Defining bargaining, defining environmental

A couple of random thoughts from reading and thinking today:

1) Fearon (1998) notes in passing that the classic definition of a bargaining problem is "a situation where there are multiple self-enforcing agreements or outcomes that two or more parties would all prefer to no agreement, but the parties disagree in their ranking of the mutually preferable agreements." (Fearon 1998:274, but based on Nash 1950 and Schelling 1960) I think you can make a strong argument that by this definition the current climate talks, at least as currently constituted, do not constitute a bargaining problem! Does that mean the definition is wrong?

2) The reason why I'm trying to define "environmental treaty" is that there is literature about "environmental treaties;" they have been, at least some of the time, treated as a separate class of treaties. If you want to look at a group of treaties as a separate class, it has to be because you think there's something unique about them that can be captured in a definition, and which matters for your understanding of the group of treaties.

I have something of a suspicion, however, that the reason why scholars want to think of environmental treaties as a group is because they want to answer the question of "how do we help idealistic environmentalists get governments to protect environmental public goods in the face of opposition from economic or security interests?" In other words, helping the good guys win and making treaties in which governments "do the right thing" even in the face of costs. That implies that they think of environmental treaties are treaties in which what is happening is that governments are agreeing to "do the right thing" even in the face of costs.

The problem is that I'm not sure such a treaty has ever been signed (land mines? maybe? although that's not really environmental). That wouldn't be a problem if it were widely acknowledged that that were so - there's nothing wrong with trying to figure out how to make governments behave in novel, better ways. But it is a problem if you think that past successful "environmental treaties" are cases in which governments were convinced to "do the right (costly) thing", and that we can therefore figure out how to replicate that effect by studying what worked in those treaties. I think there are some very good arguments that past successful environmental treaties haven't been cases of nations "doing the right thing" in spite of costs, but rather of nations realizing that the material costs of not doing the right thing outweighed the costs of doing the right thing, which happened to lead to them "doing the right thing." I think this leads to some of the pathologies seen in environmental treaty-making.

Anyway, I don't think I'm being very clear here, but I guess the point is that I'm suspicious of "environmental" as a category of treaties. Many of them share certain common problems, like how to support public goods provision, but I think it would be more rigorous to think about it based on those more clear distinctions, rather than to start from the assumption of an "environmental" category and then try to define what that is - because the question is, why are you doing that? and is it revealing a basic assumption/bias or making us think fuzzily?