The just-concluded annual Bonn Climate Change Conference is being described as another gridlocked end to an endless round of climate negotiations. The operational mechanism for global negotiations started with the Conference of Parties, or COP, in 1995 and the mid-year Bonn Conference started in 1999 as a preparatory step for the annual COP. The process of these lockstep meetings is working as expected if we remember that climate change, sustainability, and all the associated issues under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are focussed on global commons. The complications and complexities of this process are directly related to the global scales of all the issues therein.

Humanity has a robust track record of managing small-scale commons, with many inspiring stories of avoiding the tragedies of commons and accomplishing what some scholars call the triumph of the commons. We need to start with the Nobel Prize-winning work of an American political scientist named Elinor Ostrom to get a grasp on this scale issue. The most salient finding of her work is that humans are not just rational egoists maximising their self-interest all the time. It is our ability to act against narrow self-interest that may save us in the end.

She developed a framework to diagnose human systems of shared resources that need collective action. She was humble enough to admit that her framework would face difficulties with global issues such as climate change.

Economists consider humans as rational egoists whose decisions depend on maximising their own benefits. But Ostrom set out to study shared resources at various scales to see whether human behaviour is indeed always that of a rational egoist. The word “commons”, for shared resources, emerged in 15th-century England to refer to land held in common.

Based on a large number of case studies—from irrigation systems in Nepal and Bali to shared pastures in Sweden—she kept finding that human beings were making their decisions keeping in mind the welfare of others. This led to her Nobel Prize-winning work on Institutional Analysis and Development, or IAD. Her IAD framework is a tool to understand human behaviour in governing shared resources and solving collective action problems. These situations, which she referred to as action arenas, function with a set of rules, penalties, and collective-choice governance structures.

A political scientist winning the Nobel Prize in Economics raised hackles among economists. But the entire process of global negotiations under the aegis of the UNFCCC on climate adaptation and mitigation has much to learn from her work. As she herself realised, relatively small-scale commons can be governed by communities through collective-choice governance. Once the commons are defined with boundaries, actors, action arenas, actors’ positions, rules, and penalties, governance becomes possible. There are many details, but the crux of the Ostrom framework is that any interaction between two or more people is an institution with implicit or explicit rules. Actors in an action situation have some information, and they are aware that all other actors also make decisions based on that information, given the rules. One can imagine institutions of a vendor and a buyer, a stadium filled with spectators and two teams playing cricket, communities sharing a pasture, a waterbody, roads, and of course the entire humanity breathing air from the shared atmosphere and using the oceans for shipping, fishing, and tourism.

Anytime humans interact to share resources or barter goods and services, social dilemmas arise. Dilemmas are always about making decisions when strangers are involved, in the absence of communication, and when actions and outcomes are not clearly linked. There will be good citizens who always follow the rules, actors who want to monitor free-riders and punish them, some who pay their share of the cost, and free riders—people who use roads and infrastructure but do not pay taxes. Ostrom classified human behaviour in action arenas requiring collective choices and actions, and concluded that with well-defined norms and punishments, humans are perfectly capable of sustaining commons and avoiding their tragedies. These involve making decisions that do not fit into the rational egoist theory of economists.

Such successful governances and triumphs of the commons appear to occur only at small scales. Even when multilayered governance structures are involved—national, regional, and local governments—communications always enhance cooperation and typically increase benefits for all actors. Penalties are always helpful to keep free-riding from leading to tragedies. Self-policing of shared resources can work at relatively small scales as well, but governments routinely provide policing of tax compliance, traffic rules, and the like. Climate change is a global commons problem, and the expectations of irrational behaviour to save the planet have not materialised yet at this scale. Does that mean we are doomed to fail via COPs and Bonn conferences? Not necessarily.

A struggle between haves and have-nots

Climate negotiations have evolved over the past few decades to set up many communication channels in hopes of enhancing cooperation for action. Annual COPs and the Bonn Conference are a part of this process, and they are a major struggle between the haves and the have-nots. The difficulty is that global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans have already been extensively exploited by the developed countries. The developing and least-developed countries are fighting desperately for fairness and equity in collective-choice rules and penalties. Attempts to correct historic wrongs and to navigate the future with just transition seem only to bring out the rational egoist and narrow self-interests.

Cooperation seems to be evident thus far only in the process of participation in negotiations and not so much in the negotiations themselves or in the follow-up actions. Smaller commons can be well-defined with clear boundaries, actors, action arenas, rules, and links between actions and outcomes for all. Motivations for self-policing and sustaining the commons are easy to elicit from the actors in these cases. The global commons, on the other hand, have no clear boundaries and the number of actors is too many, with complicated layered structures in each of the commons. Atmosphere, rivers, forests, and oceans are split across national boundaries. Even within a national boundary, conflicts abound for water, land, and fish. Equity and justice are serious barriers not only for COPs and Bonn but also within nations.

It is no surprise that climate finance emerges as a sticking point repeatedly in climate negotiations, because rich countries keep promising and not following through on providing or mobilising the funds so desperately needed for developing and low-income countries.

The EU’s conflicted role

Identifying historic responsibilities for emissions is relatively easy, although not necessarily acceptable to those most responsible. Including them in collective choices for assigning responsibilities has been beyond any irrational behaviour we can expect from humanity. This plays out in many ways even in the current contributions to emissions. The European Union is a clear case of the complexities of a multi-faced actor.

The EU wants to lead climate action with much talk of transitions in energy, mobility, sustainability, etc.. This allows it to exhort China and India to phase out coal. But the EU still burns coal and even imports it. A significant share of its gas demand is met through imports, a large portion of which now comes from the United States—LNG exports whose extraction carries its own environmental costs. The EU restricts electric vehicles from China to protect its own markets, a purely self-interest move and not a climate-friendly action. In the meantime, the EU also wants to impose a Carbon Border Adjustment on its imports of goods and services. Conflating climate and trade raises many questions, including the role of the World Trade Organization and other trade enforcement agencies and agreements. Carbon Border Adjustments amount to a serious blow for developing countries trading with the EU.

The global commons have fluid boundaries and actors without unique or well-defined roles. Harvesting the common pools while polluting them, hoarding resources for economic advantage or hegemonic agendas, starting conflicts with unclear motivations, and poisoning the commons—all these are antithetical to governing the global commons. There are no clear pathways to avoid these barriers since the actors play multiple roles: harvesting the commons, wanting fair shares to correct for historic violations, and wanting climate finance for adapting to changing commons caused by global warming. Overriding all these is the demand to protect self-interest in terms of economic growth, while expecting to achieve just transition and sustainability.

Can local action make global commons work?

Returning to the fundamental human ability to sustain commons at local scales: the best innovation in chasing success via COPs and the Bonn Conference would be to govern the global commons through multi-layered collective choices, from global to local scales, for monitoring, regulating, enforcing, and verifying progress towards just transition and sustainability. Neither the transitions nor the sustainability will ever be global without being implemented at local scales. The constantly emerging alphabet soup of alliances between developing countries, island states, and low-income countries is a clear indication that local-scale commons based on common interests are possible. The complicated situations in dealing with cross-border resource issues seem to have no easy solutions. These are wicked problems that have to be resolved contextually—and thus resolved repeatedly, as new actors appear in action arenas such as new governments, or as exogenous factors such as intervening wars.

One big disconnect in the process is the absence of reality checks on solutions and technologies for achieving just transition and sustainability. If the technological promises materialise, then sectoral decarbonisation and sustainability must work locally via circular economies in agriculture, water, energy, health, buildings, and infrastructure. It is a tall order since the you-first tendency will always be a serious impediment. But the collective will to participate in the screaming matches twice every year at COPs and Bonn Conferences shows that humanity has made up its mind to communicate, with the dream of achieving cooperation.

There is a lot of discontent with COPs and chatter about the need to change the framework. But there is no Planet B. We must resolve all the issues collectively, if imperfectly. In the meantime, bottom-up approaches to governing the global commons via local actions need to succeed through repeated communications and collective choices.

Raghu Murtugudde is Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland; Visiting Professor, Kotak School of Sustainability, IIT Kanpur.

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