The complexity of international climate cooperation

Abstract

Although there are several collective efforts to address the problem of climate change, the main initiatives, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, have not shown satisfactory results so far. The difficulty in engaging states into effective coordinated cooperative practices can be explained as a consequence of neoclassical rationality, given that the characterization of states as rationality-endowed entities bound them to situations like the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game and its related collective action dilemmas. There are models that provide ways to circumvent PD and foster cooperation among selfish rational agents, such as the application of strategies based on reciprocity (Tit-for-Tat) in iterated games. However, these approaches do not avoid the short-sighted neoclassical rationality that lies at the root of the problem. Thus, in order to develop more productive approaches to the development of global climate change policies, I present a characterization of the international political system as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and argue that this perspective, along with models based on evolutionary games rather than iterated games, provide a more promising approach.