The United Nations and the Rationale for Collective Intelligence ...

A concept of collective action, in essence, seeks to explore the processes of creating a common good, regardless of conflicts of interest that might exist. It is for these reasons that Heckathorn suggested that the analysis of collective action problems are free of the PD paradigm.¹⁰ Sebenius also noted that the tendency to treat cooperation as binary (i.e., cooperate versus defect) ‘direct[s] attention away from issues of distribution as well as integrative potentials’, which are at the centre of collective endeavour.¹¹ For these reasons, if a concept of collective action is to be developed with a notion of cooperation as defined with the PD in mind, such a model will fall short of its supposed objectives.

Scholars examining processes of collective action frequently encounter these semantic problems and attempt to devise a range of analytical tools to overcome inherent barriers. Mancur Olson, for example, made the distinction between ‘informal cooperation’ and ‘formal organisations’. The latter, he argued, are designed to move the goals and objectives of the group to a nearly optimal point and to enable an organisation to approach an optimal level of activity.¹² Cooperation in this context is an element of collective action, since one of the main problems to be analysed is how to induce members of an organisation to give up what has to be given up for the collective good rather than cooperating for the benefit of a single actor.¹³ This further means that the organisational goal, in whichever way it is defined, is a collective good from which all members may benefit regardless of the nature of their contribution or position in the order of things within the organisation's structure.

Similarly, Emmanuel Adler identified two types of cooperation: ‘purposive’ and ‘practical’, and it is possible to add ‘tactical’, association. He defined purposive association as a relationship within which certain practices provide a means to that end, and participants respect those practices only in so far as they are useful instruments of a common purpose.¹⁴ Purposive association assumes that participants learned the same lessons and developed common political beliefs and goals and are acting together to achieve those goals.¹⁵ The League of Nations and the UN provide a good example of this kind of association. These definitions suggest