Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis set out an important objective: to analyze the emergence and functioning of regimes that govern increasingly transnational and technological shared-resource spaces. Cosmopolitan Commons is written by and for historians of Europe and historians of technology, and it is largely descriptive.

The descriptions are fascinating. We learn about new and unique kinds of resource spaces that are different from those analyzed by early theorists of the commons, mainly because the new spaces emerge from breakthrough technological advancements. They include airspace, broadcasting, hydropower, weather forecasting, crop diversity, pollution control, sea or river transport, fishing, and deep-sea oil and gas extraction. Each case study is rich in detail and offers insights into unique elements of particular commons regimes. The writing is uniformly clear, accessible, and enjoyable, and despite the diversity in subject matter, the editors and contributors do a great job in producing a cohesive whole, showing the parallels in the development of commons regimes as diverse as broadcasting and seed banking.

Across the case studies, each author asks who belongs to the community or commons. Collectively, the contributors show that the nation-state is still the most frequent “commoner” but that multistate governmental institutions, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and “epistemic communities,” as well as intrastate actors such as agencies, lobby groups, and citizen initiatives, also matter. The message seems to be that simple geography is no longer the dominant factor in defining resource spaces and that technology has come to play a greater role. Technology is often the villain in the narratives as well as the savior. The need for commons governance emerges because many technological advances produce negative externalities that damage the public good. In turn, other technological advances may make the creation of cosmopolitan commons feasible where it once was not.

Political scientists are likely to appreciate the rich history in this volume but to struggle to make use of its insights and seek greater analysis. They will likely want to know whether any findings recur across the multiple case studies and thereby help explain why and how some commons emerge and others do not. How did the communities under study overcome collective action problems? What is the generalizable lesson to be learned for going from conflict over shared and finite resources to cooperation? Although the authors claim to be framing a theory, we do not get a clear, compelling answer to the important question posed on page 4, “[W]hat exactly motivates autonomous actors to join together in a cosmopolitan commons?”

There are plausible explanations sprinkled throughout the chapters. For example, in Chapter 3, Kranakis describes the European airspace commons that developed in 1919 and exhibited tremendous cooperation during the interwar period, with problems emerging only in the post–World War II period. What accounts for the difference, and how does a well-functioning commons regime break down? Kranakis offers several plausible hypotheses: Airspace in 1919 was a “positive” commons, a pioneering adventure intended to lift restraints and transform the status quo, as opposed to more “negative” commons that seek to impose restraints. The early airspace commons had only limited and therefore more manageable participation, given the expense of air travel at the time and technological limitations, such as the inability to fly high, at night, or without stopping. Technological advances that allowed aircraft to fly higher and farther diminished the importance of multilateral cooperation and the commons regime and therefore challenged its governance. The merging and nationalization of airlines and the increasing attention to military aviation created tensions for the commons, which eventually collapsed with the onset of World War II.

Other contributors offer similarly plausible hypotheses for the development of well-functioning commons. In Chapter 5, Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro suggests that the positive turn in Finish–Soviet cooperation over hydropower from the Vuoksi River could be credited in large part to the friendship between Finland’s President Urho Kekkonen and Soviet leader Nikita Khushchev. In Chapter 8, Arne Kaijser hints that a cosmopolitan commons to address acid rain arose from a particular moment in Cold War history that called for some sort of East–West agreement on an issue less polarizing than human rights or arms control. Pressures from domestic constituencies like the growing green movement in Germany played a role, as did “recognition by scientists and experts that European countries affect one another through air pollution” (p. 215).

Still, political scientists will want to know what is “portable” from these findings. What are the important variables across cases that lead to the establishment, maintenance, and success of a commons? At times, the message seems to be little more than the tautology that cosmopolitan commons and their inherent cooperative nature depend on, well, cooperation. In Chapter 7, for example, we learn from Tiago Saraiva that a cosmopolitan commons of plant genetic diversity required agreement on standards for interchangeable databases, conservation temperature, collection procedure, and seed packages, and while the narrative of the historical path toward these agreements is quite interesting, it begs for more analysis about why agreements finally came to pass at time t but not t – 1 or indeed why they materialized at all.

The “hero that comes to save the day” in many of the historical narratives is technology. For example, in Chapter 4, Nina Wormbs posits that the troubled European broadcasting commons survived because of technological advances that allowed for larger parts of the radio frequency spectrum to be used for communication services. Similarly, Kaijser explains that the introduction of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) at large power plants allowed German companies to reduce sulfur emissions in a cost-effective way and thus made it easier for the German government to mandate emissions reductions.

The reliance on technology as the main causal element tying together these diverse narratives could be satisfying from an analytical perspective but is potentially terrifying from a human perspective, for what if the hero technology does not arrive in time? What if there is no silver bullet? What will become of collective-action problems like climate change if there is no “save the day” technology? And could the wait for new technology itself be a problem for developing cosmopolitan commons, as potential commoners delay joining together and continue depleting and destroying shared resources in the confident expectation that technology will solve their problems with little to no sacrifice involved? Indeed, what if a cosmopolitan commons can instead be crafted only with quite substantial and widespread sacrifice?

Narratives that rely on silver-bullet solutions may set up the false expectation that the failed commons regimes can be easily and quickly resuscitated with some as-yet-undiscovered invention, and so why worry about the present failure? This is precisely the naive thinking behind support for geoengineering as the futuristic cure-all that, though not tested or even fully invented, should allow humanity to continue emitting greenhouse gases, despite the preponderance of scientific evidence and scientists themselves telling us to stop.

While the authors of Cosmopolitan Commons would likely not endorse such faulty logic, it would have been extremely useful to have them engage the dialogue over climate change and other contemporary issues involving shared resource spaces. Given the important role they ascribe to technology, can collective action problems like climate change be overcome in technology’s absence? Which factors presented in these interesting case studies could be hypothesized to explain other cases where cosmopolitan commons have so far failed, and do the findings from the case studies give us any cause for optimism that contemporary failures can be overcome?

Unfortunately, the most profound take away for contemporary collective action problems may come from Disco’s Chapter 10, where he describes how the Rhine River’s atrocious water quality was finally addressed only after horrific industrial accidents that forced the issue onto the public and governmental agendas, after the river ecology was already profoundly degraded. One wonders about the amount of climate horror that humanity will endure before the issue is similarly forced onto agendas and addressed.