The use of role-play games in teaching: The International Climate Negotiation Game

This paper presents a role-play game designed by the authors, which focuses on international climate negotiations. The game has been used at a university with students all drawn from the same course and at summer schools with students from different levels (undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers) and different knowledge areas (economics, law, engineering, architecture, biology and others). We discuss how the game fits into the process of competence-based learning, and what benefits games, and role-play games in particular, have for teaching. In the game, students take on the role of representatives of national institutions and experience at first hand a detailed process of international negotiation concerned with climate change.

An Approach to the stability of international environmental agreements: the absorbing sets solution

We study international environmental negotiations when agreements between countries can not be binding. A problem with this kind of negotiations is that countries have incentives for free-riding from such agreements. We develope a notion of equilibrium based on the assumption that countries can create and dissolve agreements in their seeking of a larger welfare. This approach leads to a larger degree of cooperation compared to models based on the internal-external stability approach.