Conflict and Cooperation in Global Commons: Theory and Evidence from the Caspian Sea

Abstract

The conventional literature on the commons involves small, local resources such as coastal fisheries, community forestry, small-scale irrigation, and community pasture. We focus on conflict and cooperation in the Caspian Sea-a global commons-involving five claimant countries as well as interests of major powers (the United States, European Union, and China). Building on the work of Stern and Young on the study of conflict and cooperation in global commons, we model the case as a prisoner's dilemma game with the two different outcomes. In the North Caspian Sea, competing claimant countries-Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan-have agreed to cooperate and solve their differences over ownership of oil fields. In contrast, claimants in the South Caspian Sea-Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan-have failed to cooperate despite decades of trying. Using analytic narratives, we suggest that politics (or strategic calculations) could help explain these two different outcomes. In making these calculations, countries will act in their rational self-interest, given the prospects of international anarchy. We suggest that this realist account can be partly explained by the convergence of economic interests, geopolitics, and cultural distance. We argue that the study of global commons would benefit from understanding realist theories of international relations.

The role of home governments in entry bargaining of multinationals: China's investment in Central Asia's natural resource sector

“…At the global scale, geopolitical competition can directly affect bargaining outcomes and bargaining powers of parties. As previous studies also suggested, the geopolitical competition between powerful actors had been beneficial for Central Asian states as they utilized this rivalry to balance the presence of global powers and diversify their energy export routes (Cooley, ; Orazgaliyev & Araral, ). Particularly, more visible presence of China in the new millennium, allowed Central Asian states to “play the balancing act” between the political powers in the region.…”

State Management Of Strategic Natural Resources

“…An analysis of articles indexed by Web of science over the past 20 years on this topic allows you to distribute them in the following areas: broad-based articles dealing with various types of natural resources, linking them to the problem of economic security of the country (Ivanitsky & Privalov, 2016;Kryukov et al, 2017;Lebedev et al, 2015;Ulanov & Ulanova, 2019); articles directly linking the problem of resources with political issues (Keypour & Hendla, 2019;Seliverstov & Krivonosov, 2019;Zelenskaya, 2018); articles on certain types of resources (Golovina, 2017;Gulyanov et al, 2019;Hashim, 2010;Kudeyarov, 2019;Laverov & Distler, 2003;Panova & Sinitsyna, 2019;Privalov & Privalova, 2017;Sergeev & Ponomarenko, 2015;Vasiltsova, 2016;Zou et al, 2019); articles related to certain territories, especially the far North or the Arctic shelf Agarkov et al, 2018;Berezikov, 2019;Carayannis et al, 2017;Cherepovitsyn et al, 2018;Kozhevnikov, 2019;Lipina et al, 2018;Morgunova & Telegina, 2019;Zaikov et al, 2017;Zinoviev, 2017); articles on international relations and trade (Orazgaliyev & Araral, 2019;Orlov, 2016;Privalov & Li, 2015;Vinokurov & Krasnoyarova, 2018).…”

How Ostrom's design principles apply to large‐scale commons: Cooperation over international river basins

“…disaster & risk management, environment, governance, international governance, national governance governance of international river commons as a kind of large-scale commons before being able to determine a different or modified set of DPs (e.g., Stern, 2011) and additional subsets of these principles, such as economic interests, geopolitics, and governance regime (e.g., Orazgaliyev & Araral, 2019;Young, 2002). Stern (2011) and Fleischman et al (2014) find that although most of Ostrom's DPs apply, a distinctly different nature exists for collective action problems between the global and local scales.…”