D e v e l o pme n t : E q u a l i t i e s a n d s u s t a i n a b i l i t y Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 100 Conclusion There is a growing recognition that public goods require both theoretical and policy innovation. Despite the lasting conceptual distinction between private and public goods, few goods are ‘purely’ private and most involve negative or positive ‘externalities’ and ‘spillover effects’. Public goods are central to the theme of this volume – achieving fair and effective public service in both mature and developing democracies. The lingering under-provision of public goods is escalating into a global crisis, with inaction bearing significant costs (Kaul, 2013: 14). A new public goods approach takes national and global public goods beyond the theoretical impasse of market failure versus state failure. However, it does not provide easy answers and involves opening up the ‘black box’ of public values in politics. People need to be directly involved in debating the public value of goods such as disease control, financial market regulation, pollution control, peace and security, and human rights protection. The technical and often complex nature of these topics means that adequate levels of investment in expertise, public education, information and participation are required, in order to ensure forms of ‘publicity’ that unite people into a focused collectivities (Adut, 2012: 245) with the capability to reach democratic, fair and beneficial decisions. There are current proposals to shape the post- Millennium Development Goals agenda for international cooperation with public goods at the centre (Kaul, 2013). In the international sphere, the publicness of provision can be positively or negatively affected by international cooperation policies. National and global governance must create the right incentives for various actors to contribute the fair shares needed to achieve adequate and effective public goods provision. This involves rewarding public service motivations, addressing public value failure and regulating obnoxious markets. Public goods require multilevel governance, policy interdependence and integration with national and global development policies. Divergence can be addressed by well-designed public policies that incentivise public goods. A theory of public goods that effectively balances democratic participation, fair access to essential goods and public benefits offers an important alternative to the conventional paradigm of freerider individualism and cynical government, thus recovering possibilities for the public value of public things. References Adut, Ari (2012) A Theory of the Public Sphere. Sociological Theory, 30 (4), pp. 238–322. Bator, Francis M. (1958) ‘The Anatomy of Market Failure’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 72, (3), pp. 351–379. Bozeman, Barry (2002) ‘Public Value Failure: When Efficient Markets “May Not Do”’, Public Administration Review, 62, (2), pp. 145–161. Desai, Meghnad (2003) ‘Public goods: a historical perspective’, in Kaul, Inge et al (Eds) (2003) Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–77. Haglund, LaDawn (2010) Limiting Resources: Market-Led Reform and the Transformation of Public Goods. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Kanbur, Ravi (2001) ‘Obnoxious markets’. Working Paper WP 2001–08, July 2001, Department of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Kaul, Inge (2001) ‘Public goods in the 21st Century’, in M Faust et al. (Eds) Global Public Goods: Taking the Concept Forward, New York: UNDP Office of Development Studies Discussion Paper 17. Kaul, Inge et al. (Eds) (2003) Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaul, Inge (2006) Public Goods: A positive analysis in Touffut, J (ed) Advancing Public Goods. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar/Cournot Centre for Economic Studies, pp. 13–39. Kaul, Inge (2013) Global public goods: a concept for framing the post-2015 agenda? German Development Institute Discussion Paper 2/2013 (Bonn, 2013), available at: http://www.diegdi. de/CMSHomepage/ openwebcms3.nsf/(ynDK_contentByKey)/ANES- 959D4N/$FILE/DP%202.2013.pdf Marglin, Stephen A. and Schor, Juliet B. (eds.) (1990) The golden age of capitalism: Reinterpreting the postwar experience, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Marmolo, Elisabetta (1999) A constitutional theory of public goods, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 38 (1), pp. 27–42. Nordhaus, William B (2005) Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods: A commemorative essay for Paul Samuelson. Yale University, 5 May 2005, http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/PASandGPG.pdf Pickhardt, Michael (2005) Some Remarks on Self-Interest, the Historical Schools and the Evolution of the Theory of Public Goods, Journal of Economic Studies, 32 (3), pp. 275–293. Pickhardt, Michael (2006) ‘Fifty years after Samuelson’s “The pure theory of public expenditure”: What are we left with?’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 28, (4), pp. 439–460. Samuelson, Paul A (1954) ‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 36, (4), pp. 387–389. Samuelson, Paul A. (1969) Pure Theory of Public Expenditure and Taxation, in: J. Margolis and H. Guitton (Eds) Public Economics (London: Macmillan), pp. 98–123. Sen, Amartya (1970) Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden-Day. Skidelsky, Robert (2009) Keynes: The Return of the Master. London: Penguin. ‘The Other Canon’ (no date) ‘What is the contrast between mainstream economics and The Other Canon?’, The Other Canon, http://www.othercanon.org/index.html Su-ming Khoo, PhD, is a lecturer at the School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway, and project leader of the Development Education and Research Network. Her recent research and teaching focus has been on human rights and development, particularly the right to food, right to health and right to education; higher education policy and public scholarship; and public goods, capability theory and consumer activism. She can be reached at s.khoo@nuigalway.ie.
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