Governing In The Planetary Age
https://www.noemamag.com/governing-in-the-planetary-age/
If we’ve learned one lesson from the pandemic, it’s that nation-states don’t govern well at the planetary level or at the local level. The same is true for other planetary phenomena like climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions operate at a planetary level, but consequences vary dramatically from one locality to another. Neither the problem nor its impacts align with national boundaries.
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nation-states are also not the right institution for climate change adaptation: Los Angeles, Miami and Minneapolis are all impacted by climate change, but in vastly different ways that require vastly different policies. In fact, these cities’ climate impacts have more in common with cities in other nation-states (for example, Cape Town, Dhaka and Moscow, respectively) than they do with each other. Yet nation-states are wired for coordination and collaboration among the subnational entities contained within them, not across them.
This dynamic is found across a range of major issues. From economic precarity to public health, the nation-state is ill-equipped to manage the planetary roots of the problems and the local consequences for communities.
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Solving these twin crises of ineffective and illegitimate governance requires a fundamental restructuring of our governing institutions. In particular, it requires stripping the nation-state of many of its powers and governance functions, moving some up to planetary institutions and others down to local institutions.
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The “planetary” refers to issues, processes and conditions that span the Earth and transcend nation-states. “Global” and “globalization” are the currently popular terms for describing world-scale issues. But the planet is not the globe: The globe is a conceptual category that frames the Earth in human terms. Globalization, likewise, adopts a fundamentally human-centric understanding of the “integration” that has happened over the last few decades — the accelerating flow of people, goods, ideas, money and more.
The planet, by contrast, frames Earth without specific reference to humans. “To encounter the planet,” explains Dipesh Chakrabarty, “is to encounter something that is the condition of human existence and yet profoundly indifferent to that existence.” The Earth is not ours alone. Worldwide integration is not merely the intentional work of humans. Humans are embedded and codependent with microbes, the climate and technologically enabled emergent trans-species communities.
Planetary thinking emerges from ongoing transformations in the fields of ontology, or the nature of being, and epistemology
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Like Galileo and Darwin in earlier eras, the planetary represents a paradigm shift. It is neither empirically nor normatively adequate to assume, as the idea of globalization does, that humans top the global hierarchy and all else must and can bend to the march of human progress. We are but one (very recent) component in the biogeochemical ferment of the Earth, caught up in feedback loops of the carbon cycle and microbial and multispecies codependency.
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By planetary governance institutions, we do not mean the traditional institutions of global governance. The U.N., I.M.F. and World Health Organization, among other contemporary global governance institutions, are multilateral member-state institutions that focus on human-specific flows and represent the interests of their member states. They don’t respond directly to planetary challenges or answer directly to citizens.
The planetary demands new binding institutions at the planetary scale, not simply member state institutions that operate on a voluntarist basis. This does not mean a single world state. We envision a specifically delimited authority at the planetary level over specifically planetary things.
In practice, this means we need binding planetary institutions that go beyond the Paris accord for climate, beyond the W.H.O. for syndromic surveillance and health, beyond the U.N. Environmental Program to deal with biodiversity and a wholly new planetary institution to deal with tech-related risks. Together, these would form a new planetary tier of governance, above and beyond the nation-state.
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Together, nested and interlocking planetary, national and local institutions would form a system of multilevel governance. This system architecture allows for governance bodies to be better suited to the scale of the issue they are tasked with governing. Rather than default to the nation-state (and then wring our hands when the nation-state fails), as we do now, the principle of subsidiarity provides a rule of thumb for determining which governing institutions should be assigned to deal with which challenges.