If you want an engaging, interactive activity for classroom discussions of international climate change negotiations, then your best option is probably Climate Interactive’s
. I helped to arrange this with colleagues at the School of Transnational Governance at the EUI in Florence in 2021, and it went very well in our case – but it takes effort, and it will take a couple of hours in class time, plus preparation.
If you have less time, as I did this week, then a simpler option is to engage with game theory to illustrate, in practice, the problems of collective action that arise when supplying transnational public goods like protection of the climate system.
Disclaimers:
• Climate politics is much more complicated – and serious - than a simple game of cards like the one below, obviously.
Nevertheless, what follows is a starting point for discussion and reflection, and it is relatively fun, quick and simple.
The game I ran this week is an adapted version of one that Scott Barrett reportedly taught in his classes for many years. The basic problem structure is the same as what Barrett describes in Environment and Statecraft
(2005, pp.3-5). Keeping the red card provides the individual student with money. Donating the red card generates money for all the students. Donating the red card is a public good, akin to undertaking costly climate change mitigation, which benefits the collective.
For the individual, the benefit of providing the public good is only a fraction of what they could gain by being selfish instead. So, by refraining to supply the public good, the individual student benefits, even though the collective suffers.
Collectively, the students will be better off if they all supplied the public good. But they each have an incentive to be selfish, no matter what all the other students do. Even if all the others supply the public good, or even if none of them do, it still pays off for every individual to not provide the public good.
Apparently, Barrett’s students hardly ever supply the public good in large quantities. He wrote:
“Every time the result has been qualitatively the same. Only a fraction of the participants—ranging from about a third to two-thirds—hand in their red cards. The collective result is never as good as it could be. Collectively, the class can do no better than to hand in every red card, but this has never happened in the fifty or so times I have played this game.”
Now for me this is interesting, and suspicious: I do not quite know how Barrett played this 50 times and the students never cooperated fully, because I have played it 3 times and we had a scenario of full cooperation in two of the games (in the second round).
Full cooperation happened with undergraduates in 2019, when I played with the same scorings as Barrett recounted in his book, and it happened in 2022 with MA students (in one seminar, not the other) when I adapted the game to reflect inequality and the imposition of extra social costs from non-cooperation.
I remarked on social media in 2019: "There's a game that Barrett describes at the beginning of that book. Played it today with students. They quickly identified the limits of the game simplifications. They also cooperated fully, which Barrett said never happened for him."
It is possible that Barrett actually paid his students, whereas I did not. It could change the calculations if there is real money available. Inevitably, there will be other differences, but largely I suspect that he put more pressure on the students to act self-interested, because the theory of collective action problems starts from that assumption about behaviour.
I was not too insistent that the students act like they are in it for themselves. Although I did notice in class that when students were tending towards a cooperative approach, I felt like I had to remind them of the more self-interested considerations, partly because I wanted them to realise the central features of the game, which would illustrate collective action problems. I ended up saying things like: “what will the (imaginary) voters say when they find out you could have got a better deal, but decided not to take it? Wouldn’t you be better off if you kept the red ace, even though it imposes social costs on everyone else?” At one point, I went more direct and said, “do you want to be a loser?”. This last one attracted a gasp – rightly so, I think, because it is quite Trumpian.
I am not about to dismiss collective action theory because groups of seven students playing cards for fictional money found a way to fully cooperate, generating a pareto optimal outcome (of full equality, I might add).
But, as
Dr Genevieve Guenther observed on twitter in reaction to this in 2019, “It’s obvious (to humanists) that people’s decision-making is historically contingent”. Indeed, the ideology of selfish individualism and its connections to realist international relations theory is under continual assault from evidence of cooperative and indeed sacrificial human behaviour, from basic observations of global politics (realism was never realistic), and normative abhorrence at the theory’s reinforcing of what we seek to oppose.
Maybe you can frame it this way: the students revolted at the implied logic of the game, which naturalised the imposition of social costs and the acceleration of the climate crisis. By donating their red cards, they defended the ideals of cooperation and equality, and held out a sense of optimism for the future. They did this even though it involved some implied personal sacrifice.
I am probably taking the analysis too far because, crucially, this was just a game with low stakes, and we should be more interested in the real world than a game theory simulation. The main finding is that for me – and hopefully for any dear readers and for the students - this card game gets some mental cogs turning at least; or, more substantially, as Dr Guenther remarked a few years ago, it can be exciting to see new patterns of social thinking emerging around us.