfect; 2. 'With a little help from my friends': principles of collective action; 3. Absence of invisibility: market failures; 4. Transnational public goods: financing and institutions; 5. Global health; 6. What to try next? Foreign aid quagmire; 7. Rogues and bandits: who bells the cat?; 8. Terrorism: 9/11 and its aftermath; 9. Citizen against citizen; 10. Tales of two collectives: atmospheric pollution; 11. The final frontier; 12. Future conditional.

This book explains why the global community has been successful in correcting some recent large-scale problems, but has failed in addressing others. The analysis reaches from antibiotic-resistant microbes to greenhouse gases, from civil wars to international terrorism, and from the polluted atmospheres of cities to the depths of outer space.

Todd Sandler holds the Robert R. and Katheryn A. Dockson Professorship of International Relations and Economics at the University of Southern California. He has written or edited eighteen books, including Economic Concepts for the Social Sciences, The Political Economy of NATO (with Keith Hartley) and Global Challenges: An Approach to Economic, Political, and Environmental Problems (all published by Cambridge University Press) as well as numerous journal articles in economics and political science. In 2003 he was the co-recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.