Abstract

Abstract: With the failure of integrated, top-down bargaining strategies, analysts and diplomats have now turned to bottom-up methods such as "building blocks" and "climate clubs" to coordinate national climate change policies and to avoid persistent diplomatic deadlock. We agree that decomposition of the grand problem of climate change into smaller units is a crucial first step towards effective cooperation. But we argue that given the great uncertainty of the feasibility and costs of potential solutions, this bottom-up approach will only work if it is supported by institutions that promote joint exploration of possibilities by public and private actors along with the scaling up of successes. As politics precludes creating many of these institutions under the consensus-oriented decision rules of the UN system, engaged outsiders-including especially clubs or building blocks that can learn in the face of uncertainty-working in parallel with the UN diplomatic process will have to provide them. The logic of global public goods demands global coordination to solve free-rider problems. The logic of tragedies of the global commons demands coordination to reconcile the interests of those who use it. But coordination can emerge in different ways. It can result from integrated, purposeful efforts to align the behaviors of key players-top down. Or it can emerge in a more decentralized fashion-bottom up-from a myriad of more localized and focused efforts at problem solving, some of which prove effective and diffuse widely. Some can be applied, as well, to effective problem solving in adjacent areas. The top-down world has long been assumed as the first best strategy for solving serious global problems. It takes for granted which players should be at the table and that those players know their interests and capabilities. When the US and the Soviet Union set out to cap the volcano of strategic armaments they didn't rely on lots of decentralized actors to figure out what might work. Instead, these governments represented at the highest levels sat down and bargained directly. The result was integrated, top-down treaties focused on aligning interests where that was possible and enforcing key obligations where that was necessary. Similarly, the keystones in international economic coordination all emerged from