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Unraveling the nexus between agents and structures is fundamental to an understanding of political and social change. The two most prominent methodological approaches to explain revolutionary collective action involve either individual reductionism or structural reductionism. Both approaches result in theoretical inconsistencies and/or explanatory anomalies. An alternative proposed here utilizes the concept offramingdeveloped in behavioral decision theory primarily by Quatrone and Tversky. It directly addresses the agent-structure problem by developing the proposition that individuals evoke alternative decision rules in different structural contexts. The result is greater theoretical coherence and resolution of anomalous cases. Additionally, this model begins to define a new role for ideology in explanations of revolutionary collective action.

The most pressing problems facing mankind today require for their solution some form of worldwide collective action at the level of states. In order to combat the global threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy countries must cooperate to provide vaccines for people in low-income countries, if only to prevent these populations from becoming breeding grounds for new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that will also endanger the richer nations. Another, even more pertinent case is the campaign against global warming, which requires concerted action by committed state regimes to curtail the worldwide emission of greenhouse gases. Such figurations give rise to the classic dilemmas of collective action. Throughout human history, with ups and downs, the scale of collective action has extended. This is a corollary of the gradual increase in the scale of governance, from villages to small kingdoms to nation states. National economies, too, have expanded with the increasing control and consumption of fossil energy, as Johan Goudsblom has demonstrated. By the end of the 19th century, nation states were the largest units of effective coordination, each one comprising between one and a hundred million citizens. In the course of the 20th century, a few entities have evolved to the next higher order of magnitude with hundreds of millions, or more than a billion citizens and with a gross national product exceeding in most cases 10 trillion US dollars: these "gigants" are China, the USA, India, and the EU. They are at present the initiators and managers of global collective action. The recent COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent coordination problem. The enduring climate crisis evokes very similar dilemmas of collective action. The Russian invasion of Ukraine quite suddenly compelled the USA and the EU to join in antagonistic collaboration and overcome challenges that were much the same. State actors resort to a limited set of strategies and practices in order to overcome the pitfalls of collective action and the gigants have a leading role in coordinating them.

Political scientists commonly use their courses to emphasize the
pervasive nature of collective action problems, whereby group
interests are undermined by individual incentives to "defect" or
"free ride." In a graduate seminar a faculty member may have
students read classics in this area, such as Mancur Olson's
The Logic of Collective Action (1965). Graduate students are often expected
to model a collective action problem as a prisoner's dilemma and be
able to understand the implications in such areas as establishment
of interest groups, voting turnout, budgeting, and military
relationships among nations. Even in lower division undergraduate
courses political science instructors may integrate concepts from
collective action theory. This orientation is also evident in some
textbooks. Thus in their introduction to American politics, Samuel
Kernell and Gary C. Jacobson (2003) offer
an extensive discussion of collective action problems and the role
of government, and return repeatedly to this topic throughout their
book. Similarly, a focus on collective action problems is at the
heart of Walter Stone's introductory American politics text,
Republic at Risk (1990).

Collective action is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that this involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The account of collective intention for which the author has argued elsewhere is presented. In terms that are explained, the parties are jointly committed to intend as a body that such-and-such. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory—problems such as the various forms of coordination problem and the prisoner's dilemma—are then considered. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties' inclinations, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the technical sense of game theory.

The problem of collective action is usually identified with social dilemmas. A wider notion of the term collective action problem is introduced, as dilemmas are not the only problems to arise in collective action. The article first presents a typology of collective action problems based on matrix game analysis. Five types are distinguished: distribution, defection, co-ordination, disagreement, and instability problems. Second, the article discusses a number of proposals how to resolve these types of collective action problems, such as altruism, norms, focal points, correlated strategies, collective decision-making, external power, and sanctioning. Whereas the political solutions can be used to resolve all types of problems, the motivational solutions can only facilitate the resolution of some of the problems, and the rational expectation solutions can solve some types and help to solve others.

Through collective action, forest users, fishers, irrigators, herders, and other rural producers improve and sustain resources vital for their lives. In cases where it has weakened or seems absent, citizens, non-government organizations (NGOs), and government agencies can work to stimulate, strengthen, or sustain collective action. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CAPRi ; EPTD

AbstractThe economy‐wide liberalization reforms implemented from the 1980s onwards in major capitalist economies had deep impact on financial markets. Public financial regulation has been replaced by self‐regulation, financial innovations proliferated and gave rise to many diversified and complex speculative operations that financialized most economic decisions and actions. Recurrent instabilities and crises became common ground in advanced as well as in emerging market economies and converged on the global systemic crisis in 2007–08, notwithstanding the efficient market doctrine that kept supporting financial liberalization. This crisis raised concerns about the relevance of market‐based financial regulation with regard to the systemic viability of capitalist economies and brought forward the central role of financial regulatory framework in the sustainable working of open societies. This article considers financial stability as a collective action problem through the lens of the literature on the commons and public goods. It seeks to contribute to the development of a relevant paradigm of collective action in the provision of a particular public good, financial stability, through a particular public action, financial regulation. After recalling the broad outlines of the evolution of financial markets and the institutional environment in the last decades, the monetary and financial characteristics of a capitalist economy are presented. The monetary and financial structure turns out to be a public infrastructure. The criticalness of financial transactions for the whole economic society together with the non‐rivalrousness and non‐excludability of financial stability determine the very publicness of the latter. The continuity of financial relations fundamentally needs a viable financial system. However, this is a complex issue as it falls into the classical opposition "private vs public" and calls for a collective action framework consistent with the characteristics of a financialized economy. This article argues that financial stability cannot be ensured through individual‐decision‐based market relations because of the endogenous limits of individual actions and the systemic nature of instabilities they can provoke. A specific treatment of finance as a public utility and of financial stability as a public good is then required. The study on the organization and management of financial markets, namely financial governance issue, ultimately leads to consider financial regulation as a collective action problem that calls for a public supervision framework through an extra‐market macroregulation, apt to allow economy to work in a viable way.

I use a stylized scenario - the Big Box Retailer Problem - to demonstrate that the presence of behavioural interdependence in economic markets may result in deficient outcomes that are both stable and supported by ongoing participant behaviour. I present a theoretical discussion of social dilemmas and use the Big Box Retailer Problem to illustrate that these characteristics - stability and ongoing support - cannot be reliably employed as indicators of outcome efficiency. Equally important is the conclusion that upfront costs and the ongoing necessity of monitoring and encouraging contributory behaviour are not reliable indicators of the relative inefficiency of outcomes associated with collective action. Questions are raised regarding the ethical responsibilities of business educators and the implications of social dilemmas for corporate social responsibility research.