Anarchy and the Environment: The International Relations of Common Pool Resources

Argues that the logic of common pool resources is the most appropriate and productive way to understand international environmental conflict, and offers important practical insights into environmental negotiations and bargaining.

Anarchy and the Environment examines how the recognition of environmental limits, combined with the ability of states to degrade common environmental resources, affects the strategies and bargaining power of particular groups involved in international environmental negotiations. The contributors examine a wide range of environmental issues, including fisheries management, ozone depletion, acid rain, and water consumption rights, offering important practical insights into environmental negotiations and bargaining. Anarchy and the Environment also offers an important theoretical contribution by challenging the conventional explanations of bargaining dynamics and the resolution of collective action problems in international environmental politics.

This book analyzes these problems and uses them as means to evaluate and expand upon common hypotheses regarding the shadow effect of the future on current behavior, the role of free riders in management regimes, and the role of market power in solving collective action and enforcement problems in international environmental management.

Contributors include J. Samuel Barkin, Barbara Connolly, Elizabeth R. DeSombre, David Leonard Downie, Christopher C. Joyner, Richard A. Matthew, Ronald Mitchell, and George E. Stambaugh VI.

J. Samuel Barkin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. George E. Shambaugh is Assistant Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University and author of States, Firms, and Power: Successful Sanctions in United States Foreign Policy, also published by SUNY Press.