Robustness over efficiency in climate coalitions: a bistable model and a map of architectures

Abstract

Designs for international climate cooperation face a trade-off between efficiency and robustness to institutional erosion by defection, renegotiation, and political turnover. We formalize this trade-off in a stylized coalition-formation game with two market-based enrolment channels, a membership premium and an outsider drain, stabilized against bounded perturbations with robust control. The free-rider gap is exact within the game, expressed in measurable primitives, and separated from the architecture-specific channels. The drain is decomposed into a fiscal border channel, capped by trade law at the rent it mirrors, and a compensated terms-of-trade channel, making every channel strength measurable. With sufficiently strong channels the model is bistable: a remnant club and a near-universal coalition are separated by a critical mass. For a newly proposed carbon currency, whose emission rights are reissued each period, extinguished upon use, and enforced at the border, the minimal nucleus is thirty per cent of global emissions, ignition from an EU-China nucleus requires compensating one fifth to three fifths of the outsiders' terms-of-trade loss, the established coalition withstands two to four times the perturbation admissible at ignition, and the tipping survives heterogeneity to about three times the membership premium. Two robustness coordinates place each architecture in a map with three regimes, opening a comparative dynamics of climate clubs: the carbon currency is self-igniting, the border adjustment founding-dependent, the export rebate permanent-support-dependent. Architectures without a drain improve efficiency within a coalition but cannot drive its formation. Robustness governs whether cooperation forms and endures; efficiency decides how much an established coalition delivers.