From collective action to collective rescue: rethinking distribution and cooperation in climate governance under common peril

Distributive conflict is central to climate governance but is often treated as an external obstacle to cooperation. This conceptual paper argues that such conflict is partly generated by the dominance of a Collective Action Problem (CAP) cooperation grammar, which frames climate mitigation as managing a shared resource and makes agreement over individual contributions a precondition for action. Once institutionalized, CAP embeds distributive questions into the authorization of action itself, contributing to delay and deadlock. The paper introduces a Common Rescue (CR) cooperation grammar, illustrated heuristically through the General Average principle in maritime law. Under common peril, CR relies on standing distributive institutions (stable rules, procedures, and practices that allocate costs, losses, benefits, or sacrifices among interdependent actors) that authorize action without prior bargaining over individual contributions, highlighting the role of such institutions in enabling collective action under common perils.