The Design of International Environmental Agreements: Drivers and Obstacles for Success

Global environmental problems as for instance climate change need international cooperation between sovereign countries to address them. However, effective cooperation is not easy to achieve in this context as the seminal papers by Barrett (1994), Carraro/Siniscalco (1993) and Hoel (1992) showed. Since then, the literature on this topic has grown exponentially. The 2025 EAERE summer school aims to present an accessible but rigorous review of the last advances on the analysis of international environmental agreements. The lectures will cover the recent contributions on global climate governance in the light of mitigation, geoengineering, adaptation and transfer payments. They will also include a presentation on the role of the design of agreements on compliance and on the investment in clean and brown technologies. The theoretical lectures will be supplemented by a review of experiments to study the provision of global public goods and the literature on Integrated Assessment Models studying global governance issues with a special focus on the use of calibrated simulation models for the analysis of the drivers and obstacles for success of international environmental agreements. Thus, the school will cover a broad spectrum of different methodologies which have been employed for the analysis of international environmental agreements.

The organizers would like to thank the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences for their support.