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Governing In The Planetary Age

To overcome the twin crises of legitimacy and effectiveness
created by planetary challenges, nation-states must
delegate governance responsibilities up to planetary
institutions and down to local ones.

Jonathan S. Blake is a 2020-21 Berggruen Institute fellow.

Nils Gilman is the deputy editor of Noema Magazine.
NOEMA | March 9, 2021

From rising seas to invisible viruses, many of today’s and tomorrow’s

problems are inherently planetary in scale and scope. Yet the
primary governance institution that we have to address them, the
nation-state, is not. The scale of the challenges is incommensurate
with our capacity to govern them. The result is that planetary
problems such as climate change and pandemics are uncontrolled
and uncontrollable.
At the same time, the effects of these and other challenges on
populations are often locally specific. We experience them not as
abstract planetary concerns, but as local threats. COVID-19 is a
worldwide event, but we experience it directly as wreaking havoc in
our own communities: forcing us to shelter at home, closing nearby
bars and restaurants, and putting friends and family at risk.
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.
On the one hand, nation-states on their own cannot mitigate climate
change, because doing so requires collective action at a planetary
scale. And existing multilateral governance of the climate, codified
in the Paris accord that President Joe Biden’s administration recently
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rejoined, relies on voluntary compliance from sovereign nation-

states — a recipe for insufficient action at best.

“Solving these twin crises of ineffective and illegitimate governance

requires a fundamental restructuring of our governing institutions.”

On the other hand, 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. The nation-state’s failure to govern effectively has in
turn produced a crisis of legitimacy. People around the world have
concluded that an institution unfit for purpose is undeserving of
loyalty. The roiling resentments that have driven political upheaval
in the United States, Europe, Middle East, South Asia and Latin
America share an underlying belief: My nation-state has failed me.
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.
If, as the sociologist Daniel Bell observed back in 1977, “the national
state is too small for the big problems of life and too big for
the small problems,” then political forms that are both bigger and
smaller are the logical solution. One size does not fit all; collective
challenges come at different scales. What we need now is a
governance system with multiple levels of institutions working on
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problems at different scales that are not subordinated to the nation-

states that happen to exist today.
The Contingent Nation-State
Nation-states only became the dominant form for organizing politics
and governance starting in the second half of the 20th century. As
recently as the 1940s, as much as half the world’s population was
governed under other sorts of sovereign entities: colonies,
dependencies, mandates, condominia (joint sovereignty), empires,
protectorates, trusteeships, free cities, suzerainties, dominions and
various other arrangements.
At the end of World War II, most international observers expected
this variegated global sovereignty landscape would largely persist.
While independence was clearly in the cards for some lands, with
India and Pakistan gaining independence in 1947 and Israel in 1948,
few at the time anticipated the universalization of the nation-state.
When the United Nations building in New York was designed in
1947, the general assembly hall included seating for only 70 member
states (there were 57 at that point). That number would be exceeded
just three years after the building opened in 1952. By 1976, there
were 147 members, and an average of one more a year has been
added since then; today, there are 193. Over those decades, it
became broadly accepted that the nation-state is the only legitimate
form of sovereignty and the primary institutional vehicle through
which “governance” should be organized.
During the early postwar years, however, not everyone aspired to be
governed by a sovereign nation-state. Many colonies in the 1940s
and 50s, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, were initially less
interested in gaining independence than in being included in the
welfare states then being built by their colonial overlords in Europe.
It was only when it became clear that the Europeans would not
consider that option that colonial leaders defaulted to demands for
independence — and even then, there were abortive plans for
regional forms of governance. The hegemony of the nation-state
would be reinforced as it became seen as the best vehicle for
achieving the signature postcolonial project: achieving economic
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development and modernization, often tellingly referred to as

“nation-building.”
On the eve of the postwar rise of the nation-state, many prominent
leaders were pointing in the opposite direction, suggesting that a
better approach to managing global risks (above all, the threat of
recurrent world wars) would entail pooling sovereignty at a global
level. All but forgotten today, the World Federalist Movement during
these years dismissed the idea of sovereignty as a “myth” and
proposed nothing less than a “world federal government.”
This was no fringe idea: Albert Camus, Winston Churchill, Albert
Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jawaharlal Nehru,
Rosika Schwimmer and Wendell Willkie were all at one time or
another proponents of the idea. The University of Chicago went so
far as to convene a “committee to frame a world constitution,” which,
in 1948, poetically declared that “the age of nations must end and the
era of humanity begin” and called for a “federal republic of the
world” in which all states would pool “their separate sovereignties in
one government of justice to which they surrender their arms.”

“We already have a world state — it’s just a failed state.”

Ultimately, this movement succumbed to the ideological hostilities

and power struggles of the Cold War, resistance in rich countries to
the threat of global redistribution and rising political entrepreneurs
across the colonial and postcolonial world who wanted their own plot
of sovereignty. Instead of a world federalist state, what emerged was
a whole host of multilateral member state institutions through which
sovereign nations would work together on various specific
challenges.
The United Nations Security Council, for example, was charged with
maintaining international peace and security. The World Bank would
provide loans and expertise on development. The International
Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) guaranteed the stability of the international
monetary system. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and
then its successor, the World Trade Organization, promoted lower
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tariff barriers to ensure smooth and predictable global trade.

Likewise for many other topics of international concern.
Uniting all these organizations is an underlying structural tension in
which ultimate authority over global issues lies not with the global
institutions themselves, but with the member states. It would be
unfair to say that they do no good at all, but they vary enormously in
capacity, deliver their services unevenly and have debilitating blind
spots. A cynic might argue that the global governance architecture
that many envisioned in the mid-1940s of a federalist world
government has in fact been realized — with the caveat that this
world state was born crippled and today remains incapable of
addressing the greatest planetary challenges of our time. In other
words, we already have a world state — it’s just a failed state.
One response to the evident failures of global governance
institutions has been the demand for renewed sovereign powers.
Neo-nationalists across the world blame many local problems on
“globalist elites” who they say have sold out their countries to the
global system, often in the name of naked self-enrichment. Such
critiques have merit, but they do not address the most rank failure of
all: the inability of nation-states, especially democratic ones, to be
able to deal with the risks associated with contemporary planetary
interdependence.
The Planetary
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 planetary, 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
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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, the
study of knowledge. We know now, for example, that humans are a
geological force of nature, responsible for raising atmospheric
carbon dioxide to levels not seen in 3 million years, which in turn is
forcing radical changes to the biogeochemistry of the planet. We
also know that, like all animals, we are “symbiotic complexes of
many species living together” — we rely on the presence of
hundreds of species of microorganisms in our bodies to function.

“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.”

Taken together, these scientific discoveries decenter our sense of

our place in the universe. 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.
The hubristic idea that humans stood apart from the planet
encouraged us to pursue a doomed political project, imagining that
we could exert god-like mastery over the very biogeochemistry in
which we are inextricably entangled. But the planetary begins from a
place of humility: a political project that recognizes the limits of what
we as humans can control, and that therefore demands a
reassessment of how we govern, and to what ends.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide and pathogens do not care about
international borders; they are bounded only by the Earth system.
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Planetary problems do not just flow between nation-states or exist in

the interstitial space between them. They exist across nation-states
and within them, and they break down the conceptual division
between international and domestic. A system that rests on dividing
the world’s territory and populations into self-contained sovereign
nation-states will not adequately address planetary problems or their
local manifestations. If planet Earth is one big political space, it must
be governed as such.
Subsidiarity
How then should we govern the planet? How should we design
systems of governance that align with our new understandings of
Earth and its changing systems?
Managing challenges of this scale requires shifting the governance
of planetary problems “up” from nation-states to planetary
institutions, as well as the management of as many other governance
functions as possible, including the localized impacts of planetary
problems, “down” to sub-national institutions. In this new
architecture, there will still be an important role for the nation-state
— overseeing military matters and distributing economic goods, for
example — but it will be much diminished.
The division of labor among these different scales of governance
should follow the “principle of subsidiarity.” Originating first in
Calvinist and then more consequentially in Catholic thought,
subsidiarity endorses the view, as the political theorists Andrew
Arato and Jean Cohen have written, that “social and political issues
should be dealt with at the most immediate level consistent with their
most adequate resolution.” Thus, the powers that should be
allocated up from states to planetary institutions are those that
govern planetary problems, while the powers that should be
allocated down from states to local institutions are those that govern
local problems.
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
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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 matters.
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.
Nation-states should also be delegating as many governance
functions as possible down to institutions that are closer to the
people they serve. In a world with diverse communities with
differing needs, desires, cultures and histories, subsidiarity
promises both better outcomes and better institutional legitimacy.
Empowering local governments allows leaders who are closer and
more attentive to local problems and local demands to develop
locally appropriate responses and to change nimbly as local
circumstances evolve. Instead of fulminating at remote and
unresponsive bureaucrats at the national or supranational level,
citizens can participate more directly in the decisions affecting their
daily lives. As such, subsidiarity represents a solution to the
widespread legitimation crisis of democratic institutions worldwide.

“We humans cannot master the planet, and yet we are in a unique
position of responsibility for it.”

Resolving the twin deficits of performance and legitimacy is not

simply about delegating downward but also promoting horizontal
links between local institutions. For instance, climate change
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adaptation should be addressed by sub-national institutions —

regions, cities or even neighborhoods — that are organized into
networks of peers to learn from each other and pool resources
effectively.
The C40 cities network, which focuses on sharing best practices for
climate change resilience and adaptation, is a good example of
horizontally linked subsidiarity in action. Other international
networks of cities focused on topics ranging from social
housing to reducing political polarization and hate have arisen in
recent decades, and these subnational governance networks are
effectively linking up with older multilateral organizations like the
U.N. and the O.E.C.D.
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.
While some national leaders will abhor this assault on the source of
their power, others will be relieved to move off of their desks issues
that they know they are unable to address properly. In fact,
decentralization and devolution of power to local authorities has
already been happening in many countries for decades. There
should be more. What is missing today is the ability to move actual
binding power up to specific institutions with planet-wide authority.

The 21st century is teaching us that there exist systems and

processes that are outside the scope of full human control.
Nineteenth and 20th-century ideologies that assume or promote
human dominance over “nature” and “technology” — and the
institutions that were born of them — have reached their breaking
points.
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For life on Earth to flourish, we must remain within certain hardwired

biophysical limits. Crossing certain boundaries will trigger
processes and feedback loops that will drive the planet inexorably
toward being much less hospitable. Pathogens, resulting in part from
the changing climate but also from humans increasing interactions
with wild spaces, can and will spread, despite advancements in
medicine — viruses and bacteria, just like their human hosts, seek to
“be fruitful and multiply.” And new technologies, particularly
artificial intelligence, might also reach a point beyond human
control. This leads to a paradox that will increasingly define our
lives: We humans cannot master the planet, and yet we are in a
unique position of responsibility for it.
Just because our current institutions are not up to the task does not
mean that no institutions are. The planetary, as the researchers Eva
Lövbrand, Malin Mobjörk and Rickard Söder write, represents “an
invitation to rethink our institutions, commitments and rules and to
forge new forms of cooperation built upon participation, solidarity
and justice beyond the state and indeed the human.” The best path
forward is to rescale governance, from top to bottom, creating the
fora to make the decisions and direct the collective actions needed
to address issues that span from the planetary to the hyperlocal.
Our governance institutions have evolved throughout history due to
changing conditions, and this time should be no different. Planetary
subsidiarity as a blueprint for multi-scalar governance does not
guarantee that we will reach the right answers, but continuing with
nation-states and a broken global governance system guarantees
that we will not. Faced with our planetary future, the wildest thing of
all would be to change nothing. +++