ABSTRACT
As the twentieth century closes there is a recognition that many environmental problems have the properties of a global public good, or, perhaps better expressed, a global public ‘bad’. If goods create human well-being, bads detract from it. Public goods are shared by all because their consumption by one person (or one country) entails their consumption by another person (or another country). For a good to be truly public it must also be effectively impossible to exclude these ‘joint consumers’ through pricing or other means (see Stevens, 1993). A global public bad, then, is a loss of global well-being brought about by the actions of individuals and nations and which it is impossible, or very difficult, for any one individual or country to avoid. The solutions to such problems tend to involve1 a deliberate change in property rights, usually through the creation of an international agreement to protect the global environment. Effectively, such agreements convert what were global open access resources into global common property resources. With open access there are no owners. With common property there are communal owners and their success in controlling the problem will depend on the design of incentives to maintain the agreement (Bromley, 1991). 1
