Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods

Climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the threat of a global pandemic have the potential to impact each of our lives. Preventing these threats poses a serious global challenge, but ignoring them could have disastrous consequences. How do we engineer institutions to change incentives so that these global public goods are provided? Scott Barrett provides a thought provoking and accessible introduction to the issues surrounding the provision of global public goods. Using a variety of examples to illustrate past successes and failures, he shows how international cooperation, institutional design, and the clever use of incentives can work together to ensure the effective delivery of global public goods.

1 - Single Best Efforts: Global Public Goods that Can Be Supplied Unilaterally or Minilaterally
2 - Weakest Links: Global Public Goods that Depend on the States that Contribute the Least
3 - Aggregate Efforts: Global Public Goods that Depend on the Combined Efforts of All States
4 - Financing and Burden Sharing: Paying for Global Public Goods
5 - Mutual Restraint: Agreeing What States Ought Not to Do
6 - Coordination and Global Standards: Agreeing What States Ought to Do
7 - Development: Do Global Public Goods Help Poor States?

Scott Barrett was previously an advisor to the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, and drew upon his work for the Task Force in preparing this book. He wrote the book while on sabbatical as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University. His previous book, Environment and Statecraft, was published by OUP in paperback in 2005.