Environmental problems like global climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion can only be remedied if states cooperate with one another. But sovereign states usually care only about their own interests. So states must somehow restructure the incentives to make cooperation pay. This is what treaties are meant to do.
A few treaties, such as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, succeed. Most, however, fail to alter the state behavior appreciably. This book develops theory that explains both the successes and the failures. In particular, the book explains...

Climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the threat of a global pandemic have the potential to impact each of our lives. Preventing these threats poses a serious global challenge, but ignoring them could have disastrous consequences. How do we engineer institutions to change incentives so that these global public goods are provided?
Scott Barrett provides a thought provoking and accessible introduction to the issues surrounding the provision of global public goods. Using a variety of examples to illustrate past successes and failures, he shows how international cooperation,...

This book honours Partha Dasgupta, and the field he helped establish; environment and development economics. It concerns the relationship between social systems (to include families, local communities, national economies, and the world as a whole) and natural systems (critical ecosystems, forests, water resources, mineral deposits, pollution, fisheries, and the Earth's climate). Above all, it concerns the poverty-environment nexus: the complex pathways by which people become or remain poor, and resources become or remain overexploited. With contributions by some of the world's leading...