A green dream

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development– Policy Analysis Research Group

Environmentalism is an ideology that inspires a number of social movements with fundamental concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the environment and the human’s life quality. Since the early 90s, large efforts have been made to elaborate a global wide accepted regulation to help halting the increase of GHG in the atmosphere. Despite the public consciousness about the risk of climate change, governments and international community authorities have achieved no effective global collaboration. WHY?

Political economy and social sciences can give a proximity answer. The political economy scholar Mancur Olson pointed out; in his book “The Logic of Collective Action” collective action is either unreachable or begins to break down as the size of cooperating group increases. In large groups it becomes harder to monitor the individual contributions of members; free riding and other form of opportunistic behaviour become much more common   

Any sort of collective action, for protecting environment, in global scale tends to follow Olson’s framework. Green lobbies may be dispersed instead of being concentrated.

Regardless how far people share  common interests in cutting down the GHG concentration and no matter how large the green lobbies could be, producers still enable organize effective lobbies for pursuing their common interest which centre profit maximization with rising production.  

The fact is democratic governments respond to influential lobbies as it is assumed that the interplay of pressure groups is the essence of democracy

The logic of collective action can be examined in the global context. Countries will realistically contribute time and money to an association if and only if their contributions make a great deal of difference for them. Given the nature of climate change, any collaboration makes no sense where there is possibility of free-ride possibility.