Cooperation under Uncertainty: The Roots of Global Environmental Agreements

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Global Environmental Politics

Abstract

The significant challenges of achieving international cooperation can be exacerbated by the high degree of scientific uncertainty that often underly global environmental problems. In most cases, states are asked to make environmental commitments without a full understanding of the long-term costs or benefits of their decisions. While issues of uncertainty and risk are fundamental to environmental decision-making at all scales, these problems become particularly acute given the magnitude of global ecological problems and anarchic structure at the international level. Without a clear understanding of both the potential harm caused by the environmental problem, nor the costs and benefits of the proposed fix, what do decision-makers rely on when making these choices? This paper uses randomized experiments to test the proposition that that as scientific uncertainty increases, decision-makers become increasingly likely to follow norms, specifically regional defined descriptive norms, when determining their preferences toward global environmental cooperation.

Accordingly, it suggests that in situations of limited information decision-makers will instead rely on social norms to make difficult policy choices. While rational models often assume state actors possess perfect information, the reality is, especially in the realm of environmental politics, states rarely have the rigorous scientific understandings of the impact of agreements they may hope for. However, the behavior of peers is observable and understanding the presence of a norm is likely to be more easily assessed. While broad debates between logics of consequences or logics of appropriateness(March and Olsen, 1998) as fundamental drivers of behavior undergird much of international relations theorizing, the approach of this paper shifts to when states are more likely to behave in ways consistent with a rational choice understanding and when social models have more explanatory power.

Global environmental cooperation is a fertile ground for testing this hypothesis, not only because of its normative importance, but because of the wide variation in ratification patterns across global environmental agreements(Mitchell, 2019). Previous work has shown that states ratify multilateral environmental agreements in regionally defined patterns (Bernauer et al., 2010). In other words, as the proportion of co-regionalists ratifying a given agreement increases, it becomes significantly more likely that the remaining states will as well, even when controlling for alternative explanations. However, there is a wide degree of variation across issues areas and agreements on the size of this effect.

Building on this finding, this paper employs multiple survey experiments to test the effect of variation in uncertainty and regional descriptive norms on individual preference for global environmental cooperation. Building on the growing behavioral IR literature (Davis and McDemott, 2020) and others using online convenience samples to understand international phenomena (Kertzer et al., 2020) online survey experiments with representative samples in the United States, India, and UK.. A two-by-two experimental design was used with treatments differentiated between strong and weak norms and low and high scientific uncertainty. The treatments consisted of a vignette on a hypothetical global treaty on global plastic pollution with respondents then reported their support for the treaty.

The results improve our theoretical understanding of how uncertainty and norms shape global cooperation. In addition, the paper provides an initial attempt to better understand the microfoundations of global environmental politics and suggests further use of cross-national online convenience samples as an efficient means to conduct future research. The paper concludes with a discussion of the how the experimental outcomes can best be applied to international negotiations.

Author

• Colin Kuehl, Northern Illinois University