How states deal with long-term destabilizing risks

Abstract Many risks of events with the potential to cause societal collapse either lie far in the future or have a low chance of materializing in any given year. However, optimal mitigation of these long-term destabilizing risks requires state action in the present. We provide a novel framework for understanding why states struggle to formulate a rational response to these risks. In our framework, insights from cognitive psychology, long-term governance and game theory in international relations are integrated. Cognitive biases limit state forecasting accuracy; political incentives and state structures are generally not aligned with tackling the important challenges of the long-term; and global cooperation, a necessary component of mitigation of long-term destabilizing risks, is constrained by suboptimal institutional design in the face of game-theoretical challenges to cooperation. We illustrate this framework by looking at the case of how states fared against epidemic risk in the pre-COVID-19 period. Using 2019 indices of pandemic preparedness, we show that, as a result of the challenges included in our framework, almost all countries failed to take low-cost, high-benefit measures for preventing and mitigating pandemic risk. This underinvestment was widely acknowledged at the time, and occurred in spite of the well-established favorable cost-benefit ratios of such measures. In addition, international cooperation failed to lead to adequate preventive, mitigative and response policies. We argue that, considering the stakes, deepening our knowledge of why states do not adequately mitigate long-term destabilizing risks should be a priority for the study of governance. We conclude with recommendations both for policy makers and researchers.