Restructuring Climate Change Cooperation: the Themis Mechanism

Climate change is a collective action problem. No national policy – however ambitious – can address it on its own. We need to cooperate. However, current global approaches such as the Paris Agreement are structurally flawed, as they are mostly a collection of of unilateral pledges with little notion of reciprocity and ultimately fail to overcome the misalignment between national and collective incentives, which is arguably the root cause of the climate crisis.

Reciprocal agreements between countries based on common commitments enable alignment of national and global incentives, but the question remains: how do we implement such ideas in the real world?

The Themis Mechanism is a simple, concrete proposal for how to implement reciprocal climate cooperation. Its annual schedule builds trust between partners, has ethical foundations and uses an elicitation process that draws from behavioural economics to agree on governing quantities for a climate coalition. Themis has nothing to do with altruism: it enables sovereign nations to act in their self-interest when addressing the evermore urgent climate crisis cooperatively.