Médiation et Coordination Internationale : Le poids du président des négociations

Global issues such as climate change, depletion of the ozone layer and bio-diversity loss call for a coordination of national environmental policies. In this paper, we focus on the conditions for mediation to promote cooperation. We consider two coalitions of countries that participate in an international negotiation. By participating, they receive an advice, a draft agreement from the chairman in charge of the negotiations. This draft sets out a distribution of the burdens and, according to the cost and benefit functions, coalitions may have an interest in complying with it or not. When there is at least one draft agreement such that countries have no incentives to deviate from the recommendation, we say that mediation by the chairman is able to disentangle coordination failure. We focus on cases where it does, and discuss the configurations that render mediation, a feasible coordination device to promote international environmental cooperation.