make cooperation to address collective action problems extremely difficult. Since anyone can benefit from being a free-rider in the face of successful collective action, fewer people participate in making environmental or political change than should – in other words, most people who want the change, and would benefit from it, don’t participate in helping to bring it about. And the fear that not enough people will participate can lead all but the most committed activists to give up on their efforts. After all, if you hold a political rally and only a few people show up, your efforts will be in vain. You receive what game theorists call the “sucker’s payoff” – you bear all of the costs and get none of the benefits.2 Being aware of that risk can make people less likely to participate in collective action.
The environment isn’t the only issue that faces collective action problems. Any situation in which action is individual and the effects are collective is a candidate for collective action problems. Students organizing to get better dining hall food is an example of a collective action problem because, if they succeed, the benefit accrues to everyone, regardless of whether they contributed to the effort to improve the collective food. Citizens creating a lobbying day to pass a law requiring internet neutrality benefit no more from their successful efforts than do those who put their attention elsewhere. But additional characteristics of environmental problems, described below, make the collective action problems they face likely to be worse.
Common Pool Resources
The characteristic of environmental issues that makes collective action problems especially difficult is that they are common pool resources (CPR; some economists call them common property resources). These types of issues share two qualities. The first is non-excludability. People cannot be kept from accessing the resources – say, the fish in a lake or the air into which pollution is emitted. Because of that lack of excludability, almost anyone can contribute to the creation of environmental problems. The effects are also widely shared, and so are the benefits of preventing or fixing the problems – if air pollution is cleaned up, everyone who breathes the air benefits. This aspect is the central one to the creation of collective action problems, discussed above, and can make it difficult to collaborate to solve them.
The second quality causes additional problems: CPRs are what is sometimes called “subtractable” (and sometimes called “rival”). That means that one person’s use of a resource (or contribution of pollution to a resource) can make that resource less useful for others. The factory that puts pollution into the air makes the air dirtier for others who want to breathe it. The fisher who takes fish from the ocean leaves fewer fish behind to reproduce or to be caught by others. That is part of what causes the environmental problem in the first place, but the most important aspect of subtractability is that it makes addressing the problem especially difficult. If most factories stop putting pollution into the air but one or two of them don’t, those factories can still decrease the quality of the air. If most who are fishing agree to fish less, those who do not change their behavior can simply catch more of the fish that remain. In other words, free-riders don’t just make it harder to cooperate (because you know that not everyone is bearing their fair share of the effort to solve a problem), they actively undermine the ability of others to address the problem. In some cases, free-riders can make solving the problem impossible.
Subtractability is a characteristic of common pool resources that other types of public goods problems (such as the operation of lighthouses to warn ships of hazards or the creation of public broadcasting systems) don’t have, and that can therefore make them harder to address cooperatively. This logic, again, supports the need for political solutions to environmental problems. Mandating or prohibiting action by all relevant contributors to a problem can be important, since free-riders can undermine any collective solution. But it can be difficult to find political solutions when they would be costly for some of those who would be regulated.
Time and Distance
The potential disconnect between when and where an environmental problem is caused and when and where its effects are felt is another element of environmental issues with important implications for environmental politics. Some environmental problems are felt immediately after they are created, in close proximity to the activities that create them. Indoor air pollution from poorly ventilated stoves, one of the major sources of this type of pollution in poor countries, has these characteristics.
But many environmental issues are experienced distant in either time or space from where the activities that create them take place. Invasive species may become a threat only decades or more after a first non-native species arrives in an ecosystem. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can cause problems for the stratospheric ozone layer a century or more after they were initially emitted. Some substances, such as greenhouse gases or acid rain, may take time to accumulate in sufficient quantities before major effects are felt.
The same kind of disconnect happens with distance. Much of the plastic that ends up in the garbage patches in the middle of the ocean was used on land, often far from the coasts. Acid rain can occur hundreds of miles from the power plant emissions that cause it. Persistent organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, have been found in the blood and breast milk of indigenous peoples in the Arctic far from where these substances were used.
These lags in time and distance matter for several reasons. They can add to uncertainty (discussed in chapter 2) since, if a problem emerges far in time or space from its causes, the connection between cause and effect may not be immediately made. It also means that, by the time a problem is noticed, the behavior that causes it may already be widespread and thus harder to change. And on the side of resolving problems – which is often the stage at which the political process becomes involved – the time between when a behavior stops and a problem is resolved may be quite long, requiring people to take costly action long before the benefit is felt, which politicians may be reluctant to demand. The distance between cause and effect can be politically problematic if the causes of an environmental problem – and thus the location where the costs of changed behavior are felt – is in a different jurisdiction than the location where the effects – and thus the benefits of change – are experienced.
Non-linearities/Tipping Points
Another important element of some environmental problems is that their effects may be related in a non-linear way to their causes. We tend to think of problems as having a clear and consistent relationship between cause and effect: the more CFCs we emit, the more the ozone layer is depleted, and when we stop the emissions the ozone layer will recover. But for many environmental problems the relationship is more complex. There may be tipping points after which changes in natural systems mean that recovery to a previous state is no longer possible. A species may suddenly collapse once a sufficient percentage has been harvested. Enough climate change may cause ocean currents to slow or change direction, dramatically altering weather patterns around the world. More dramatic are feedback loops in which effects compound. For example, as the global average temperature increases, ice melts. Because ice reflects sunlight, when it melts the system takes in more sunlight and warms even more, which causes more ice to melt, and so on. Once this kind of feedback loop engages, it continues to magnify. One of the particular dangers of climate change is that it features many such feedback loops. In other words, more climate change leads to even more (and even faster) climate change. These characteristics of some environmental problems make it more difficult to understand the relationship between cause and effect and increase the urgency of intervening before such dangerous tipping points or feedbacks happen.
Effects of Scarcity: Will We Run out of Resources? Another important aspect of environmental issues is their intersection with economics: in particular, how people and systems respond to scarcity. Because non-renewable materials are finite, people often express concern that we will use up these resources. Given
