3.4 Environmental Degradation Thus far we have focused almost exclusively upon mechanisms identifying economic globalization as the key contemporary constraint on public policy-making auton have also questioned, in so doing, the extent to which contemporary economic trends are well captured by the term globalization. Yet at to issues compelling is a rather more political mechanism which refers unequivocally not so that are genuine global in their scope and scale. Strictly speaking this does much point to the diminished capacity of public policy makers in an era of global ization, as to the globalization of the problems with which such policy makers are confronted and their inability to date to deal with such problems The classic example here is the problem of high-consequence global environmental (Giddens 199o). This is well expressed in the so-called "tragedy of the commons" first identified by Garrett Hardin (1968). Hardin provides an intuitively plausible and all too compelling mod of the seemingly intractable problem of environmental degradation in contemporary societies a useful extension and updating of Hardin's pioneering work, see Gardiner 20o4). The systematic explo ation and pollution of the environment, it is argued, is set to continue since individual corporations and states, despite a clear collective interest, choose not to impose upon themselves the costs of unilateral environmental action. Their logic is entirely rational, though potentially catastrophic in its cumulative consequences Such actors know that environmental regulation is costly and, particularly in an open international economy, a burden on competitiveness Accordingly, in the absence of an international agency capable of enforcing compliance of all states and the all corporations, the anticipation of free-riding is sufficient to ensure that corporations and states do not burden themselves with additional costs and taxes, The long-term effects for the environment are all too obvious, preventing as it does a global solution to a genuinely global problem The extent to which the narrowly perceived self-interest of states and governments can subvert the development of effective mechanisms and institutions of global governance is well evidenced by the Bush administration's withdrawal from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol committing signatories to staged reductions in greenhouse gas emissions) and for its critics, by the fact that such a protocol, even if fully implemented, would only serve to reduce slightly the pace of an ongoing process of environmental degradation. This is a most important example, and a number of broader implications might be drawn from it. First, the "tragedy of the commons is indicative of a more general disparity between the need for and supply of effective institutions and mechanisms of global public policy. For whilst it is easy to point to genuinely global problems requiring for their resolution coordinated global responses, it is far more difficult to find examples of the latter. Second, whilst the proliferation of genuinely global political problems does point to the incapacity of a system of sovereign states (capable of exercising veto power) to deal with the challenges it now faces, it does not indicate any particular incapacity of domestic public policy to deal with the problems and issues it has always dealt with. This is, then, less a story of a loss of capacity than of the proliferation of issues which domestic policy makers have never had the capacity to deal with. Finally and rather perversely, the disparity between the need for and supply of global solutions to global problems is merely exacerbated by economic globalization. For this has served to drive states, at pain of economic crisis to elevate considerations of competitiveness over all other concerns, including environmental protection. There is a clear and obvious danger that the narrow pursuit of short-term economic advantage will come at the long-term price of a looming environmental, economic, and political catastrophe.