Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century

"Global Public Goods" offers a new rationale and framework for international development. The book's main argument is that in practice this has moved on from financially assisting the poor to broader issues, including among many others the ozone hole, global climate change and peacemaking. Aid, the book suggests, has been primarily guided by national development priorities; but in response to today's global and regional challenges, the aid agenda needs to be amplified. These topics are in many cases not poverty-related, but instead concern adequate provision of "global public goods." Published for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and edited by three senior members of its staff, the book seeks to better understand the roots of contemporary crises and to look at today's policy challenges through the lens of such goods, with a view to managing globalization. As any businessperson knows, the market may be the most efficient way of producing private goods and services, yet it relies on commodities that it cannot itself make. These include such things as property rights, public safety, etc. ­ goods recognized as having benefits that cannot easily be confined to a particular "buyer." Yet once they are provided, many can enjoy them for free. A sustainable environment is an example that, like other topics covered in this volume, has "public good" qualities. This difference between public and the private benefits is called an externality, and one of the main points of this book is that in today's world, large externalities are increasingly borne by people in other countries. Indeed, issues that have traditionally been merely national are now global; and this problem is compounded by the main policymaking unit remaining the nation state. The book investigates policy options and strategies that would ensure a more reliable supply of such global public goods as market efficiency, environmental sustainability and peace. These questions are examined in relation to selected areas of global policy concern in 15 case studies. Framing the case studies are two additional sections, one on concepts, the other on policy implications. An intriguing essay in the latter, by Harvard's Lisa Cook and Jeffrey Sachs, discusses the need for greater focus on regional public goods, both for the specialized requirements of individual regions and to co-ordinate regional contributions to global public goods. Noting the minimal funding currently targeted at this level, Cook and Sachs consider the success of the Marshal Plan in post-World War II development cooperation in Europe, and suggest that regional action in the future could follow a similar model. I found this essay particularly topical and interesting given the present stage of the Middle East peace process. One important point also made in the book is that the division of the world into "developed" and "developing" countries is no longer valid in its traditional form. It is

This book tries to extrapolate the concept of 'public goods' from the national level to the global level. We live in an insreasingly integrated & inter-linked world. Thus as the book correctly points out there is a need to rethink the nature of international assistance. These global public goods cut accross several countries, several sectors, several socio-economic groups & several generations. No country can achieve these global public goods (peace, greater economic stability & well being, social justice & environmental stability) on its own & neither can the global marketplace. The book offers a powerful new arguement for increased international cooperation in order to provide the global public goods that are needed to give globalization a human face. Now that we are leaving in a more open world; global public bads travel; and the existence of public goods at the local level; often depends on events 'far away'. Therefore, to secure their national interests,the book says that it is now important to place international cooperation at the core of national public policy. Working together with other states and encouraging cooperation & fariness at the global level will increasingly be seen as vital elements of 'self interested' national strategies. The policy making under conditions of globalization & for 'global public goods' poses tremendous challenges of balance-because it entails the need to complement decentralization with centrlization & community with diversity. Thus as the book rightly suggests domestic affairs have to blend so that international cooperation becomes an integral part of national public polcy making. The book brings into the limelight some major areas, which is of immense importance as far as the global community is concerned. It introduces a framework for facilitating & reinforcing international development through an equal partnership model of cooperation.