Abstract
It has been assumed that public or collective goods, such as resource conservation or pollution reduction, will not be created or maintained since rational actors in the international system will choose to consume these goods while avoiding the cost of preserving them. I argue that on the contrary private and public goods are so interrelated that cooperative coalition behavior over their generation is possible. The problem of the maintenance of such cooperative coalitions, via an internal bargaining process, is considered. It is suggested that local optimizing behavior by a coalition may bring about qualitative change in the system, to the extent that the stability of the coalition is destroyed. Such a catastrophic change could lead to entirely new patterns of cooperation, and hence to qualitatively different development paths for the economic and ecological system.
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Schofield, N. The logic of catastrophe. Hum Ecol 5, 261–271 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00891280
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00891280