Constructing Global Public Goods

Why do international actors provide global public goods when they could free-ride on the production of others? Constructing Global Public Goods examines this question by understanding the identities and preferences of the actors. Most rational choice models of public goods explain the public goods decision by examining the strategic interactions among the actors. They generally avoid the question of how utilities and preferences are formed. Constructing Global Public Goods brings a constructivist approach to the study of public goods by recognizing that the actors’ utilities and preferences are socially constructed from the identities the actors take on in the choice situation. The book develops a formal model that links the interpretation of unobserved utilities to preferences for the public goods outcome. It then applies the model to case studies on global monetary management, collective security, and protecting human rights. Bringing constructivism into the public goods decision allows the analysis to look beyond the limited Prisoner’s Dilemma based model of most rational choice approaches and recognizes that the decision whether or not to produce a global public good is a complex web of social, political and cultural factors.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 A Constructivist Approach to Global Public Goods Chapter 2 Accounting for Tastes: The Social Construction of Utility and Preferences Chapter 3 Utility, Preferences, and the Individual Public Goods Decision Chapter 4 Leadership and the Global Monetary System Chapter 5 Collective Security as a Global Public Good Chapter 6 The Individual Decision to Provide Collective Security: Romania and the Kosovo Campaign Chapter 7 Human Rights: Consensus, Norms, and Public Bads Chapter 8 Identities, Utilities, and Public Goods Decisions

About the Author :
James C. Roberts is professor of political science at Towson University

Review :
Constructing Global Public Goods provides a needed addition to a discussion on how rational choice theory can benefit from social constructivist insights. It is easily accessible and likely to benefit students of rational choice, because it does what it promises, namely “that rational choice models become much more robust representations of reality when theorists engage in thick rationality”. This book breaks new ground in studying the social construction of the politics of global public goods. Prof. Roberts argues that in order to apply the insights of rational theories of public goods provision effectively we need first to look at what state preferences are, and how they came to be that way. Why do some states see themselves as public goods providers and others not? The answer lies in state identity as much as in rational calculation. By assuming that functionally equivalent actors have the same preferences or by assuming that the formation of preferences is exogenous to the model (and therefore unimportant), rational choice approaches have seemed to me to be sterile and disconnected to the messy, blood-filled world they purport to model. Constructing Global Public Goods is a welcome exception. In this heterodox and clearly written book, James Roberts does something I did not think was possible: He makes rational choice approaches to International Relations interesting and helps us understand the context in which global public goods are or are not provided. By using rule-based constructivist methods, he unpacks actors’ identities, providing insight into the utility that actors assign to possible choices. In essence, there’s a politics to the formation of utility and identity, and constructivism’s focus on the co-constitution of actors and structures provides the analytical lens. Roberts’ utility-based model of public goods provides an analytical tool for making sense of actors’ changing preferences for supplying public goods as a consequence of changes in identity. Roberts put the politics back into rational choice models of providing global public goods.