Climate change is fundamentally a cooperation problem. But after 25 years of failure, climate negotiations still use an ineffective pledge-and-review approach. Countries pledge almost anything, subject to unenforced review. This approach ignores everything we know about how to promote cooperation.
Fixing the climate may be the toughest cooperation problem ever faced by humanity. Every country wishes the others would solve the problem for them, and many try to get a free ride. So the Paris agreement is weak and calls for repeated reviews to “increase ambition.” Will this work? A large body of science, including hundreds of laboratory experiments and field studies, says it won’t. Paris negotiators didn’t reject this science. They just didn’t discuss it.
There is only one successful approach to cooperation: reciprocal agreements — “I will if you will.” The other approach, pledge and review, is just a practical-sounding euphemism for what might be called contagious altruism. Here’s how it unfolds in hundreds of experiments.
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