Abstract
The literature on global climate change has largely ignored the small but positive steps that many public and private actors are taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A global policy is frequently posited as the only strategy needed. It is important to balance the major attention on global solutions as the only strategy for coping with climate change. Positive actions are underway at multiple, smaller scales to start the process of climate change mitigation. Researchers need to understand the strength of polycentric systems where enterprises at multiple levels may complement each other. Building a global regime is a necessity, but encouraging the emergence of a polycentric system starts the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and acts as a spur to international regimes to do their part.
Thanks to Dan Cole Eric Coleman Maria Claudia Lopez Jimmy Walker an anonymous reviewer and the editor of this journal for very useful comments on the earlier draft of this paper and to Patty Lezotte for her excellent editing. Sections of this paper draw on a report that I submitted to the World Bank entitled “A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change.” Financial support from the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
Originally published in Economic Theory, Volume 49, Number 2, February 2012 DOI 10.1007/s00199-010-0573-7.
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Notes
- 1.
Many Web pages are now available for households and businesses to learn about new ways of saving energy. See, for example, the stories about ways to save energy in homes on the Environmental Defense Fund Web pages at http://www.fightglobalwarming.com/page.cfm?tagID=262 (accessed 20 February 2009).
- 2.
http://www.toronto.ca/environment/index.htm (accessed 9 February 2009).
- 3.
http://www.c40cities.org/ (accessed 1 February 2009).
- 4.
Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Calif. Assembly Bill 32.
- 5.
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/climatechange/ (accessed 27 June 2008).
- 6.
http://rggi.org/home/ (accessed 7 February 2009).
- 7.
See Clark (2006) for a review of policies that have been adopted by national governments related to fisheries that initially led to perverse outcomes—some of which were eventually reversed.
- 8.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, for example, developed a model of stock regeneration for northern cod that scientists later found to be flawed. Local cod fishers in Newfoundland raised serious questions in the late 1980s and predicted a near-term collapse; the Canadian government refused to listen and assured doubters that their model was correct. In 1992, however, the cod stock collapsed and the Canadian government declared a moratorium on all fishing in Canadian waters, which has generated very substantial costs for local fishing villages dependent upon that stock that they had earlier managed relatively effectively (Finlayson 1994; Finlayson and McCay 1998).
- 9.
John Vidal (2008), in an article in The Guardian (17 October 2008), stressed that recognizing forest community rights would be a more cost-effective mechanism for reducing emissions than paying organizations to plant trees. “A study by Jeffrey Hatcher, an analyst with Rights and Resources in Washington, found that it costs about $3.50 (€2) per hectare to recognize forest people’s land. The costs of protecting forests under REDD have been estimated at about €2000 per hectare.”.
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Ostrom, E. (2016). Nested Externalities and Polycentric Institutions: Must We Wait for Global Solutions to Climate Change Before Taking Actions at Other Scales?. In: Chichilnisky, G., Rezai, A. (eds) The Economics of the Global Environment. Studies in Economic Theory, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31943-8_13
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