Prioritizing Global Responsibilities

Abstract: Although states have global responsibilities across several issue areas, they also have significant budgetary and resource limitations in what they can do to tackle all the various ongoing and potential crises worldwide. Tackling one crisis, and fulfilling one set of responsibilities, typically raises opportunity costs for other crises and for fulfilling global responsibilities elsewhere. In the face of budgetary and resource limitations, states have to decide which global responsibilities they will focus on. This is exacerbated by domestic publics often being willing to support only a limited, and relatively small, amount of public spending to redress challenges beyond their borders. This paper considers how states should prioritize when faced with numerous ongoing global issues and crises. It will assess several potential prioritization principles in the context of key global challenges, from mass atrocities (and discussions about R2P) to migration, warfare (and discussions about Just War Theory) to development assistance, global health to climate change. In doing so, it will develop a new theory of just prioritization that delineates how states should prioritize responsibly, which will be both philosophically sound and practically relevant.