Global public goods and the architecture of cooperation: a conversation with Inge Kaul

Inge Kaul, pioneering development economist and architect of the global public goods framework, discusses her groundbreaking work on international cooperation and development financing in this 2015 interview recorded at her flat in Berlin. Economists define public goods — like street lighting — as things everyone benefits from that nobody can be excluded from using. The problem is that individuals won't voluntarily pay for them, so governments provide them through taxation. Kaul's insight was recognising that globalisation has created global public goods — climate stability, disease control, financial stability — that benefit everyone across borders but that no world government exists to provide. Her central argument: financing cooperation on global public goods requires "new and additional" resources beyond traditional development assistance, because they serve fundamentally different purposes — one driven by moral concern for the poor, the other by shared self-interest. The conversation explores the fierce political resistance her ideas encountered, the chronic diversion of aid money towards global public goods purposes in violation of international agreements, her critical assessment of the SDGs, and the structural reforms needed in multilateral institutions. Kaul passed away in 2023, making this interview a valuable record of her intellectual legacy.

The interview begins with Kaul explaining the origins and breakthrough of the global public goods concept. To understand why this concept matters, it helps to start with the basic economic definition. A public good is something that has two key characteristics: it's non-excludable (you can't prevent people from benefiting from it) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish another's). Classic examples include street lighting, national defence or clean air — once these exist, everyone benefits whether they pay for them or not. This creates a problem: rational individuals won't voluntarily pay for public goods because they can "free ride" on others' contributions. That's why governments typically provide public goods through taxation.

Kaul's crucial insight was recognising that globalisation has created a new category: global public goods. Just as street lighting benefits everyone in a city regardless of who pays, climate stability, control of infectious diseases, financial market stability and a rules-based trading system benefit everyone on Earth regardless of which countries contribute to providing them. But there's a fundamental problem: there's no world government with the power to tax and provide these goods. Instead, sovereign nations must cooperate voluntarily to produce them. While earlier scholars like Kindleberger and Bruce Russett had used the term in academic journals, it was the 1999 UNDP publication Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, edited by Kaul, that brought the concept into policy discourse.

Kaul's central argument was that international cooperation operates along two fundamentally different tracks: traditional development assistance motivated by equity concerns for poor countries, and cooperation to provide global public goods driven by enlightened self-interest shared across all countries, rich and poor alike. Crucially, different countries have different priorities amongst global public goods. An Ethiopian woman facing maternal mortality risks might value accessible medicines more urgently than climate mitigation, even whilst recognising climate's importance. This variation in preferences means that international negotiations around global public goods resemble a political marketplace where agreements require fair terms of trade that make all parties better off. You can't simply impose solutions — you need to negotiate agreements where everyone perceives themselves as better off participating than not participating.

Kaul reserves her sharpest criticism for the widespread practice of diverting official development assistance (ODA) towards global public goods purposes, particularly environmental programs. She argues this violates international agreements dating to the 1992 Earth Summit, which stipulated that financing for global environmental challenges should come from "new and additional" resources, not existing aid budgets. By 2015, she notes, approximately 24% of ODA had climate change as a primary purpose, with even more having it as a secondary objective — a figure that had risen from 33% across all global challenges in 1999. This diversion, she contends, undermines the capacity to address the growing number of failed and failing states that need resources for conventional development purposes.

When Kaul challenged the chair of the Green Climate Fund at a resource mobilisation meeting in Berlin about whether they would require proof that contributions were "new and additional," the chair had to take a deep breath and look around for someone on the board to answer. The African delegate eventually admitted they had not discussed this issue. Kaul characterises the heads of agencies like the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, and UNDP as acting in "non-compliance with the international agreements that exist on new and additional financing" when they accept ODA money for environmental purposes.

The conversation delves into the intense political resistance Kaul encountered. The United States strongly opposed the three-word phrase "global public goods," fearing it implied supranational taxation or production. Developing countries worried the concept would siphon resources from traditional aid budgets. Some interpreted "public" to mean state-provided goods, evoking concerns amongst former Soviet bloc countries about returning to centrally planned economies. Kaul describes being "shouted and screamed at" in UN meetings, facing opposition so intense that leading economists avoided engaging with the concept. She characterises this treatment as "the severest human rights violation that I have ever experienced in my life." She argues that global public goods are simply a reality created by globalisation — she merely put a name to them.

A French-Swedish commission on global public goods further muddled the concept by insisting that global public goods are "things that are good for everybody," which Kaul vigorously opposed. This interpretation, she argued, opened the door for hegemonic powers to impose their preferences on others under the guise of pursuing universal goods. Her dissenting voice stressed that precisely because countries have varying preferences and unequal power, decisions about global public goods are amongst the most contentious in international relations and must be negotiated fairly amongst sovereign equals. The commission even identified ten priority global public goods, which fed into developing country concerns that they would be told what was good for them.

The discussion explores practical questions about financing arrangements. Kaul envisions a system where each country has separate budget lines: one for traditional ODA, and others within various line ministries (environment, health, transport, justice) for contributions to global public goods. The aggregate financing for global public goods would be the sum of contributions across these ministries, determined by each country's assessment of its willingness to pay for various global public goods based on how much it values them. She uses the example of New Zealand and ocean acidification — New Zealand cannot simply invest in its own coastal zones if it doesn't also invest upstream in places like Papua New Guinea to address the broader problem.

On the question of "incremental costs" — paying developing countries extra when they're asked to adopt more expensive climate-friendly technologies — Kaul is pragmatic. Whilst acknowledging that the concept has methodological difficulties, she argues it's "better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong". When paying countries like Brazil or India to provide environmental services (like forest preservation), she suggests letting countries themselves propose what they consider a fair price, then negotiating mutually beneficial bargains. There should be a profit margin for developing countries, not just reimbursement of actual expenditures.

Turning to the Sustainable Development Goals, Kaul is bluntly dismissive: "We will get it. No way. And there's nothing new, nothing new in it." Most SDG targets, she observes, already exist in national policy documents. What matters is implementation, and for that, the world needs fundamental institutional reforms. She advocates for issue-based management structures — essentially CEOs for major global challenges like climate change mitigation, disease control, or outer space governance — that can coordinate action across sectors, levels of government, and national boundaries. Current institutions are organised along geographic and sectoral lines, she argues, when what's needed is the capacity to produce specific outcomes like climate stability or food security.

Using the metaphor of Boeing designing an aeroplane, Kaul asks: imagine if the CEO simply said "wouldn't it be nice if we had a Dreamliner?" without actually organising production of wheels, engines, and the outer shell. That's what the international community does with the SDGs — setting aspirational goals without creating the operational structures to achieve them. For climate change, UNFCCC handles negotiations but there's no operational manager, no CEO for climate change mitigation who oversees sub-CEOs for different types of mitigation (energy, clean technology, etc.) and someone dealing with adaptation. The beginnings of issue-based management are emerging — special envoys appointed by UN Secretaries-General, the response to Ebola — but these arise from compulsion rather than foresight.

Kaul questions whether organisations like the World Bank have a clear future role, given competition from regional development banks and the emergence of new institutions like the BRICS bank. These "lumpy organisations" were interim solutions for a time when countries lacked capacity and when development cooperation had a stronger country focus. For global public goods, she suggests, the World Bank might serve as an umbrella organisation for global funds, but this requires serious rethinking. She envisions separate global funds financed by different line ministries — climate change programs funded by environment ministries, health programs by health ministries — rather than all international cooperation flowing through foreign affairs ministries and ODA budgets.

The interview explores why such logical structural reforms face such resistance. Kaul points to the political economy of budget rules and political incentives: politicians get credit for repainting houses after floods, not for preventing storms through climate mitigation. Budget structures in most countries prevent domestic line ministries from spending abroad, even as their mandates increasingly involve international dimensions. She sees "dual actor failure" — both markets and states failing to provide adequate global public goods — and argues this requires creative thinking about incentives and governance structures. She notes that pension funds and large investment firms actually cry out for standardised environmental regulation because search costs and risks are too high, but governments prefer to maintain flexibility hoping for initial advantage.

Despite the barriers, Kaul maintains optimism, noting that reality is forcing changes even when foresight fails. She observes that significant organisational changes have occurred in the UN system over decades. When she started at the UN, the department was called Department of International Economic and Social Affairs; after 1990, "International" was deleted because they started looking into countries, which had been forbidden before. Whilst scholar Richard Cooper suggests three major crises are needed before fundamental reform occurs, Kaul hopes that "a little foresight and goodwill" might suffice, noting that President Obama demonstrated what's possible with political will.

Throughout the conversation, Kaul's frustration with intellectual dishonesty and institutional inertia is palpable, yet she defends the UN's efficiency based on her experience: "My God, I mean, we are hard-working, we are efficient, we are quick" compared to national bureaucracies. The challenge is not within organisations but achieving genuine cross-institutional strategies, which requires overcoming departmental resistance and the deeply entrenched silo mentality.

The interview captures Kaul's intellectual rigour, her unflinching willingness to challenge powerful institutions, and her commitment to more equitable and rational approaches to international cooperation. Her insistence on distinguishing between equity-driven aid and efficiency-driven cooperation for global public goods, her demand for "new and additional" financing rather than aid diversion, and her vision for issue-based global governance structures remain profoundly relevant to contemporary debates about climate finance, pandemic preparedness, and the architecture of multilateral cooperation.

Links:

• Kaul, Inge (ed). Global Public Goods. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/global-public-goods-9781783472994.html
• Kaul, Inge, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc A. Stern, eds. Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Kaul, Inge, Pedro Conceição, Katell Le Goulven, and Ronald U. Mendoza, eds. Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Stern, Nicholas. "Understanding Climate Finance for the Paris Summit in December 2015 in the Context of Financing for Sustainable Development for the Addis Ababa Conference in July 2015." Policy Paper. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 2015. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64533/
• Kaul, Inge, Robin Davies, Robert Glasser, Michael Gerber and Luca Etter. “Financing the SDGs: Global vs Local Public Goods”, Policy Debate 6.2 | 2015, International Development Policy, Geneva Graduate Institute. https://journals.openedition.org/poldev/2068
• Davies, Robin. "Public Enemies: The Role of Global Public Goods in Aid Policy Narratives." Development Policy Centre Discussion Paper No. 57, March 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2941164

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