Special Section: Domestic Climate Policy under Anarchy Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change

Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politics cases. Second, collective action claims—whether in their strongest or in more nuanced versions—appear observationally equivalent to alternative theories focused on distributive conflict within countries. We argue that extant patterns of climate policy making can be explained without invoking free-riding. Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with freeriding has been in place or not. Without an empirically groundedmodel for global climate policy making, institutional and political responses to climate change may ineffectively target the wrong policy-making dilemma. We urge scholars to redouble their efforts to analyze the empirical linkages between domestic and international factors shaping climate policy making in an effort to empirically ground theories of global climate politics. Such analysis is, in turn, the topic of this issue’s special section. Global Environmental Politics 20:4, November 2020, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00578 © 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally. Portions of the cited empirical research were supported by a Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Center for Business and the Environment at Yale Sobotka Research Grant. We are grateful to Sarah Anderson, Patrick Bayer, Mark Buntaine, Iza Ding, Jessica Green, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Geoffrey Henderson, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Robert Keohane, Kyle Meng, Matthew Potoski, Michael Stone, Eric R. A. N. Smith, Johannes Urpelainen, and participants in the UCSB Environmental Politics Workshop for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. We are also thankful to the editors of Global Environmental Politics, Erika Weinthal and Steven Bernstein, and managing editor Susan Altman, for their support and guidance. 4 D ow naded rom httpdirect.m it.edu/glep/article-/1859795/glep_a_00578. pdf by gest on 22 Agust 2021 Scholars have largely converged on collective action theory to explain the global failure to mitigate climate risks (inter alia Bernauer 2013; Keohane and Victor 2016;Ostrom 2009; Stern 2007). According to this receivedwisdom, every country wants a stable climate but also faces individual incentives to free-ride off other countries’ climate mitigation efforts. This pushes all countries to unsustainably exploit the global atmospheric commons. In turn, policy guidance from collective action proponents emphasizes the need for international institutions to overcome the climate policy free-riding problem. The global climate policy architecture, as embodied by the Kyoto Protocol, reflects a belief that free-riding constituted the main constraint on effective climate action (Victor 2011). Despite being the dominant paradigm of climate policy, the collective action account hasmostly been acceptedwithout extensive empirical tests. In this article, we outline a framework to evaluate collective action theory’s capacity to explain patterns of global climate policy making. Strong collective action claims suggest that climate policies are primarily structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative and original qualitative data, we cannot find evidence to empirically substantiate this perspective in many important climate politics cases. A weaker version of collective action theory would argue that concerns over free-riding structure (but do not dominate) climate policy making and that other factors can also contribute to it. We find some empirical evidence consistent with this perspective; however, this evidence can also be explained by competing theories without the need to invoke free-riding. In sum,wefind that collective actionaccounts of climate change are either unsubstantiated or vulnerable to observational equivalence and that this empirical support is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. What are the sources of this mismatch between theory and empirical evidence? We suggest that many scholars have tended to conflate climate outcomes and climate policies. Climate outcomes are undoubtedly characterized by negative externalities. Policy, however, responds to a different logic. What governments often care about is maintaining the support of key constituencies. In the case of climate change, governments’ preferences are shaped by conflicts between pro– and anti–climate reform interests. Climate policy involves a dramatic renegotiation of the institutions that structure economic and social activity within each economy. Consequently, climate policies create new economic winners and losers. Sharp divisions in the material interests of political and economic stakeholders trigger subsequent distributive conflict over climate policy making. Conflicts over material benefits are further reinforced by ideological struggles among politicians, voters, and interest groups. Empirically, this distributive conflict lens offers an alternative explanation for empirical patterns currently attributed to collective action theory, while also accommodating empirical evidence that is otherwise anomalous to collective action accounts. By contrast, we cannot identify any empirical facts that are uniquely explained by either the strong or weak version of collective action theory. To be clear, free-riding concerns may, at times, be a source of climate action failure. What this article argues is that we need a richer theoretical model that does not narrowly focus on a single cause. Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger • 5 D ow naded rom httpdirect.m it.edu/glep/article-/1859795/glep_a_00578. pdf by gest on 22 Agust 2021 Instead, we need to place free-riding concerns alongside many other potential breaking points. The absence of a robust empirical foundation for collective action accounts of climate politics has serious implications for international relations. Decades of international negotiations have sought to address free-riding because there was widespread belief that this was holding back climate policy. Treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement sought to create transparent and verifiable commitments, presumably in order to increase compliance. Our findings join critical voices arguing that this was the wrong solution to a misunderstood problem (e.g., Victor 2011). Yet our review raises deeper questions about institutional design for global climate regimes. Solutions such as climate clubs, while offering several benefits, may still not solve the climate problem if the logic of climate politics has been misdiagnosed. To the extent that distributive conflicts are the main constraint on effective policies, international agreements may be more successful if they instead focus on empowering key pro-climate interest groups and neutralizing veto players, such as fossil fuel interests. Without an empirically substantiated understanding of climate politics’ problem structure, social scientists cannot offer a necessary contribution to climate policy making (Mitchell 2006). In this spirit, this special section brings together a series of research articles that contribute to this effort, offering nuanced analyses of how linkages between domestic and international factors shape climate policy making. The Collective Action Conventional Wisdom Over the past decades, many social scientists have come to view environmental problems as, first and foremost, commons management issues (Stavins 2011). This perspective interprets clean air, cleanwater, and stable ecosystems as common pool resources with nonexcludable but rival benefits. Since individuals cannot be excluded from enjoying these goods, each has an incentive to overexploit the commons. Solving the problem requires community production of public goods. Collective action characterizations of commonsmanagement issues highlight two distinct logics. First, players must expect an outcome under the “business-asusual” that is suboptimal compared to some other possible outcome. What makes competing outcomes “better” is not always specified. Second, players face individual disincentives to move from the suboptimal to the optimal outcome. Investing in public goods production is individually costly, but the benefits of action are contingent on the number and scale of group contributions. Furthermore, no actor can unilaterally produce the public good alone. Thus, every player has an incentive to free-ride and let others shoulder the costs of public goods provision. But the public good will not be provided if every player behaves this way. In game-theoretic terminology, this suboptimal status quo is thus a Nash equilibrium. This logic is often portrayed with reference to the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma game, where two players are jointly better off when both cooperate than 6 • Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma D ow naded rom httpdirect.m it.edu/glep/article-/1859795/glep_a_00578. pdf by gest on 22 Agust 2021 whenboth defect. However, each player is best off when shedefectswhile the other continues to cooperate. Global politics, then, is about finding a solution to the free-riding problem (Keohane 1984; Kindleberger 1973). Noting that climate change is almost by definition a public bad (Bernauer 2013), scholars have widely applied collective action theory to interpret patterns of climate policy outcomes.While there are significant collective benefits associated with climate change mitigation, climate policy imposes concentrated costs on early movers who, neverthe