Evaluation Review

To determine what legal instruments need to be formulated and institutions created to manage a global commons, it is first necessary to investigate the various functions that the proposed management regime or regimes are to carry out. This article considers what functions might be assigned to an international regime to manage the threat of climatic change resulting from the "greenhouse effect. " It then examines what instruments would be required to initiate the regime and what other instruments it may be expected to create as well as what institutions would be required to carry out the various processes. These requirements in terms of legal instruments and institutions would be essentially the same whether it is decided to establish a single regime to manage all global commons or, for practical or political reasons, to have separate regimes- for example, for the atmosphere, for space, for the seas, for land-based activities, and for the Antarctic.

Climate change issues differ from the ozone layer precedents in important ways, including a greater degree of human reliance on fossil fuel energy, longer lead times, and demographic projections. Even if industrial countries significantly improve energy practices and reduce the rate of CO2 accumulation, energy dcmands in the developing world by the middle of the next century will resume atmospheric heating at threatening rates. New approaches are needed, and new ideas are on the table. There are proposals to provide the resources needed to encourage future energy strategies more in keeping with greenhouse-gas constraints. The recent Hague Declaration suggests that at least one major power might be willing to divest itself of the veto power for the sake of effective decisions to halt global warming. A major group of actors that have not yet been involaed in this issue are the multilateral and bilateral development institutions whose combined $40B annual budgets assume strategic importance in a world of indebtedness.

The goal of this article is to see how the underlying cultural, historical, or perceptual elements that form the basis for the establishment of international agreements and organizations affect bargaining between nations over issues of the global commons. The article has four parts. In the first two, the author summarizes competing ideas about the provisions of collective goods and theories of regime formation (related aspects of the same phenomenon). In the third section, the author suggests ways in which cultural, historical, and perceptual differences might be worked into notions about regime formation. Finally, in the fourth, the author addresses the implications of these ideas for managing the planetary atmosphere.

This article introduces the concept of management frameworks as institutional cultures. Nations and organizations tend to favor one or another of a variety of decision-making styles composed of unique combinations of only three basic types known as hierarchies, markets, and collectives. The decision styles systematically constrain discourse and lead decision makers to frame problems in specific, sometimes incompatible ways. Such constraints affect the selection ofissues for attention, perceptions of urgency, recognition of other stakeholders as legitimate participants in decisions, and preferences for different instruments of policy implementation. The article explores the implications of these decision styles for climate decision making, especially in the context of polycentric management regimes. The article concludes that greater attention to nongovernmental institutional contacts across national boundaries may provide opportunities to conclude and implement global agreements for environmental management.

Existing research comparing regulatory processes for environmental and health hazards in Europe and North America indicates that there are considerable differences in the ways that countries with quite similar legal and political traditions approach both the scientific evidence on which policy is made and the frameworks that are used to implement such policy. Such differences may be even more extreme between countries with vastly different cultures and political traditions. This article describes and accounts for such differences in political, legislative, administrative, regulatory, and judicial systems that may present obstacles to reaching international accord.

Environmental and futurist movements have taken up the issue of managing global environmen tal change. They have transformed "thinking globally, acting locally" from its original use as cautionary caption to its new use as militant maxim for change. René Dubos coined thinking globally, acting locally to warn that global programs cannot be easily translated everywhere into local actions. Movements now use it as a maxim to encourage people to act locally to save the world. Thinking globally, acting locally has become a model for a future in which planet Earth is to be managed comprehensively as a living system, not centrally, through command from a global government, but polycentrically, up from the global grassroots. Globalizing en vironmentalist and futurist movements have thus reinterpreted thinking globally, acting locally because the changed interpretation helps its user to deal with two major contradictions: (a) the goals of managing comprehensively and integratively to serve global system interests versus the goal of promoting freedom, equality, and personal or ethnic identity to serve individual or local interests; (b) the goal of protecting the biophysical environment versus the goal of expanding economies to advance material welfare. Thinking globally, acting locally functions like myth to promise that these contradictions can be overcome, and charts paths to victory. This motivates people to act to make change and legitimates the movements that promote the changes. Also, thinking globally, acting locally mirrors movement organization: many local groups, each pursuing its local goals, yet interacting in networks coordinated by overarching ideology.

Change in climate and other portions of the global environment will have uneven consequences across countries and regions. These changes already may be underway, will remain highly uncertain, and will prove challenging to diagnose. The geographical separation between the sources of human driving forces and the affected areas is a potential source of international tension and conflict. Some of these changes will exacerbate existing social and economic inequities and threaten sustainable development. This article examines the major equity prob lems arising from the interaction of geographical discontinuities, uncertainty, and international development.