Spielräume für uni- und multilateralen Klimaschutz

The failure of previous climate policy leads us back to the public good characteristic of climate protection. The first aim of this paper is to identify by a simple graphical representation of 2x2 games, the ranges of constellations between country-specific environmental benefits and abatement costs which entail the four relevant games: prisoners’ dilemma, chicken game, stag hunt game and harmony game. Moreover, we examine how fairness preferences and especially reciprocity change these ranges. In contrast to the hypothesis that fairness motivations will foster cooperation we show that reciprocity reduces the scope for unilateral climate protection. In a third step, we consider reciprocal subsidies of abatement efforts, which definitely increase the scope for successful climate protection without requiring contractual mitigation obligations.