Hale, Held, & Young: Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing when We Need It Most

Thomas Hale (Univ. of Oxford - Blavatnik School of Government), David Held (Durham Univ. - Politics and International Relations), & Kevin Young (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst - Political Science) have published Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing when We Need It Most (Polity 2013). Here's the abstract:

The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down. The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most.