How to Reverse the World’s Trust Deficit Disorder

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, a small and little-known think tank attached to the United Nations Development Programme published a book that transformed the global development discourse: Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century. Runaway globalization had created a “global public domain,” the authors argued. A shared pool of resources was being either undersupplied or overexploited. In a globalized world, advancing sustainable development became more than a moral obligation; it was in everybody’s enlightened self-interest. If the world has a glut of cheap palm oil but no forests, nobody thrives in the long term.

The idea of a global public domain caught the zeitgeist in an era of falling walls and regimes. At the beginning of the 1990s, the collapse of communism stigmatized big government, but then breakneck liberalization, privatization, and