Climate Change and Collective Action

Oil shortages, climate change and collective action.

Concerns over future oil scarcity might not be so worrying but for the high carbon content of substitutes, and the limited capacity of the atmosphere to absorb additional CO(2) from burning fuel. The paper argues that the tools of economics are helpful in understanding some of the key issues in pricing fossil fuels, the extent to which pricing can be left to markets, the need for, and design of...

Climate Change: An Agenda for Global Collective Action

Climate Change and Collective Responsibility

Can persons be held morally responsible for harmful consequences that result from the acts or omissions of their nation or society, even if they conscientiously avoid contributing toward those consequences qua individuals?What if those acts and omissions, together with a great many other similar ones committed against the backdrop of social norms that tolerate and even encourage such harmful be...

Collective action and network change

Network models of collective action commonly assume fixed social networks in which ties influence participation through social rewards. This implies that only certain ties are beneficial from the view of individual actors. Accordingly, in this study we allow that actors strategically revise their relations. Moreover, in our model actors also take into account possible network consequences in th...

Institutional Change, Collective Action and Cooperation

Institutional change, collective action, and cooperation are closely related. The connection between institutional change and collective action comes from the fact that both democratic political institutions and norms of behavior are collectively chosen: they are the result of a collective action process. Collective action, however, requires a solution to the cooperation problem, for it is usua...