The Republican Tragedy of the Commons: The Inefficiency of Democracy in the Light of Climate Change

Abstract

This paper argues that an analysis of the dissatisfactory outcomes of international negotiations concerning climate change must take into account procedures of political decision‐making in democracies. Although the normative ideal of republican democracy has means of dealing with such dissatisfactory results, political processes in republican democracies take too much time and risk becoming stuck in tragic or dilemmatic decision structures when facing challenges such as climate change. Consequently, this paper discusses possibilities for redesigning republican democratic institutions to counter‐act these negative forces. However, all possibilities discussed either call into question the normative ideal of republican democracy itself or would take too much time to be realized.