Governance in Space

Governance structures are comprised of some combination of norms, rules, adjudication procedures, and enforcement mechanisms. Norms are general principles; rules are specific stipulations with regard to specific behaviours; adjudication procedures are est

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Governance in Space Marco Aliberti and Stephen D. Krasner

3.1

Governance

Governance structures are comprised of some combination of norms, rules, adjudication procedures, and enforcement mechanisms. Norms are general principles; rules are specific stipulations with regard to specific behaviours; adjudication procedures are established to decide when rules have been broken; enforcement mechanisms impose penalties when it has been determined that a rule has been violated. For instance in international trade the general principle informing the World Trade Organization is that free trade is good; a specific rule would refer, for instance, to the circumstances that define dumping or state subsidies; the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO adjudicates disagreements about the rules; the enforcement mechanism in the WTO is the withdrawal of concessions. Governance structures are necessary in situations where the unconstrained behaviour of actors will result in sub-optimal outcomes; situations in which without governance structures the Pareto frontier would not be reached. There are three different configurations of interest: harmony, coordination, and cooperation. Each has different implications for the kinds of governance structures that must be put in place if actors are to avoid sub-optimal outcomes. Harmony is a situation in which each actor, acting on its own, leads to a Pareto optimal outcome. Governance structures are entirely unnecessary when there is harmony, when every M. Aliberti (*) European Space Policy Institute, Schwarzenbergplatz 6, 1030 Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] S.D. Krasner Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Freeman Spogli Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA © Springer-Verlag Wien 2016 C. Al-Ekabi et al. (eds.), Yearbook on Space Policy 2014, Yearbook on Space Policy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-1899-3_3

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M. Aliberti and S.D. Krasner

actor can maximise its own utility by acting in ways that do not need to take any account of the behaviour of others.1 Coordination problems arise when a sub-optimal outcome occurs if each individual actor fails to take account of the behaviour of others. Coordination problems require some level of governance. Minimal governance structures are needed when the choice of a focal point or rule has no distributional consequences. Actors must coordinate their behaviour around one of a number of possible focal points to reach the Pareto frontier (the set of points along which no one actor can be made better off without making other actors worse off), but they are indifferent about which one is chosen. Once a focal point has been chosen there is no incentive for any one actor to defect, because defection would leave the actor worse off. Every actor is just as happy with the focal point chosen as they would have been with any other. Enforcement mechanisms are not necessary because if an actor violates the agreed up