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Chapter
What are global public goods?
International cooperation has many uses. It is a tool for altruistic purposes, importantly so, and it serves a host of geo-political interests, certainly. But it is also a tool for states to align their long-term, enlightened national interests to achieve common goals. Some of these goals are “global public goods”. Technically, in their pure form public goods are those that share two qualities—non-excludability and non-rivalry, in economists’ jargon. This means, respectively, that when provided to one party, the public good is available to all, and consumption of the public good by one party does not reduce the amount available to the others to consume.^12 Traditional examples of national public goods include traffic control systems and national security—goods that benefit all citizens and national private actors but that none could afford to supply on their own initiative.^13
The sphere of global public goods we are concerned with is delineated by issues that are broadly conceived as important to the international community, that for the most part cannot or will not be adequately addressed by individual countries acting alone and that are defined through a broad international consensus or a legitimate process of decision-making. The concept of public goods contains within it powerful tools for the analysis of the relationship between national and international public policy. Public goods can be regional or global in character, as well as national (see box 2.1). There are many challenges, cross-border in character, that are more effectively dealt with at the regional than either the national or global level. This is clearest for issues relating to shared physical systems, such as the provision of tsunami early warning systems and the management of river basins. Regional public goods are particularly useful for dealing with region-specific vulnerabilities created by regional openness, including for example cross-border transmission of human and animal diseases. In addition, regional public goods are increasingly perceived as part of the solution to long-standing development problems across a wide spectrum of sectors.^14
Global Public Goods:
What they are and why
many are in short supply 2
1
Applied to the global sphere the term defines a set of international goods whose benefits could in principle be enjoyed by the governments and people of all states.^15 Examples include international mechanisms for ensuring financial stability, the scientific knowledge involved in the discovery of a vaccine and international regulations for civil aviation and telecommunications. Once such global standards and systems are established, they are available to all states, and consumption of the good by one state or its people in no way reduces its availability to others.^16 It is important to note that in some contexts public goods are contested, as further elaborated below. The features that characterize global public goods make them valu-able, but—as further discussed below—they are difficult to provide. Precisely because they are available to all once produced, states routinely avoid their own responsibilities, believing others will act and they will benefit (the “free rider” problem); but the result is often that too few states act for the good to be produced. And states also resist accepting the restraints on their sovereignty that are often necessary to produce these goods. Indeed much of the difficulty in ensuring the provision of global public goods comes from the international level. It is at this level that our Task Force has chosen to focus its analysis. This does not negate a recognition that the national level is critical for the provision of global public goods. As with development and every other sphere of international cooperation, much of the work is accomplished by national authorities in a national context—for example, when countries introduce national carbon taxes. This report, however, is focused on the problems and prospects of international cooperation and our recommendations for its adaptation to better and more reliably deliver global public goods.
Box 2.1 Definitions A local public good benefits all the members of a local community, possibly to include the citizens of more than one country. A national public good benefits all the citizens of a state. A domestic public good benefits all the members of a community situated within a single state. National public goods are domestic public goods, but domestic public goods need not be national public goods. A regional public good benefits countries belonging to a geographic territory. A global public good benefits all countries and, therefore, all persons. An international public good benefits more than one country. Global and regional public goods are both interna- tional public goods. However, some international public goods may be neither regional nor global. The public good of collective defence under NATO, for example, applies to North America and Europe. Source: Barrett (2007).
allows for the construction of win-win approaches to common challenges, rather than the zero-sum (“if I win, you lose”) approach that characterizes much current international negotiation. In short, in this period of intensifying political divisions between countries, regions and groupings, understanding the character of global public goods compels the recognition that all states have a vested inter-est in each other’s mutual benefit and helps to transcend the divisions that weaken the prospects for tackling common global ills. Work on global public goods also takes us beyond the state, helpfully pointing to the private sector, including civil society, who are increas-ingly involved in shaping transborder interactions and to the positive benefits these actors can provide.
Why are many global public goods in short supply?
If all states and peoples can benefit from the provision of global public goods, it seems logical that they should be easy to supply and should be available in abundance. But the opposite is true. In fact the very nature of global public goods means that demand will tend to outweigh supply. There are a number of reasons for this:
- Sovereignty. Governments (or their citizens) are often unwilling to limit or constrain sovereign decision-making, for example by accepting binding rules or international monitoring of their own compliance with agreements. This weakens the prospects for cooperation by adding a high degree of uncertainty to most international agreements, where reliability would be more pro- ductive.This basic problem underlies all the others. - Differing preferences and priorities. Governments often have di- vergent short-term interests in specific solutions even where they share common long-term goals; and since more and more governments are elected for time-bound periods, short-term politics tend to outweigh long-term perspectives. Moreover even the long- term goals themselves may resonate differently for different governments. Climate change impacts differently on different countries, and in the short term some may even profit from changes to local climate. Similarly, to describe the trade regime as a global public good is correct in economic terms, but countries have different economic stakes in the sys-tem and disagree on its social and political value; free trade, for
Meeting Global Challenges Chapter 2
example, remains highly controversial in many countries and regions. Thus the “good” in global public good is often contested. What might be a highly desirable public good for one country or group of people might not be so for another.
- The “free rider” problem. Once a public good is produced and made available to one, in principle it becomes available to all, and it is hard to exclude others from its consumption. Consequently there is an incentive for every party to wait until another provides that public good, then enjoy its consumption. - The “weakest link” problem. Some global public goods can only be produced when every government fully complies with a common approach, such as in efforts to eradicate an infectious disease. Success can be eroded by a single act of non-compliance.This makes for arduous and long-term problems of cooperation.And the risk of failure is such that it is hard to convince governments to make the necessary investments. - The “summation” problem. Where the successful production of a particular global public good is literally the result or sum of the individual efforts of all the separate participants, such as mitigating global climate change, there are hard challenges in ensuring compliance and sustaining momentum with long-term global initiatives.
The major barriers to solving global problems, then, do not lie with institutional strain—a symptom of a problem, not its cause. Instead, the major obstacles emerge from the fact that the international sphere is characterized principally by voluntary interaction between sovereign states —all with ideas and values and interests of their own. While social, political and economic interactions draw peoples together, as does an increasingly globalized private sector, separate na-tional governments remain responsible for balancing and legitimizing the policies to structure their interactions. While organizations such as the European Union are altering our conceptions of sovereignty, democratically elected governments remain the most consistently legitimate form of authority yet devised, and electorates are often less keen than politicians to accept multilateral restrictions on domestic sovereignty. Sovereignty, often declared to be in rapid retreat, perseveres nonetheless. Thus voluntary cooperation between independent, sovereign states remains the hallmark of the international system and its essential requirement.
