The Design of Supranational Organizations for the Provision of International Public Goods: Global Environmental Protection

Authors

E. Wesley F. Peterson, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

12-2000

Comments

Published in Review of Agricultural Economics 22:2 (December 2000), pp. 355–369. Published on behalf of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association by Blackwell/John Wiley . Used by permission. http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jpages/1058-7195

Abstract

An international environmental organization would need to be loosely structured initially with a focus on a narrow range of environmental issues. It also would need to emphasize consensus and limit the scope of its interventions to avoid defections by important participants. The benefits of such an organization include the potential for achieving more nearly optimal levels of environmental protection, cost savings from reduction of duplication and managerial economies of scale, and the strengthening of environmental interests in negotiations on the coordination of the environmental regime with other international regimes such as those focusing on trade or development.