By Liam Grima
March 17th, 2025
Within Washington D.C. and prominent policy circles, climate change is often seen as the ultimate collective action problem. Private parties can either cooperate by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or defect by choosing not to reduce emissions. The question becomes: do actors have a motive to endlessly consume cheap, easily accessible fossil fuel products to satisfy their self-interests? Or is cooperation an integral part of human nature that has defined the species’ politics?
The predominant view is that cooperation is a ‘pipe dream’ and that sufficient GHG reductions are unlikely, virtually guaranteeing irreversible climate change. This argument is exemplified by a 2021 Foreign Affairs article by Dr. Stephen Walt, titled The Realist Guide to Solving Climate Change. According to Dr. Walt, states – his main unit of analysis – are embedded in an international system known as the Westphalian System, which is inherently anarchic, meaning there is no overarching authority to control the domestic actions of individual states. As a result, states are said to be constrained from incorporating the concerns of other states and public goods into their sovereign and strategic decision-making. This presents a classic prisoner’s dilemma: individual states are institutionally and mathematically inclined to compete rather than cooperate with one another. States can either forgo potential economic gains from fossil fuel investments for the benefit of others, which risks free riding and exploitation, or try to gain a competitive advantage by ignoring the boundaryless and compounding effects of GHG emissions. This reasoning, endorsed by Dr. Walt and others, is used to justify the idea that climate change is not within the purview of states to solve. He concludes by suggesting that humanity must hope a few hegemonic states come to a bilateral agreement to ameliorate the situation. However, there are numerous issues with this pessimistic position.
Concrete Beings – Not Abstract States – Choose to Cooperate or Compete
The rules and incentives that shape international relations are not innate and static but socially conditioned and dynamic.
States are not entities with agency. They cannot weigh the relative costs and benefits of cooperation versus competition. Consequently, the international system is not inherently anarchic, inevitably forcing states to adopt a self-help mentality. Rather, only living, breathing human beings – who grapple with these contentious issues and develop social narratives – can choose to rationalize enmity or amity. Still, however, orthodox international relations theory – primarily realism – treats states like organisms with an evolutionary incentive to defect from international agreements and continue burning fossil fuels to supercharge development and meet economic growth goals. This view assumes that states possess a priori properties that are hardwired into their very existence. But the rules and incentives that shape international relations, which at times legitimize collectively irrational and selfish behavior, are social constructs, determined by actors who then reproduce the very state system they represent through their recognition of it. The rules and incentives Dr. Walt and others reference are not innate and static but socially conditioned and dynamic.
Institutions and Social Norms Facilitate International Cooperation
State actors frequently cooperate to confront contentious international issues. One specific example is the establishment of institutions and the social construction of common norms. Take nuclear weapons, which present a classic case of mutually assured destruction – the paragon of structural realism – since, in probability terms, cooperation is a disadvantageous security initiative under the assumption that merciless and power-hungry states don’t care about each other or future generations. Why would these acquirable and lethal weapons be resisted, abandoned, and then shamed by over one hundred states, even as a select few continuously aspire nuclear weapons potential? How was this achieved? The answer is that a variety of state and non-state actors pioneered an internationally coordinated campaign that created conversation around nuclear weapons and their humanitarian consequences. In 2017, this culminated in the international adoption of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. As a result, previously nuclearized states began acknowledging, and even supporting, nonnuclear states through the language of an emerging prohibition norm and common nonnuclear identity. Or consider Apartheid. As Audie Klotz has shown, the international diffusion of a racial equality norm helped key state and non-state actors overcome President Ronald Reagan’s veto, which had been preventing the U.S. Congress from authorizing sanctions against South Africa’s white minority government. This led to an internationally coordinated sanctions regime that helped reduce the white minority stronghold and begin ending Apartheid. How would Dr. Walt and others explain this? Shouldn’t competitively inclined states have been indifferent to the domestic characteristics of another state halfway across the world?
Many Governments Already Have Taken Some Climate Action
Governments across the world have taken bold steps to reduce GHGs. For example, in 2022, the United States – the largest historical emitter of GHGs and the wealthiest country in history – under the leadership of President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to combat climate change by decarbonizing the power and transportation sectors. Primarily through renewable energy tax credits and electric vehicle subsidies, the bill invested nearly $370 billion in climate change mitigation measures. A Princeton team led by Jesse Jenkins found that the IRA doubled the rate of annual emissions reductions, helping the United States reduce GHG emissions by between 43% and 48% below 2005 levels by 2035. This policy has – and continues to – generate benefits for other states, including ‘free riders’. It is true that the IRA was designed to enhance the United States' international competitiveness, particularly in relation to China. Some might argue that this undermines the cooperative nature of the policy, framing it instead as a case of strategic self-interest. While this perspective holds some merit, it does not tell the whole story. A complementary discourse that galvanized the Biden administration was not rooted in competition but rather in the necessity and importance of global cooperation. In fact, President Biden partially justified his decision to help craft and sign the IRA by emphasizing that climate change is an “existential threat that faces all nations” and requires “leading an all-out effort to partner with nations.” At one point, he even praised the IRA for the benefits he believed it would provide to other countries, stating that it “has encouraged American companies to invest in...and for low- to middle-income nations.” Whether this claim is accurate or desirable is another question. What is revealing, however, is that the leader of one of the world’s most powerful countries touted his signature policy achievement by highlighting the benefits he perceived it would have for others – amidst an election cycle in which his opposition labeled him “weak” and called for an “America First” foreign policy. Can Dr Waltz’s structural realism explain this?
The International Community Has Made Efforts to Tackle Climate Change
Nearly 200 states have confederated multiple times to develop mechanisms for addressing climate change. Beginning with the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – an institution that lays out long-term targets and objectives for the international community to follow, enforce, and ultimately achieve – climate change was inserted as a top development consideration. International institutions became loci for debate and the promulgation of climate change norms. In fact, a procedural mechanism created by the UNFCCC to establish and meet expectations was the Conference of Parties (COP), comprising 198 registered states whose officials meet annually to build a shared vision and design policies to confront climate change. Subsequently, 84 and 195 official state actors respectively used the UNFCCC and COP format to ratify two international treaties: the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Accords. These accomplishments have yielded some positive advancements. For example, the emissions intensity of economic growth – the amount of GHGs emitted per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) – has globally declined, and GHG emissions are rising at a slower rate. While these efforts remain insufficient, a report by Climate Action Tracker (CAT) in 2022 found that national decarbonization efforts and promises have put the planet on track to warm between 2.4°C and 2.8°C by 2100. While this figure questionably assumes governments will follow up on their promises and is still well above the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommended limit of 1.5°C, this is significantly below the pre-2015 trajectory of 3.9°C. Dr. Waltz forgets this and fails to realize that new discursive spaces and social imaginaries can displace outdated paradigms and build bridges toward cooperation – even around something as complex as climate change.
Cooperation is Possible
Failure is only inevitable if we convince ourselves that cooperation is impossible.
It is true that existing levels of international cooperation have been woefully inadequate for addressing climate change. The targets set and solutions proposed by state actors are myopic, avoiding the radical economic downscaling and systemic transformation necessary not only to combat climate change but to prevent ecological collapse. We need not just international cooperation but global cooperation – one that prioritizes the rejuvenation of ecological life-support systems and redefines humanity as merely one member of the biotic community. It is also true that cooperation has often broken down as powerful state actors prioritize personal and national interests over the collective good. The scale of these challenge makes cooperation seem impossible – as Dr. Waltz says. Yet, history and empirical evidence demonstrate that cooperation is hardwired into human nature and a driving force behind the species social, political, and economic life. Failure is only inevitable if we convince ourselves that cooperation is impossible. We must shift the paradigm and recognize that humans are a fundamentally cooperative species, fully capable of addressing climate change and ecological collapse.
Liam is a Master of Science student in the University of Vermont’s Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) department. Broadly speaking, Liam is an aspiring ecological economist that is interested in the evolutionary dynamics of human cooperation at each scale of society - with a particular fascination with how social arrangements and cultural structures impact the ways societies produce, allocate, and consume raw materials and energy.
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