Collective Action at Local and Global Scales: The Next Collaborative Agenda

As we approach the twenty-year anniversary of Keohane and Ostrom’s Local Commons and Global Interdependence, I assess their agenda for collaboration between scholars working in the local and global domains. I use the case of global climate change - a challenge that intrinsically spans local to global collective action - to emphasize what scholars working at the intersection of these two domains have learned over the last two decades and what we might do next. Issues that were ripe twenty years ago - such as studying the effects of numbers of actors and their heterogeneity - have seen substantial progress. New topics for cross-domain research include a more careful look at how collective action affects technological innovation. They also include the study of how fragmented institutions affect collective action; fragmentation has grown as a research topic in both domains yet described with different terms of “polycentrism” and “regime complexes.” This paper is part of a panel at APSA aimed at reviving the Keohane-Ostrom; I suggest that a shift to these new topics is as important as a revival of interest in collaboration in these two domains.