What gives?

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to start following the science of collective action.

By Hassan Damluji, Co-Founder, Global Nation

Image: Meeting of the UNFCCC. Credit: UN Climate Change

Climate change is consistently rated by voters as the greatest threat the world faces. Why then, have elections in India, Europe and the UK hardly touched on the issue? Why do countries make bold pledges without a serious plan to back it up? Why did the climate financing talks break down in Bonn, with G7 countries unsuccessfully calling on the BRICS to contribute? What would it take to produce the collective action we need to halt the climate crisis? 

These questions are often asked by politicians, pundits and advocates, but in doing so, too little attention is paid to the science of collective action. In thinking through the climate crisis we often operate as if we were in uncharted territory. In terms of the planet’s temperature, and scientific advances, we surely are. But this is a classic collective action problem; a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage that joint action. And when it comes to this – the puzzle of how to get humans to cooperate – we have millennia of experience, and decades of academic theory, to work with. We ignore its lessons at our peril. 

The ‘puzzle’ of climate action 

In the first half of the twentieth century, it was taken as read by most economists that humans naturally acted in groups, where they shared a common interest with others. Collective action wasn’t a puzzle at all. It was an assumption. But Mancur Olson smashed this consensus in 1965 with his landmark book The Logic of Collective Action, whose basic tenets still hold today. Olson pointed out that we should, in fact, see collective action as a puzzle, because when many individuals share a common interest, they often have little or no incentive to work towards achieving it. That is because they will enjoy the benefit of the “collective good” (higher wages, cleaner streets), so long as it is produced by anyone, and their contribution will not make much difference. Why then play their part by paying union dues or picking up litter? 

Climate change provides a perfect example of this problem. I may not want the planet to warm, but my contribution to reducing emissions will always be minimal. Why should I reduce the quality of my life by giving up flying or eating meat, when it’s everyone else’s actions that will determine whether or not the planet warms? As one audience member asked in a recent televised UK election debate, challenging the Green Party leader: “our emissions make up 1% of the world’s total. What difference will it make for us to decarbonise if America and China don’t?” 

Olson’s observation explained the many instances in which people who share a common interest do not cooperate to achieve a common goal. But what about the occasions on which we do work together? There are so many examples of this that it had previously been taken for granted as a law of human behaviour. How have we overcome collective action problems? 

3 ways to solve the puzzle 

Where humans are able to muster at least some degree of collective action, there are three possible reasons why. The first is hegemony or monopoly. If the number of participants is small enough, and especially if one or more participants have outsized weight within the group, there is in fact an incentive for those major players to produce collective action. Rather than all the billions of people in the world, consider the roughly 200 countries. 

When a country like the US is so huge, it may be worth its while to produce some collective goods all on its own, because it can afford it, and the benefits it will receive are enough that it doesn’t mind others receiving them too. Olson posited in 1965 that this was the logic of NATO. Collective security benefited many countries, but given America’s size and vast resources, it was worth its while providing it almost alone. This dynamic, claimed Olson, led to the strange phenomenon of “exploitation of the great by the small”. Because the US has an incentive to fund NATO unilaterally and its European allies have less individual incentive to do the same, America feels taken advantage of and is perpetually cajoling allies to contribute more. This dynamic has not gone away since 1965!

But Olson’s theory states that collective action provided by the powerful few will always be far less than if everyone contributed their fair share. Big countries like the US will provide just as much support for peace and security, development in poor countries and vaccine research as it is in America’s interest to provide, set against its costs. In thinking about how to deliver collective action, it has an incentive to prioritise the collective goods that are particularly beneficial to itself (e.g. the security of its allies), and to deliver them in a way that creates other, purely selfish, benefits (e.g. contracts going to US firms). 

This is a fair description of the international system we inhabit. There are a small number of players who are large enough for it to be worth their while to spend something on it. But the resultant collective action is far less than we need, and focuses on those issues that are important to the powerful, not the weak. We have kept shipping lanes open, but the terms of trade remain unfair. Covid-19 vaccines were developed rapidly, but distributed to poor countries more slowly. We have reduced poverty, but the world remains grossly unequal.

This logic will not work for tackling climate change given the huge sacrifices that are needed and the requirement for all countries to contribute. What is more, the limited collective action we have mustered in the old world order is at risk as we enter the new one. We are increasingly living in a multi-polar world where the US and its allies have less ability, and willingness, to shoulder the costs. That is why they are calling on the BRICS to contribute to a climate fund. In a post-hegemonic world with several middle-powers, there is no longer a monopoly on power, and the temptation for each country to be a “free-rider” (refusing to contribute and hoping that others will bear the costs of collective action) is growing. The evidence for that is clear to see in European foreign aid cuts and American threats to ditch NATO. 

Second is an enforcement scenario. This is easy to understand – you do it if you must. It’s the reason that a majority of citizens in nearly every country say that “for certain problems, like environmental pollution, international bodies should have the right to enforce solutions”. We know that some kind of benign enforcement mechanism that managed a just global energy transition would be a wonderful thing. 

But we also know that it is a pipe dream. Countries do not trust each other sufficiently to agree to submit themselves to such a mechanism. This lack of trust shows up in the fact that around half of the people who say they support international enforcement also say that “my country should never be forced by an international organisation to change any policy”. These people want impunity for their own country but enforcement for others. This is the zone where collective action is not created. 

The final way to produce collective action is by associating it with other benefits that only come to those who do their bit for the group. When left to my own devices, I might not cut my emissions to help the world. But what if cutting my emissions was the only way to become part of a friendship group? 

Social scientists have come to agree that where there is no enforcement, the primary way that collective action is enabled in human society is by this kind of ‘indirect reciprocity’, where people with a reputation for doing the right thing are socially rewarded in a way that delivers a range of benefits, while those with a reputation for failing to contribute are socially punished or ostracised. In a society where this ‘indirect reciprocity’ happens, collective goods can be delivered with little or no enforcement. 

Can this work for international relations? How do we get enough incentive for countries to maintain a reputation for contributing to collective goods?  

Raising the benefits of being a good actor, raising the costs of being a bad actor. 

Currently it is clearly not working well enough, but reputation does matter to an extent already. One sign of this is the prevalence of “greenwashing”. Why do countries, even those whose economies are dependent on fossil fuels, feel the need to stand up and make commitments to net-zero? It is because they worry about being excluded or punished in other ways if they are seen as bad actors. Will they receive less private investment or fewer tourists? Will countries vote with them less often at the UN? Or will there just be a sense of diminished respect? These social incentives for countries may not today be enough to turn those words into overwhelming climate action. But the question is not whether indirect reciprocity works between countries – the question is how to strengthen it.  

The complex answer to this question, wrapped up in a simple phrase, is global solidarity. Where people feel that they are part of a shared community, where they knit themselves together through effective institutions, and where they have successful experiences of delivering collective action in the past, they have a high degree of solidarity. When that happens, the conditions for indirect reciprocity are in place. This is how well functioning communities, and countries, work. People pick up litter and pay their taxes, not only because they fear enforcement, but because it is important to feel part of the group, to benefit from its institutions, and to be seen as contributing to its common goals. In such a scenario, each actor’s reputation becomes increasingly important to them. The benefits of being perceived as a good actor rise, as do the costs of ostracism. In a low trust, “dog-eat-dog” world, having a reputation for playing nicely means little. People who feel alienated from society are far more likely to drop litter. 

Understanding the interconnectedness of it all is key.

The implication of this is that all international issues are fundamentally interconnected. It is foolish to hive off climate change into a separate category of “issues on which we can work together”, while conflict and mistrust deepen in other areas. 

Any action that reduces trust and interdependence between countries actively harms our ability to deliver climate action. If the US and her allies lose the respect of other countries over the Israel/Palestine conflict, if China and America economically decouple, if voters increasingly buy into a worldview where other countries are a threat, all of these things will make governments’ international reputations less relevant. That in turn will make them less likely to cut their emissions. 

To turn greenwashing into genuine action, we have to move on many fronts simultaneously. Countries will only have an incentive to cooperate on climate change if there are a thousand other interdependencies that raise the costs of being a bad actor. 

Where to start? Counterintuitively, the most important climate action in 2024 may be for the world to step back from the brink of escalating conflict. As the Ukraine war has shown, security trumps climate every time for political decision makers. A world at conflict is one in which the only important reputation for a country is its military power. 

We have grown too used to working on issues in isolation. Funders, advocates and academics often treat, for example, nutrition, climate, trade or conflict as domains unto themselves. But it is only in the connections between them that we will succeed in making meaningful progress on any of them. That is what we mean at Global Nation when we talk about the need to build solidarity.