[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2015_05.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Customary International Law and Public Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Niels Petersen

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

Abstract
The paper examines the potential of customary international law to protect global public goods. In particular, it focuses on the question whether customary law can contribute to the mitigation of climate change. The analysis proceeds in the three steps. First, it will have a closer look at the concept of public goods and common pool resources in economic theory and experimental economics. On this basis, the second section examines the formation of customary international law. The analysis shows that sustaining cooperation in multilateral settings through customary law is difficult. With regard to the mitigation of climate change, it is unlikely that states will coordinate on an equilibrium that will lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The section then examines two further ways of identifying customary international law through moral interpretation and judicial lawmaking. However, the potential of these two avenues to protect global public goods effectively is rather limited. The final section analyzes the protection of global public goods through the initially unilateral extension of authority. One problem of global public goods is that states have shared authority over them. A solution might be to divide authority by extending the jurisdiction of the nation states. I will draw from an example concerning the protection of common pool resources, the protection of fish stocks, and analyze whether this example contains any lessons for the mitigation of climate change.

Suggested Citation

  • Niels Petersen, 2015. "Customary International Law and Public Goods," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2015_05, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2015_05
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2015_05online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K33 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - International Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2015_05. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.