Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making (review)

Scott Barrett's new book entitled Environment and Statecraft is destined to become a landmark in the pursuit of knowledge regarding the determinants of success and failure in efforts to solve largescale environmental problems through sustained international cooperation. What makes this book outstanding is not the presentation of new findings, though Barrett offers a wide range of interesting arguments about specific factors affecting cooperation. Rather, the book's most striking feature is the effort to pull together "many disparate ideas" associated with the economic/game theoretic approach to international cooperation and "to combine and package them in a coherent fashion" (p.358). The result is a wide-ranging survey in which the major ideas are presented in a manner that is analytically rigorous yet accessible to any reader prepared to take the time to work through the logic of the key models. Notable as well is the fact that Barrett concentrates throughout on connecting theory and practice. As he puts it, theories of international cooperation should "provide an approach for the conduct of policy," and "practitioners need to think deeply about these problems" (p.358). The result is a book that is likely to stand for some time as the most important statement of the economic/game theoretic approach to international cooperation in the realm of environmental affairs.

A few simple propositions suffice to characterize the core of this approach. Collective-action problems involving such matters as the use of common property resources and the provision of public goods (e.g. an intact stratospheric ozone layer) are common occurrences at the international level. Actors (and on Barrett's account they are ordinarily states) often enter into international agreements designed to solve these problems. But the absence of an effective public authority at the international level makes it difficult at best and often impossible to enforce the terms of these agreements. To be effective, then, these international agreements must be "self-enforcing" or, in other words, "individually rational, collectively rational, and fair" (p. xiv). In effect, a successful agreement must produce an outcome that is an equilibrium in the sense that individuals cannot improve on the outcome for themselves through unilateral actions and the group has no incentive to renegotiate the agreement (pp.196, 205). The key to success in this endeavor is to restructure "the relationships among the countries," changing the rules of the game in such a way as to alter the incentives of the member states (p.196). The specific mechanisms needed to accomplish this restructuring are linked to features of the problem at hand, and much of the book is devoted to identifying factors leading to success or failure in such efforts under a variety of specific circumstances.

Drawing heavily on N-person game theory and analyzing key features of different payoff structures, Barrett generates an array of conclusions about factors that need to be considered in efforts to transform underlying dilemma games into relationships that allow for self-enforcing agreements. Some of these conclusions reemphasize familiar propositions. Coordination problems are easier to solve than cooperation problems. The difficulties in structuring incentives to produce self-enforcing agreements increase as the number of independent participants rises. There are sometimes opportunities to change incentives by switching from one policy instrument to another (e.g. from discharge standards to equipment standards in the case of oil pollution at sea). But others involve strikingly new insights. Non-participation may emerge as an obstacle that is more severe than non-compliance and, in any case, a "treaty that sustains real cooperation must deter non-compliance and non-participation" at the same time (p.355). International agreements seldom structure incentives in such a way as to achieve full cooperation, a fact that means they are "often able to sustain only a second-best outcome" (p.357). Designers of international agreements almost always face a "trade-off between the depth and breadth of cooperation," and...