In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business firms often will not invest in training that makes their workers more attractive to other employers, even though they would prefer having better-skilled workers.Culpepper sees in European training programs a challenge typical of contemporary problems of public policy: success increasingly depends on the ability of governments to convince private actors to cooperate with each other. In the United States as in Europe, he argues, policy-makers can achieve this goal only by incorporating the insights of private information into public policy. Culpepper demonstrates that the lessons of decentralized cooperation extend to industrial and environmental policies. In the final chapter, he examines regional innovation programs in the United Kingdom and the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay in the United States—a domestic problem that required the coordination of disparate agencies and stakeholders.

A famed political scientist's classic argument for a more cooperative world We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival. A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.

A study of the relationship between environmental cooperation and state building in post-Soviet Central Asia.

Through a comparative analysis of six case studies, this volume illustrates key conflict-resolution techniques for peacebuilding. Outside parties learn how to facilitate cooperation by engaging local leaders in intensive, interactive workshops. These opposing leaders reside in small, ethnically divided countries, including Burundi, Cyprus, Estonia, Guyana, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan, that have experienced communal conflicts in recent years. In Estonia and Guyana, peacebuilding initiatives sought to ward off violence. In Burundi and Sri Lanka, initiatives focused on ending ongoing hostilities, and in Cyprus and Tajikistan, these efforts brought peace to the country after its violence had ended. The contributors follow a systematic assessment framework, including a common set of questions for interviewing participants to prepare comparable results from a set of diverse cases. Their findings weigh the successes and failures of this particular approach to conflict resolution and draw conclusions about the conditions under which such interactive approaches work, as well as assess the audience and the methodologies used. This work features research conducted in conjunction with the Working Group on Preventing and Rebuilding Failed States, convened by the Wilson Center's Project on Leadership and Building State Capacity.

Directed to teachers, facilitators, and counselors, offers more than 170 cooperative activities for classrooms, summer camps, and family occasions designed to improve children's problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate.

This book explores the nature of regions and how they function, particularly at the local and micro-level. Whilst recent years have seen a resurgence in debates around the roles which regions can play in development, the focus has tended to be on 'macro' regional institutions such as the EU, ASEAN, ECOWAS or MERCOSUR. In contrast, this book offers a nuanced analysis of the important field of sub-regionalism and sub-national cross-border cooperation. Region-Making and Cross-Border Cooperation takes a fresh look at both theoretical and empirical approaches to 'region-making' through cooperation activities at the micro-level across national borders in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The book aims to explore the role that institutional dynamics play at the micro-level in shaping local and global ties, investigate what the formal and informal integration factors are that bolster regionalism and regionalization processes, and to clarify to what extent, and under what conditions, cooperation at the micro-level can be instrumental to solving common problems. Scholars and students within politics, sociology, geography, and economics would find this book an important guide to regionalism at a micro-local level perspective.

In Cooperation among Nations, Joseph M. Grieco offers a provocative answer to a fundamental question in world politics: How does the anarchical nature of the international system inhibit the willingness of states to work together even when they share common interests? Grieco examines the capacity of two leading contemporary theories--modem political realism and the newest liberal institutionalism--to explain national responses to the non-tariff barrier codes negotiated during the Tokyo Round of international trade talks. According to his interpretation of realist theory, Grieco characterizes states as "defensive positionalists." As such, they often fail to cooperate because they fear that a joint endeavor, while producing positive gains for all participants, might also generate disparities in gains among the partners involved. Grieco demonstrates that this realist concept of defensive state positionalism gives rise to a better understanding of the systemic constraints on international collaboration and of the impact of anarchy on states than is offered by neoliberal institutionalism. Drawing on previously unreported archival materials, Grieco rigorously applies the two theories to an empirical analysis of the cooperative efforts of the United States and the European Community during the 1980s to regulate and reduce non-tariff trade barriers through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down. The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most. Ranging over the main areas of global concern, from security to the global economy and the environment, this book examines these mechanisms of gridlock and pathways beyond them. It is written in a highly accessible way, making it relevant not only to students of politics and international relations but also to a wider general readership.

This proceedings volume provides a fresh perspective on current challenges in cooperation and coopetition in the age of Industry 4.0. Featuring selected papers from the 10th Conference on Management of Organizations’ Development (MOD) held in Zamek Gniew, Poland, this volume extends the knowledge of cooperation and coopetition, presents analytic tools used in the research, considers the potential impact of Industry 4.0 on collaboration, and provides recommendations for managerial practice. Interorganizational relations have been a relevant topic in the management sciences in recent years. Globalization, social, cultural, and technological progress are among the factors shaping the environment for collaboration, determining the conditions for development and defining a set of new challenges that managers have to face in today's knowledge-based economy. This book, therefore, explores emerging problems of organizational development in the light of the needs and challenges of Industry 4.0. Combining the latest theory and practice, the volume provides a realistic outlook on the network economy and interdependencies both within and between sectors.

Through experiments with kids and chimpanzees, this cutting-edge theory in developmental psychology reveals how cooperation is a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. “[A] fascinating approach to the question of what makes us human.” —Publishers Weekly Drop something in front of a 2-year-old, and she’s likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. For example, apes put through similar experiments demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to. As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior. In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello’s studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans’ earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions. Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello’s findings and explore the implications.