A bottom-up institutional approach to cooperative governance of risky commons

Climate change cooperation has been limited by the lack of sanctioning mechanisms to deal with those who fail to abide by agreements. Research now shows that a bottom-up process, in which parties create local institutions that punish free-riders, promotes widespread cooperation as opposed to the traditional top-down approach that builds global institutions. Avoiding the effects of climate change may be framed as a public goods dilemma1, in which the risk of future losses is non-negligible2,3,4,5,6,7, while realizing that the public good may be far in the future3,7,8,9. The limited success of existing attempts to reach global cooperation has been also associated with a lack of sanctioning institutions and mechanisms to deal with those who do not contribute to the welfare of the planet or fail to abide by agreements1,3,10,11,12,13. Here we investigate the emergence and impact of different types of sanctioning to deter non-cooperative behaviour in climate agreements. We show that a bottom-up approach, in which parties create local institutions that punish free-riders, promotes the emergence of widespread cooperation, mostly when risk perception is low, as it is at present3,7. On the contrary, global institutions provide, at best, marginal improvements regarding overall cooperation. Our results clearly suggest that a polycentric approach involving multiple institutions is more effective than that associated with a single, global one, indicating that such a bottom-up, self-organization approach, set up at a local scale, provides a better ground on which to attempt a solution for such a complex and global dilemma.