Markus Fraundorfer - Global Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene-Springer (2022)-42-88

CHAPTER 2
Global Governance and the Anthropocene:

An Entangled History
2.1 A Very Brief History of the Anthropocene

One of the first scientists to come up with the term of the Anthropocene
was Paul J. Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist, had
received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his contributions to
explaining the thinning of the ozone layer (NobelPrize.org 2021). He
felt that the unprecedented impact humanity was having on the planet’s
geology and ecology justified a new term which already existing terms
could not properly summarise. He then realised that Eugene Stoermer,
an ecologist from the US, had been informally using this term since
the 1980s. Both scientists teamed up to provide a first idea of the
Anthropocene by arguing that humanity’s geological impact since the late
eighteenth century had become so profound that the consequences would
shape the planet for millennia to come (Davies 2016, 42–43).
Since the coining of the term in 2000, the engagement with the
Anthropocene has flourished across disciplines of the natural sciences,
the social sciences and the humanities, amounting to different versions
and understandings, and has found its way into mainstream debates hotly
discussed by artists, journalists, politicians, CEOs, environmental activists
and many others. In 2014, the term was included in the Oxford English
Dictionary, defining the Anthropocene as:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Fraundorfer, Global Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88156-6_2
24 M. FRAUNDORFER
The epoch of geological time during which human activity is considered

to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of
the earth, a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit with a base which has been
tentatively defined as the mid-twentieth century. (Oxford University Press
2021)
While immensely popularised over the last twenty years, the term itself
is not new at all. And scientists have engaged with the idea of anthro-
pogenic climate change since the nineteenth century at least. The Italian
Antonio Stoppani is widely regarded as the first to come up with the
idea in 1873, suggesting that the massive impact of humans on the envi-
ronment through cities, dam-building and mining justifies the naming
of a new geologic epoch, “the Anthropozoic era”, which would last far
into the future. In 1922, the Russian geologist Aleksey Pavlov suggested
that it would make sense to call this geological era the “Anthropogène”,
a term that became popular within Soviet academia (Yeo 2016). Apart
from these isolated endeavours in understanding the human impact on
the environment, it would take until the early twenty-first century before
this idea caught fire.
The meaning of the Anthropocene is contested, and scientists from
different disciplines have hotly debated the term. For the sake of clarity
and brevity, and to do justice to some of these debates, it is helpful
to understand the Anthropocene in three dimensions (Hamilton et al.
2015, 2–3): (1) the geological dimension denotes the beginning of a new
geological epoch which would potentially supersede the geological epoch
of the Holocene, the epoch that started approximately 12,000 years ago
after the last ice age; (2) the Earth-system dimension denotes that all of
Earth’s different spheres (lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere
and atmosphere) see a major shift away from the relatively stable climatic
conditions of the Holocene; (3) the civilisational dimension describes
a major impact of the human civilisation on all possible aspects of the
planet’s ecosystems, such as urbanisation, species extinction, resource
extraction, waste dumping and so forth, significantly altering climatic
conditions worldwide.
2 GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE … 25
2.1.1 The Geological Dimension

The first dimension is embraced by geologists and stratigraphers and is the
hardest to find evidence for, as the naming of geological epochs relies on
evidence found in rocks and sediments. It will take some time before the
manifold consequences of humanity’s actions over the past two centuries
will have made their mark on rock strata and sediment. Several scientists,
however, have made suggestions as to the geological starting point of the
Anthropocene.
The geologists Lewis and Maslin suggest the colonisation of the Amer-
ican continent since the late fifteenth century as an important geological
marker of the Anthropocene. Antarctic ice core records show a significant
reduction in CO2 in the atmosphere between 1570 and 1620, which the
geologists associate with the initial stage of the European colonisation of
the American continent and the massive decline in the numbers of indige-
nous peoples (Lewis and Maslin 2015, 176). This period also prepared the
ground for the emergence of our globalised civilisation several centuries
later:
The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492, and subsequent

annexing of the Americas, led to the largest human population replacement
in the past 13,000 years, the first global trade networks linking Europe,
China, Africa and the Americas, and the resultant mixing of previously
separate biotas […]. One biological result of the exchange was the global-
ization of human foodstuffs. The New World crops maize/corn, potatoes
and the tropical staple manioc/cassava were subsequently grown across
Europe, Asia and Africa. Meanwhile, Old World crops such as sugarcane
and wheat were planted in the New World. The cross-continental move-
ment of dozens of other food species (such as the common bean, to the
New World), domesticated animals (such as the horse, cow, goat and pig,
all to the Americas) and human commensals (the black rat, to the Amer-
icas), plus accidental transfers (many species of earth worms, to North
America; American mink to Europe) contributed to a swift, ongoing,
radical reorganization of life on Earth without geological precedent. (Lewis
and Maslin 2015, 174)
Alternatively, the start of the Anthropocene can be pinned down to the

year 1952, which saw the first thermonuclear weapons tests conducted
by the US, the UK and the Soviet Union. These tests dispersed various
radioactive isotopes, among them plutonium, around the globe, leaving
a geological mark in our planet’s soil strata that can be traced for the
26 M. FRAUNDORFER
next hundred thousand years. These traces left a clear geological marker
to distinguish the transition period between two geological epochs, the
Holocene and the Anthropocene (Davies 2016, 104–106).
Other researchers suggest plastic as a viable marker for the Anthro-
pocene. The mass production of plastic is an essential feature of the
developments marking the Great Acceleration after the Second World
War. Today, plastic is so ubiquitous on our planet that it can be found
in its most remote corners, be it on the ocean ground at a depth of
11,000 m, in Arctic sea ice, washed ashore the most far-flung Pacific
islands or inside the stomach of hundreds of thousands of birds and
other marine and land animals. Global plastic pollution, particularly in the
form of microplastics, is so overwhelming that it has found its way into
the planet’s sedimentary record. A group of researchers found plastic in
geological sediments dating back to 1836 and discovered that its concen-
tration significantly increased after 1945, when the mass production of
plastic took off. Hence, the increasing plastic concentration in the plan-
et’s fossil records provides another important marker for the rise of the
Anthropocene (Brandon et al. 2019).
Another group of researchers (Elhacham et al. 2020) found that in
the year 2020 global human-made mass surpassed all living biomass.
While in 1900 anthropogenic mass (that is, human-produced mass such
as concrete, metals, asphalt, bricks, plastic, etc.) “was equal to only 3% of
global biomass […] [,] [a]bout 120 years later, in 2020, anthropogenic
mass is exceeding overall biomass in the world” (Elhacham et al. 2020,
2). For the authors of the study, this finding represents another geolog-
ical marker of humanity’s extraordinary impact on the Earth-system over
the past century.
2.1.2 The Earth-System Dimension

While many discussions in the natural sciences about the Anthropocene
pay special attention to humanity’s unprecedented planetary impact as a
geological force, a proper understanding of this new geological epoch
is not necessarily equivalent to the human age. The key features of the
Anthropocene will continue to exist long after humans have disappeared
from the planet’s surface. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions from
one day to the other or were driven to extinction within the next few
decades (or centuries), the existing and ongoing disruptions in the Earth-
system would far outlast humanity, transforming the climate for millennia
to come. All these climatic changes rolling towards us with horrifying

speed will eventually trigger climate time bombs, which will only worsen
the scenario. One such ticking time bomb is methane (CH4 ), another
greenhouse gas more than 20 times more potent than CO2 , stored in
large natural reservoirs across the planet. The most critical methane reser-
voirs include permafrost in the Arctic (900 billion tonnes of carbon)
and methane hydrates in the oceans (10,000 billion tonnes of carbon)
(Glikson 2018). The accelerated melting of permafrost and warming of
the oceans could trigger this time bomb within our lifetimes.
These and other ticking time bombs are also known as tipping points:
critical thresholds in the Earth-system that usually take a long time to be
reached. But once they are reached, very often after a long cumulative
process at particular moments in time through very tiny changes, they
abruptly alter the state of an entire system. Arctic permafrost has been
stable for thousands of years, and it might remain so for decades to come.
With constantly rising global temperatures and the cumulative effect of
melting ice sheets, tiny atmospheric changes would be sufficient to cause
the sudden release of tonnes of methane and carbon dioxide with massive
and irreversible destabilising consequences for the entire Earth-system.
Once the critical threshold of the relentless deforestation of the Amazon
rainforest is reached, tiny atmospheric perturbations will suffice to dry up
the entire Amazon basin due to the rainforest’s lost capability to recycle
precipitation in the region.
Similar tipping points that may be crossed in this century exist for
all other major climate phenomena and ecosystems that have largely
contributed to the climate conditions of the last few thousand years, such
as the Indian Summer Monsoon, the West African Monsoon, the Boreal
Forest, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or tropical coral reefs (Hoegh-
Guldberg et al. 2007; Lenton 2013; Lenton et al. 2008). It is highly likely
that the massive Earth-system changes triggered by one of those time
bombs could rapidly push other parts of the Earth-system to a critical
threshold and beyond. Such a colossal chain reaction would radically alter
the planet’s climate to a degree never experienced by humans before. And
climate scientists argue that we are already in the midst of a “planetary
emergency”, with a global cascade of tipping points approaching which
will irreversibly change the planet’s climate and threaten our civilisation
(Lenton et al. 2019).
28 M. FRAUNDORFER
In Jeremy Baskin’s view, this Earth-system perspective can lend itself

to an ideological interpretation of anthropogenic climate change, univer-
salising humanity and marginalising accounts of the differentiated impact
of some human societies and classes. Rather than humanity as a whole,
climate change has largely been driven by a minority of humans and
particular socio-economic and political structures (2015, 15–16).
Humanity is made one with modern Enlightenment man, the man for
whom “progress”, “growth” and “development” are the dominant goals.
The Indian subsistence farmer, the African herder and the Peruvian slum-
dweller become part of one “humanity” with the inhabitants of the rich
world, despite clearly being very differentially responsible for ecological
devastation and planetary overshoot. (Baskin 2015, 16)
This universal interpretation of the Anthropocene and humanity’s respon-

sibility opens the door to technocratic, authoritarian and technology-
based planetary solutions, such as geoengineering, normalising the impact
of consumer-driven societies and capitalist structures on climate change,
which ultimately have the potential to deepen existing socio-economic
and political divides and exacerbate the climate crisis (Baskin 2015). Tech-
nologies to be employed to geoengineer the planet’s atmosphere are not
sufficiently developed yet. The debate on geoengineering as a promising
technology-based solution to the challenges of CO2 emissions reductions,
however, has already captured the imagination of many natural scientists,
politicians, diplomats and entrepreneurs (see Box 2.1).
Box 2.1: Geoengineering

In 2006, Paul J. Crutzen, the chemist who suggested the term of the
Anthropocene, called for research into solar geoengineering as an alter-
native to the failed political efforts of reducing CO2 emissions. Solar
geoengineering involves attempts to reflect sunlight away from Earth
and cool the climate by injecting chemical substances like sulphur and
hydrogen sulphide into the stratosphere.
This approach is modelled on volcanic eruptions which also throw
tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere and contribute to a temporary
cooling of global temperatures.
Source Crutzen (2006).
More than that, the debate has already shaped international climate
negotiations. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement includes “negative emis-
sions” as a viable alternative to achieve CO2 emissions reductions. The
awkward term of “negative emissions” refers to technological efforts to
remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so-called negative emissions
technologies (Nature 2018, 404). Among negative emissions technolo-
gies feature, for example, enhanced weathering, direct air capture and
carbon storage (DACCS), and ocean fertilisation. Enhanced weathering
involves the manipulation of geochemical processes by adding carbonate
or silicate minerals to the oceans and the soil to accelerate the absorption
of CO2 .
Some of these techniques are already used by industrial agriculture to
reduce the acidity of the soil. As a drawback, these techniques depend on
complex mining processes and huge amounts of water. DACCS involves
the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere through liquid absorbents, and
experiments with these techniques have been ongoing for several years.
Ocean fertilisation involves the removal of CO2 from the oceans through
planktonic algae and other microscopic plants (EASAC 2018, 8–9). The
inclusion of recommendations on negative emissions technologies in the
Paris Agreement effectively legitimised the use of geoengineering as a
promising way to tackle the problem of CO2 emissions. And while there
is widespread concern about the effectiveness of these technologies in
tackling CO2 emissions, the belief in these techno-fixes has gained consid-
erable momentum in the governance of CO2 emissions (Corry et al.
2020).
Both in the scientific community and in international political nego-
tiations, geoengineering has become a viable option, or a measure of
last resort, to actively intervene in CO2 emissions reduction efforts and
achieve the breakthrough that three decades of international climate
negotiations have failed to achieve (Boettcher and Schäfer 2017; Pearce
2019). And the more pressing the global climate crisis becomes, the
more seductive and irresistible the siren call of geoengineering will be.
But geoengineering projects have a planetary impact, affecting every
single aspect of the Earth-system, with unpredictable and incalculable
environmental and social consequences (Hobden 2018, 112–116). And
these techno-fixes deflect attention from the socio-economic and political
factors driving climate change.
30 M. FRAUNDORFER
2.1.3 The Civilisational Dimension

The acceptance that we live in a new geological epoch called the Anthro-
pocene comes with two powerful claims (Hamilton et al. 2015, 4–5): The
first claim refers to the fact that humans have become a powerful geolog-
ical force similar to those geological forces that have usually been respon-
sible for profound Earth-system changes in the planet’s history, such as
volcanism, tectonics, shifts in the planet’s orbital movements around the
Sun or the cyclic fluctuations of solar activity (see also Box 2.2). This
means that “natural history and human history, largely taken as indepen-
dent and incommensurable since the early nineteenth century, must now
be thought as one and the same geo-history” (Hamilton et al. 2015, 4).
The second claim highlights that humans (and all other species) on the
planet will face disastrous environmental changes of a magnitude that no
former human generation has ever experienced. This means that the rela-
tive climate stability of the Holocene, the geological epoch of the last
12,000 years, is coming to an end. The Holocene, however, has been
the very epoch in which complex human civilisations evolved along with
complex political, social and economic systems.
Box 2.2: The Great Oxygenation Event

Apart from humans, lifeforms of different sorts, from microorganisms to
vertebrates, have played an important part in shaping and transforming the
planet’s geology and climate for billions of years. One event in the plan-
et’s history might be considered as an analogue to the Anthropocene: the
Great Oxygenation Event. When the planet’s atmosphere lacked oxygen,
the vast explosion of populations of cyanobacteria, more commonly known
as blue-green algae, caused a transformative change of the Earth-system.
The oxygen these bacteria populations produced gradually oxygenated
the atmosphere over the course of millions of years, giving rise to an
atmosphere which allowed more complex species to evolve. Admittedly,
the Great Oxygenation Event dragged on for millions of years, whereas
the human-induced Anthropocene largely emerged within a few hundred
years.
Source Carson (2019).
But when we accept that humanity (or the anthropos) has become a
major geological force, further reflection is needed on what humanity
actually means in this context. In his initial definition of the Anthro-

pocene, Paul Crutzen cautioned that human-induced climatic changes
“have largely been caused by only 25% of the world population” (Crutzen
2002), that is, those humans living in Europe and North America who
have benefitted the most from the economic development and wealth
generated by the Industrial Revolution and the post-Second World War
order. Furthermore, historian Christophe Bonneuil argues that “the
‘anthropos’ that has triggered the Anthropocene is not a merely biolog-
ical agent but the product of complex belief systems” (2015, 21), shaped
by interconnected socio-economic, political and technological processes.
Given the extraordinary development of many human societies over
the past two centuries and its destructive impact on the Earth-system, an
extensive body of literature from the social sciences and Earth sciences
points to this period as crucial to understanding the Anthropocene.
Several scholars, among them Paul Crutzen, divide the Anthropocene
into two stages: the first stage comprises the Industrial Revolution in
the nineteenth century and its ripple-effects until 1945; the second stage
comprises the developments after 1945, also called the Great Acceler-
ation, when human development, economic growth, industrialisation,
urbanisation and population growth rose to unprecedented heights and
entered a new stage of intensity, speed and force, quickly spreading from
Europe and North America to all other world regions, cultures and
societies (Steffen et al. 2007).
But some scientists argue that the Anthropocene started thousands
of years, if not millions of years, earlier. The Earth scientist Andrew
Glikson suggests broadening the time horizon of the Anthropocene and
dividing it into three stages: First, the Early Anthropocene which started
approximately two million years ago when homo ergaster, one of the early
humans, discovered fire. Second, the Middle Anthropocene, starting with
the development of extensive farming. And third, the Late Anthropocene,
marked by the unprecedented human-induced rise of CO2 emissions
as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which then led to the
Great Acceleration in the twentieth century after the Second World War.
Without the discovery of fire or the development of extensive farming,
the technological innovations leading to the Industrial Revolution would
have been unlikely (Glikson 2013, 91). Recent studies found that exten-
sive anthropogenic transformations of the biosphere started even before
32 M. FRAUNDORFER
the advent of agriculture. That is, the biosphere had already been exten-
sively reshaped by hunting and gathering societies in the late Pleistocene
(more than ten thousand years ago) (Stephens et al. 2019).
Indigenous populations significantly manipulated and modified their
natural environment across the globe thousands of years before Europeans
started to colonise large parts of the world (Williams 2003). As a case in
point, the Māori tribes contributed to species extinction, massive envi-
ronmental degradation and deforestation long before the first Europeans
started to colonise New Zealand in the eighteenth century (Williams
2003, 21–23). And on many occasions, severe environmental degrada-
tion in the form of acute deforestation, soil erosion and water pollution
caused by unsustainable economic growth, extensive agricultural produc-
tion, and overpopulation was a natural by-product of many pre-modern
empires, including the Ancient Maya and Aztek Empires in South and
Central America and the Ancient Roman Empire in the Mediterranean
region (Hughes 2009, 42–48, 73–79; Williams 2003, 57–63, 95–101).
And yet, all these forms of human impact on the Earth-system had
been mostly local and regional, without the transformative global impact
that would justify the naming of a new epoch (Davies 2016, 74–75).
Humanity’s limited impact on the Earth-system changed fundamentally
with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the use of fossil fuels for
energy generation and the unprecedented development of European
and North American societies in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Since the development of modern industrial societies in the past two
centuries has been closely linked to capitalism (not least in Britain, the
country where the Industrial Revolution took off), several social scien-
tists and Marxist thinkers have looked closer into those socio-economic
and political developments that marked the beginning of a much more
transformative global impact of human actions. To put emphasis on
the significant impact of capitalist ideologies on the Earth-system, these
scholars came up with the term Capitalocene.
In Elmar Altvater’s words, one of the original proponents of the
term Capitalocene, “[n]ature has been reduced to something that can
be valued and traded and used up just as another asset: industrial capital,
human capital, knowledge capital, financial claims, and so forth” (2016,
145). Capitalism can, therefore, be described as an “ideological way of
incorporating nature into capitalist rationality and its monetary calcu-
lus” (2016, 145). According to Parenti, Karl Marx already knew that
non-human nature serves capitalism as a priceless value to its material
accumulation process by providing the fundamental assets capitalism is

built on. Capitalism essentially relies on the exploitation of human and
non-human nature for wealth accumulation (2016, 167–169).
The access to new energy sources (most importantly coal and oil), as
well as the far-reaching consequences of new technological inventions (the
Watt steam engine, the locomotive or the modern factory) in the eigh-
teenth century in Great Britain, propelled the world regions of Europe
and North America into entirely new dimensions, setting these two world
regions apart from other world regions and exacerbating already existing
structural inequalities in the international system. In 1825, Great Britain
alone was responsible for 80 per cent of worldwide CO2 emissions from
fossil fuel combustion and 62 per cent in 1850 (Malm 2016, 13).
To avoid misunderstandings, the environmental historian Jason Moore
broadened the concept of the Capitalocene, clarifying that “the Capi-
talocene does not stand for capitalism as an economic and social system.
[…] Rather, the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing
nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” (Moore
2016, 6). Due to this broader conceptualisation, Moore situates the
starting point of capitalism in the times of Christopher Columbus and
the conquest of the Americas rather than the early nineteenth century
(2017, 596). While Moore acknowledges the fact that human societies
and pre-modern empires have cleared vast forest areas for thousands of
years, he emphasises that “[a] radical shift in the scale, speed and scope of
landscape change occurred in the long sixteenth century” in that “[a]fter
1450, […], comparable deforestation occurred in decades, not centuries”
(Moore 2017, 609).
Considering the era of colonialism as a potential starting point of the
Anthropocene also makes sense when looking more specifically at the
developments in the past two centuries. In Malm and Hornborg’s words,
“[a] scrutiny of the transition to fossil fuels in 19th-century Britain […],
however, reveals the extent to which the historical origins of anthro-
pogenic climate change were predicated on highly inequitable global
processes from the start […]. The rationale for investing in steam tech-
nology at this time was geared to the opportunities provided by the
constellation of a largely depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery,
the exploitation of British labour in factories and mines, and the global
demand for inexpensive cotton cloth” (2014, 63).
Moore’s broad view of capitalism as an ideological system to organise
nature and human relationships also allows the inclusion of communist
34 M. FRAUNDORFER
countries (or empires) such as the Soviet Union, which participated in

the capitalist world system geared towards economic growth and devel-
opment and the commodification of nature. The Soviet Union was one
of the leading CO2 emitters and oil producers of the twentieth century.
In the same vein, some of the most devastating environmental disasters
in the history of the twentieth century occurred in the Soviet Union,
among them the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the shrinking of the
Aral Sea (see also Chapter 6). Its successor state, the Russian Federa-
tion, belongs to the major CO2 emitting countries today (Ritchie and
Roser 2017). And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, commu-
nist China, although essentially a state capitalist society, surpassed the
US as the world’s leading CO2 emitting country worldwide due to its
integration into international capitalist structures dominated by transna-
tional corporations, financial flows of foreign direct investment and the
abundance of a cheap and disciplined labour force in the country (Malm
2012).
Apart from an emphasis on capitalist structures, other scholars stress
the role of technology in bringing about the Anthropocene. Fossil fuels
have existed for millennia. But only in the mid-eighteenth century, engi-
neers and inventors in Europe discovered how to effectively harness coal
and oil to free human societies from former constraints and make possible
the unprecedented human development of the nineteenth and twentieth
century.
The sociologist Hermínio Martins argued that the Anthropocene
“could also be called the Technocene, inasmuch as the reasons for that
denomination [of the Anthropocene], which are because of the impact
on the atmosphere of carbon dioxide emissions since the mid-eighteenth
century, have more to do proximately with technological agency than
with the psychophysiological make-up of Homo sapiens sapiens” (Martins
2018, 1). Martins goes even further by suggesting that the Anthropocene
may only be a “subset” of the Technocene because in a few centuries
technology and artificial intelligence will have outlived us. Martins partic-
ularly referred to a post-human world with cyborgs, androids and robots
as major protagonists. Humanity will have evolved into a techno-species,
genetically manipulated and technologically enhanced, as the only way to
survive the unprecedented challenges of anthropogenic climate change—
and ultimately leave planet Earth, venture into the cosmos and settle on
other planets.
The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft represent an intriguing

example of Martins’s thought. Built in 1977 to explore and photograph
the other planets of our solar system, both spacecraft carry welcome
messages destined for any extra-terrestrial life form (that may have the
intelligence to decipher that message), engraved on a gold-plated disc:
a time capsule of humanity from the twentieth century. The journey of
these two spacecraft provided humanity with new information about the
planets of the solar system, the solar system itself and the universe. In
2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to reach interstellar
space (the space between the stars and beyond the bubble of the Sun).
Voyager 2 followed in 2018. In interstellar space, both spacecraft can
travel for thousands of years and longer, floating like a message in a bottle
in the vast dark ocean of the universe—until someone (or something) may
eventually pick it up. Technology like the Voyager spacecraft will prob-
ably outlive our species. These spacecraft will continue to travel through
space as a relic of humanity’s development in the twentieth century when
our species will have long disappeared from Earth and our solar system.
In addition to Voyagers 1 and 2, three other spacecraft (Pioneer 10,
Pioneer 11, and New Horizons) are currently on an interstellar trajectory,
reaching interstellar space in the near future (Redd 2019).
Supporters of the Technocene have a point in emphasising that tech-
nology has been an essential driver of environmental degradation over
the previous two centuries. And yet, technology alone has hardly brought
about the climate crisis. After all, the use of technology is embedded in
complex belief systems, socio-economic relations and historical processes,
such as those teased out by advocates of the Capitalocene.
2.2 A Very Brief History of Global Governance

The definition of the Anthropocene remains hotly debated. The three
different dimensions of the Anthropocene debate (geological, Earth-
system, and civilisational) intricately entwine world-historical events with
geological time horizons and Earth-system transformations. In terms
of world-historical events, the social scientist-inspired emphasis on the
environmental impact of capitalist structures since the early nineteenth
century, fed by capitalist developments stretching back to the European
conquest of the Americas in the late fifteenth century, is particularly
relevant to the scope of this book.
36 M. FRAUNDORFER
As the following sections outline, the roots of today’s global gover-

nance system stretch back to the early nineteenth century. At the same
time, these nineteenth-century roots are embedded in a world-historical
context that stretches back to the European colonisation of the Americas.
As Hamilton et al. (2015, 10) argue, “Politics in the Anthropocene is
about the collision of the system Earth with the system world”. This colli-
sion challenges our understanding of the world and defies our analytical
approaches to politics because of the unprecedented complexity gener-
ated by global environmental changes (Galaz 2014). The political scientist
Victor Galaz speaks of an Anthropocene gap, “a time where we are unable
to grapple, analyse and respond to the major implications induced by our
transgression into a human-dominated planet” (Galaz 2014, viii).
In this light, the next three sections briefly summarise how over the
past two centuries the system Earth happened to collide with the system
world in the form of global governance. The first section traces the
gradual development of international and transnational authority. The
second section briefly summarises the dominant economic features of
global governance And the third section teases out the entanglements
between geological time and world time in the emergence of the global
governance architecture over the last two hundred years.
2.2.1 The Emergence of International and Transnational Authority

The effective exploitation of fossil-fuelled energy sources, the develop-
ment of highly complex, globalised, unequal and interdependent societies
and the use of energy-intensive technologies in the nineteenth and
twentieth century led to an unprecedented phenomenon in interna-
tional politics: the gradual emergence of international and transnational
authority. The past two centuries saw the gradual evolution of permanent
international governance architectures, which allowed the actors of the
international system to cooperate more regularly on transboundary issues
and develop international norms, rules and regulations. The nineteenth
century witnessed the first timid attempts at international decision-making
in Europe, which in the twentieth century would reach unprecedented
heights through the integration of countries from across the globe. As
human development ushered into a new era in the twentieth century,
so did international politics and decision-making, as well as transnational
problem-solving.
2.2.1.1 Shades of International Authority: States

and International Organisations
States have gradually emerged as the most powerful actors in global gover-
nance since the seventeenth century. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) put
an end to several religious wars in Europe, including the Thirty Years’ War
in Central Europe. The signing of the Peace of Westphalia in Münster
and Osnabrück ushered Europe into a new era which over the following
centuries would witness the gradual emergence of the so-called West-
phalian state system: an international system of nation states based on
the key tenets of territorial sovereignty and non-interference, without the
existence of any authority above the state.
The groundwork for the rise of formalised international cooperation,
international organisations and international authority was effectively laid
in 1814/1815 at the Congress of Vienna, which reorganised Europe after
the Napoleonic Wars. Europe’s colonial powers sought to establish a new
international system that guaranteed long-term peace on the European
continent among its imperial powers. In fact, for the first time in history,
Europe’s imperial powers started to govern together through meetings,
summits and other international forums to create a public good, albeit
highly fragile and circumscribed: the maintenance of pan-European peace
and the avoidance of war in Europe. The Congress evolved into a new
authority, unprecedented in international politics, whose essential logic
would later echo the international authority of international organisations
and international groupings like the G7, the G20 and other intergovern-
mental platforms. For the first time, a group of states realised that they
could only govern together, in Concert, to tackle a “transnational” chal-
lenge that threatened the stability and survival of these states (Mitzen
2013).
Thus, it is not wrong to call Vienna the birthplace of global gover-
nance. Eventually, the Congress system, which collapsed and was restored
several times throughout the nineteenth century, gave way to the First
World War. This catastrophe once again brought the entire continent
to its knees—and validated the institutional innovations introduced by
the Congress of Vienna. The establishment of the League of Nations in
1919 and the United Nations in 1945 (after another collapse of Europe’s
civilisation) followed the Concert’s logic of creating institutions through
which states could govern together to tackle a transnational threat and
create a public good: the prevention of a new war and the maintenance
of peace (Mitzen 2013; Murphy 2015, 189–190).
38 M. FRAUNDORFER
In the context of the Congress system, European cities turned

into centres of transnational cooperation and exchange among individ-
uals, communities, companies and other public and private associations,
creating periodic conferences and permanent secretariats, which helped
set political agendas, prepare meetings and conferences, monitor the
compliance with rules, technical standards and regulations (Murphy 2015,
190). The first international organisations of the nineteenth century
would emerge from this gamut of incipient international and transna-
tional administrative work, which in turn became a blueprint for the
vast number of international organisations, agencies and bodies of the
twentieth century (Murphy 2015, 189–190).
When in early nineteenth-century Vienna and Europe the foundations
of global governance were laid, European colonial powers dominated the
world through their vast colonial empires in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
And the dominant structures of international, transnational and global
governance were deeply pervaded by a colonial logic (Murphy 2015,
191). Today’s deeply entrenched socio-economic and political inequali-
ties in global governance between different world regions, between actors
from Europe/North America and other parts of the world, between
Anglo-American/Eurocentric and Asian, African or Latin American
perspectives, norms and worldviews stem from these colonial beginnings.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the first standing interna-
tional governance mechanisms emerged, which for the first time allowed
regular cooperation and decision-making on transboundary issues (see
also Box 2.3). The International Telegraph Union (ITU), created in
1865, can be credited as the first international organisation in history.
The first commercial telegraphic service opened in London in 1839, and
the Morse code was invented in the US by Samuel Morse in 1844. The
ever more expanding network of telegraphic wires across national borders
and continents in the first half of the nineteenth century forced Euro-
pean powers to forge cross-border agreements and treaties, culminating
in establishing the International Telegraph Union. This telecommuni-
cations revolution received a further push with Scottish-born inventor
Alexander Graham Bell’s patent of the telephone in the US in 1876,
making long-distance communication among people a new reality.
Box 2.3: Europe’s Geography

The geographic particularities of nineteenth-century Europe as a continent
with numerous small and middle-sized states, kingdoms, duchies and city-
states made cross-border cooperation much more likely to emerge in this
part of the world than anywhere else.
This peculiar geography gave rise to a hotchpotch of geophysical
borders, slicing up the continent into small bits and pieces and adding
a transboundary dimension to lots of conflicts and policy areas that just
did not exist to a similar extent in other world regions.
One decade after the creation of the International Telegraph

Union, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) was established in 1874 in
Bern to coordinate international postal services in Europe as a response
to increasing international trade, mounting dissatisfaction with high inter-
national postal charges and the ambition to harmonise technical standards
(ITU 2019a, b; Zacher and Sutton 1996). Both organisations continue
to exist as UN specialised agencies: the International Telegraph Union
as the International Telecommunication Union now headquartered in
Geneva, and the Universal Postal Union under the same name and still
headquartered in Bern.
Following several infectious disease outbreaks in Europe and the Amer-
icas and the creation of some informal governance mechanisms, the very
first international health organisation, the International Sanitary Bureau,
was born in 1902 in Washington, DC (which after the Second World War
turned into the Pan-American Health Organisation [PAHO], the oldest
existing international health organisation in the international system).
One of the forerunners of today’s World Health Organisation, L’Office
International d’Hygiene Publique, dates back to 1907 (McCarthy 2002).
And the creation of the League of Nations in 1920 became the most
ambitious attempt at that time to cooperate on matters of war and peace
beyond state borders. The League of Nations was accompanied by two
further international organisations: the Permanent Court of International
Justice and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The Permanent
Court of International Justice (transformed after the Second World War
into the International Court of Justice) became the first standing and
fully established international court allowing arbitration between states.
The International Labour Organisation survived as the only international
organisation of the League of Nations system during the political quakes
of the Second World War. After its integration into the UN system after
40 M. FRAUNDORFER
the Second World War, it has become the UN’s longest-living specialised
organisation.
The technological leaps in aviation in Europe and North America in the
early twentieth century further boosted international cooperation. Avia-
tion pioneers created the first successful aircraft, crossing large distances
and state borders, and the first commercial airlines were born. The
technological developments in aviation also spurred international coop-
eration, most importantly embodied by the International Civil Aviation
Organisation from 1944 and the International Association of Transport
Airlines founded by the world’s airlines in 1945 (Zacher and Sutton 1996,
81–126).
The temporary rupture of the Second World War did not put an end to
the growth of international authority. The creation of the United Nations
system in 1945 rescued many ideas of international decision-making sown
in the first two decades of the twentieth century. By building on these
internationalist ideas, the international system ushered into a new era
of institutionalised intergovernmental decision-making. The UN system
with its principal UN bodies—UN Secretariat, UN Security Council,
UN General Assembly, UN Economic and Social Council, Interna-
tional Court of Justice and the UN Trusteeship Council (suspended in
1994)—along with the UN’s specialised and affiliated agencies—FAO,
WHO, ILO, UNESCO, IMF, World Bank, etc.—became the funda-
mental building block of the new international order of the twentieth
century in existence until this very day.
The European Coal and Steel Community, which came into force in
1952, laid the ground for creating the European Economic Commu-
nity in 1957 and decades later, in 1992, the European Union, the most
ambitious and far-reaching regional integration project in history. These
ambitious cooperation efforts in Europe were complemented by a series
of integration projects in other world regions, albeit far less ambitious
and successful: among them the Arab League in 1945, the Organisa-
tion of American States (OAS) in 1948, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967, the Pacific Islands Forum in 1971, the
Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in 1973, the Economic Commu-
nity of West African States in 1975, the Gulf Cooperation Council in
1981, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) in South America in
1991, the African Union in 2002 and many others. Apart from these
major examples of regional integration, further regional organisations and
initiatives would pop up across the globe to institutionalise the ideas of
economic liberalisation, human rights, democracy and ever closer coop-

eration among neighbouring states on a series of economic, political and
social issues that no state could tackle on its own.
Despite the Cold War and other crises, conflicts and proxy wars that
overshadowed the second half of the twentieth century, institutionalised
intergovernmental cooperation became a new imperative and an indis-
pensable norm in the international order. Since the end of the Second
World War, international organisations have become major actors in the
international order, firmly entrenching the new concept of international
authority: the capacity of international organisations to make decisions
that are followed and complied with by a critical number of states
from across the world. Almost negligible before the Second World War,
the developments after 1945 turned the phenomenon of international
authority into a new reality in the international system (Zürn 2018, 111;
see also Box 2.4).
Box 2.4: The Great Acceleration of International Authority

In Anthropocene debates, the post-Second World War period is usually
known as the Great Acceleration. Not only did human development
accelerate in unprecedented ways in Europe and North America before
spreading across the globe. International authority also accelerated, deep-
ened and broadened in ways never seen before in the international
order.
This was due to the rise of the US as the new hegemon in the West
and the US–led commodification of oil as the new defining energy source.
Between 1938 and 1973, world oil consumption skyrocketed from 265
million tonnes to 2765 million tonnes.
Sources Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016, 116–121), M’Gonigle and Zacher
(1979, 14–15).
2.2.1.2 Shades of Transnational Authority: Cities, Social

Movements, Companies, Philanthropic Foundations
and Multistakeholder Organisations
Besides the rise of international organisations and the increasing hold
of international authority on the processes and dynamics in the interna-
tional system, the twentieth century also witnessed the gradual emergence
of transnational authority, promoted by the growing influence of an
increasing number of non-state actors, such as cities, social movements,
42 M. FRAUNDORFER
companies, philanthropic foundations and multistakeholder organisations.

The growing importance of transnational authority is another reflection
of the ever more transnational and transboundary realities of the interna-
tional system. Along with states, the actions of non-state actors have had
a defining impact on human development over the past two centuries and
the emergence of today’s global environmental challenges.
Cities and Transnational City Networks

Many of the cities we live in are much older than the state whose nation-
ality we hold. Athens is much older than the nation state of Greece.
Rome was already a major world city (and a major empire) two thou-
sand years ago, long before the nation state of Italy came into existence.
Lots of cities in Europe with their preserved medieval centres, castles and
fortifications have a history stretching back a thousand years and were
economic powerhouses and European-wide centres of commerce and
trade long before the so-called Westphalian (or state-centric) order started
to take shape. Cities created their own trade alliances to form powerful
economic trading blocks. The Hanseatic League in Northwestern and
Central Europe included cities as diverse as Lübeck, Hamburg, Riga,
Gdansk, Novgorod, Bruges and London. In its heyday in the fourteenth
century, the Hanseatic League wielded substantial economic, diplomatic,
political and military power. Cities in other world regions are even older.
Damascus, in today’s war-torn Syria, is one of the oldest continually
inhabited cities in the world, with a history stretching back more than
10,000 years (UNESCO 2020). Given this millennial history of many
cities worldwide, it is not surprising that many early nation states were
born out of cities and their hinterlands (Smil 2019, 357).
The phenomenon of urbanisation (mass-scale migration from the
countryside to cities) is a fundamental characteristic of our times and
essentially linked to the emergence of global environmental challenges.
Urbanisation started in a few countries in the eighteenth century, then
accelerated in the nineteenth century and reached unprecedented dimen-
sions in the twentieth century (Smil 2019, 336). This development
transformed cities into sizeable actors driving the emergence of global
challenges, such as food insecurity, water and air pollution, environmental
degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, London’s popu-
lation rose from 600,000 in 1700 to 1.1 million in 1801, before its
population growth received a massive push jumping to 6.5 million in
1901 (Smil 2019, 336). Today, London’s population stands at roughly 9
million. Together with other megacities worldwide, London has become

a crucial gateway and critical node in the globalised flows of trade,
commerce, finance, transport and digital technologies (Curtis 2016;
Sassen 2001). Today’s megacities are the nerve centres of our globalised
world (see also Box 2.5).
Box 2.5: The City Hubs of Global Governance

Europe, and particularly Vienna, can not only be regarded as the birthplace
of global governance. Still today, most of the actions of global governance
take place in European or North American cities. The three major hubs
of global governance are New York City, Geneva and Vienna. New York
City headquarters the UN; Geneva hosts an almost indefinite number of
international organisations (such as the ITU, WHO, WTO, ILO), NGOs
(such as MSF or ICRC), multistakeholder organisations and transnational
networks and initiatives; Vienna headquarters the OSCE, OPEC, the IAEA
and a range of other UN programmes and agencies.
Other essential city hubs in global governance are Paris (UNESCO,
IEA, OECD), Bonn (UNFCCC, UNCCD), Rome (FAO, WFP, IFAD),
Washington, DC (World Bank, IMF) and Brussels (EU institutions).
City locations of global governance outside of Europe are still very
rare and include Nairobi (UNEP), Abu Dhabi (IRENA) and Yokohama
(ITTO).
Some of these megacities have joined forces to form megaregions that

are economically more powerful than many states. Asia’s largest megare-
gion, Greater Tokyo (40 million people), compares to Spain in terms of
population and economic output. The largest megaregion in the world,
Bos-Wash, a conglomeration of the US cities Boston, New York, Philadel-
phia and Washington, DC (50 million people), if considered a country of
its own, would economically outperform countries like the UK or Brazil
(Florida 2019). In the year 2000, more than half of the human population
lived in cities or urban spaces. And in 2050, this proportion is projected
to grow to roughly two-thirds of the world population (UN 2018).
Cities concentrate in extreme forms the vast political, social, economic
and environmental implications of today’s global challenges. As the most
complex and intensive civilisational structures created by humans, they
devour enormous amounts of resources (Smil 2019, 342–343). The daily
realities in megacities in the global south, such as Cairo, Jakarta, Johan-
nesburg, Lagos, Mexico City, Mumbai and São Paulo, are often described
44 M. FRAUNDORFER
as dystopian. Polluted air and polluted rivers, gridlocked traffic and

collapsing public infrastructures, overpopulation and segregated urban
spaces, extreme poverty and extreme wealth side by side. The conse-
quences of climate change only add to these stress factors in cities. Water
shortages, power outages in times of drought and severe flooding during
the rainy season have become frequent phenomena in cities worldwide.
Many megacities were built in coastal areas or delta regions, further aggra-
vating the environmental degradation of these often highly fragile and
biodiverse regions. Around 65 million people live in Guangdong’s Pearl
River Delta (Smil 2019, 350). Roughly 39 million people live scattered
across several megacities in the Nile River Delta. And about 160 million
people live in the Rio de la Plata River Basin in South America (see
Chapter 6). If this were not enough, these cities also face the looming
threats of rising sea levels.
The unabated devastation of biodiversity driven by the rapid spread
of urban areas across the planet has also significantly facilitated infectious
disease outbreaks. Wet markets in megacities in Asia and Africa, where
wild animals are slaughtered and sold under inappropriate hygienic condi-
tions, are major hotspots of the transmission of viruses from animals to
humans. This happened, for instance, with SARS-CoV-2, which prob-
ably emerged in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019
and spread across the world in a matter of weeks, leading to the worst
global pandemic in the early twenty-first century (see Chapter 4). Given
that many cities are highly integrated into the globalised political and
economic system, they have turned into hotspots of virus transmission,
providing the perfect conditions for a virus to spread quickly and simul-
taneously to several countries and world regions. The SARS epidemic in
China in 2002/03 only started to spread globally through infected trav-
ellers and businesspeople who passed through Hong Kong, Asia’s major
airport hub, and travelled on to several other destinations in the region
and worldwide (see Chapter 4).
Since the 1990s, cities have increasingly joined forces to tackle global
environmental challenges through transnational city networks. These
transnational initiatives ambitiously aim to turn cities from a part of the
problem into a part of the solution. Today, transnational city networks
and platforms have become a crucial characteristic of global gover-
nance. Some of the most influential transnational city networks today
are ICLEI, UCLG and C40. ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustain-
ability, launched in 1990, links together local and regional governments
to represent the interests of more than 1750 cities, towns and regions
from across the globe to develop urban solutions to global environ-
mental challenges. UCLG–United Cities and Local Governments, created
in 2004, is a global movement of municipal governments seeking to
localise global challenges and develop local approaches to the global chal-
lenges of sustainable development. The C40 Cities Group, in contrast,
reflects the reality of today’s megacities. Launched in 2005, the C40
Cities Group brings together more than 90 megacities in several transna-
tional theme networks to jointly tackle some of the major challenges
these cities are facing today, such as sea-level rise, air pollution, water
pollution, the production and distribution of food, waste collection,
energy consumption, transportation and urban planning. These transna-
tional networks have become influential transnational authorities, shaping
the global agenda on global challenges, participating in the UNFCCC
climate summits and pushing state governments into more decisive action
on climate change (Acuto 2013; Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013;
Fraundorfer 2017).
NGOs and Social Movements

The first civil society organisations came into existence in the nineteenth
century. The Anti-Slavery Society, launched in 1839 to fight against
slavery worldwide and still active today to tackle modern-day slavery,
can be regarded as the first international NGO (Cunneen 2005). The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was created in 1864
and has played a leading role in shaping international human rights law.
Through its lobbying activities, the ICRC pushed states to adopt the
Geneva Conventions, international rules that introduced the humani-
tarian treatment of wounded combatants in wars and conflicts (Forsythe
and Rieffer-Flanagan 2016).
The twentieth century witnessed another wave of NGOs that came
into being during and after the Second World War. OXFAM was created
in 1942 in Oxford to help people affected by famines and has become
one of the leading NGOs worldwide with a global network of offices
and supporters. Today, OXFAM shapes the global agenda on a broad
range of issues related to poverty, food security and food production.
CARE (Cooperative for Resistance and Relief Everywhere), another major
humanitarian aid organisation, was initially created by US charities in
1945 to provide food to starving Europeans as a consequence of the
Second World War. CARE’s food aid took the form of food packages
46 M. FRAUNDORFER
(so-called CARE packages). Today, CARE’s agenda is global, focusing on

emergency relief and development projects across the world.
These few examples show that NGOs in the international system have
a two-century-long history. And occasionally, these NGOs had a major
impact on shaping international law and the global agenda. In general,
however, NGOs remained marginal actors in the international system for
a very long time. This only changed after the end of the Cold War. The
1990s saw an unprecedented rise in the number of NGOs in the inter-
national system. With almost 9000 new international non-governmental
organisations created in the 1990s alone, that decade saw the greatest
expansion of non-governmental organisations in the history of the inter-
national system (Weiss 2013, 16). And their profound impact could be
felt centre stage. The 1992 Earth Summit (the United Nations Confer-
ence on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro proved to be a
monumental event, turning the city of Rio de Janeiro for a few days into
the centre of the world. Representatives of all UN member states met
with representatives of more than 2000 representatives of NGOs, local
and indigenous communities to discuss the way ahead on global chal-
lenges such as climate change, development, deforestation, biodiversity
and the reduction of CO2 emissions. The summit’s discussions, debates
and negotiations kicked off a new global agenda on global development
and environmental issues, inspiring a range of new intergovernmental
mechanisms. Among those mechanisms features most prominently the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
the principal mechanism to reduce CO2 emissions.
NGOs and social movements also started to change the political
dynamics of the international order in other areas. In 1992, a coalition
of more than 1000 NGOs from across the world launched an interna-
tional campaign to ban antipersonnel landmines. This global coalition,
along with like-minded countries like Canada and Norway, successfully
pressured states into negotiating a Mine Ban Treaty, adopted in 1997, to
ban antipersonnel landmines worldwide (Cameron 1999; Goose 1998).
From 1995 onwards, a small coalition of civil society organisations, which
grew to more than 2500 NGOs worldwide, lobbied to establish an
International Criminal Court, which was finally created in 2002 (Glasius
2008).
NGOs and social movements have also used their new-found clout
to challenge and resist the dark sides of this ever more globalised
world, that is, those neoliberal policies which, after the demise of the
Soviet Union, became the guiding ideology among governments, inter-

national organisations and private actors. Their global protest campaigns
are directed against the growing inequalities both within countries and
across developed and developing countries and the hollowing out of
democratic principles through the unregulated profit-seeking behaviour
of major transnational corporations. Global social movements like La
Via Campesina, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transac-
tions and For Citizens’ Action (ATTAC) and transnationally organised
NGOs like ActionAid, Oxfam, Greenpeace or Médecins Sans Frontières
(Doctors Without Borders) have organised global campaigns against
unfair international trading rules enforced by the World Trade Organisa-
tion (WTO), the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), regional trade agreements and the invasive role of multinational
private companies.
Meetings of the World Economic Forum or the summits of the leading
heads of government, be it the G7, G8 or G20 summits, have regularly
been accompanied by global social protests. The World Social Forum,
created in 2001 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, has served as the
major institutionalised response of social movements to the neoliberal
paradigm of globalisation. In its annual meetings, social movements and
organisations come together from across the world to debate alternative
versions of globalisation and development.
In the early 2000s, a global AIDS movement, which campaigned
for universal access to AIDS treatment, allied with like-minded states
like Brazil to challenge international legislation on the intellectual prop-
erty rights of medicines and won several important battles to reduce
the prices of these medicines against such powerful countries like the
US and powerful pharmaceutical companies from the US and Europe
(Fraundorfer 2015). In 2005, a small number of people in Australia
were inspired by the achievements of the International Campaign to Ban
Landmines in the 1990s and formed a group that soon grew into a
global movement called the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons (ICAN) to campaign for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons.
For their efforts, ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017
(twenty years before, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). Despite strong opposition from
nuclear-armed states, ICAN and countries without nuclear weapons were
successful in advocating for the negotiation of the UN Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, adopted by the UN General
48 M. FRAUNDORFER
Assembly in the same year (Ruff 2018). Now, ICAN is the leading
movement to monitor the implementation of the treaty.
Over the past century, millions of local peasants and small-scale farmers
were disenfranchised, marginalised and pushed into poverty and precar-
ious living conditions through the accumulated power of multinational
companies, market-dynamics and international legislation. Represented by
the global grassroots movement La Via Campesina, launched in 1993,
these communities have regained their voice and turned into an author-
itative global force to challenge the structures of injustice and inequality
in the global food system (see Chapter 5). Their efforts have challenged
the ways food is consumed and produced worldwide.
World-renowned scientists around the globe have lent their authori-
tative voices to global movements to raise awareness about and reinforce
efforts to confront climate change, environmental degradation and species
extinction. During the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, the
NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was for several months, together
with other minor NGOs, the only international actor responding to the
crisis. MSF set up an extraordinary mission to treat thousands of infected
during the outbreak before state governments, international organisations
and aid agencies finally came to help (see Chapter 4).
Although civil society organisations continue to act as mere observers
in the UN, they are involved in the decision-making processes of lots
of other transnational organisations, platforms and mechanisms, which
have come into existence since the 2000s. As transnational authorities,
civil society organisations have shaped the global agenda through their
global campaign efforts and monitoring and verification activities. In
their transnationally organised campaigns, they raise awareness about a
variety of transnational issues, naming and shaming governments for their
inaction and mobilising citizens in different countries to challenge and
question their governments.
Major international NGOs and global movements like OXFAM, MSF,
La Via Campesina, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are
versed in presenting themselves as moral actors standing up for citi-
zens’ human rights and environmental concerns against powerful state
governments and companies. Many NGOs and global social movements
have successfully connected citizens across different countries and world
regions on transnational issues like climate change, food production or
infectious diseases. In their campaigning efforts, some of these globally
organised NGOs have successfully woven compelling narratives about the
relevance of a global mindset, a global citizenry or a global consciousness

to raise awareness about global issues and unite citizens from across the
world in global movements.
Multinational Companies and Philanthropic Foundations

Like cities and civil society actors, globally acting companies are not a new
phenomenon at all. The predecessors of today’s multinational companies
can be found in the colonial era. The endeavours of the British East
India Company (1600–1874), the Compagnie française des Indes occi-
dentales (French East India Company, 1664–1769) and the Vereenigde
Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, 1602–1799) were
notorious for looting and extracting India’s wealth and resources for
the benefit of private traders and European colonial powers (Dalrymple
2019). The United Fruit Company (1899–1970) became one of the
most influential companies in the world in the first half of the twen-
tieth century by globalising and commoditising the banana trade and
turning this tropical fruit into an everyday food staple in North America
and Europe. In its heyday, the US-based company exercised a degree of
absolute hegemony over Central American countries exploiting banana
workers, stealing vast land areas for banana plantations and controlling
Central American governments like puppets. For the benefit of private
interests and corporate greed, the United Fruit Company incited violence,
bribed and intimidated Central American presidents and government offi-
cials, used military force and spread poverty and misery across Central
American societies (Bucheli 2005; Dosal 1993; Striffler and Moberg
2003).
This dark legacy is alive and kicking in the global governance system
of the twenty-first century. The dynamics of globalisation have particu-
larly favoured multinational companies, dominating all aspects of global
governance. The global food system and the global production of food
are dominated by a handful of globally acting corporations from Europe,
North America and Brazil (see Chapter 5). In global health governance,
powerful pharmaceutical companies from Europe and North America
dominate the research and development process of medicines and diag-
nostics (see Chapter 4). In global environmental and energy governance,
oil companies have played a crucial role in lobbying powerful govern-
ments to delay action on climate change. The internet, the principal
technology that has driven the major changes in the global system since
the 1990s, is in the hands of companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and
50 M. FRAUNDORFER
Facebook (or Meta). Microsoft, for instance, has a permanent office to the
UN in New York and the EU in Brussels (Microsoft 2020). And multina-
tional companies are active participants in many global platforms, shaping
the global agenda according to their interests and lobbying governments
to adopt international legislation in their favour.
Driven by profit-maximisation with short-term horizons, companies
do not have an immediate interest in tackling global challenges. And
driven by capitalism as the dominant ideology of the global governance
system, companies hold a carte blanche to exploit labour forces and
environmental resources.
Many tycoons who become rich with their companies or other
wealthy and well-established individuals found philanthropic foundations
to support charity work and social services, donate to public causes or
provide a form of development aid. The US-based Rockefeller Founda-
tion, created in 1913, used John D Rockefeller’s eyewatering profits from
his oil business to shape institutions, ideas and practices in the US and
worldwide by investing in health, education, agriculture and the sciences
(Birn 2014). In the years between the two world wars, the Rockefeller
Foundation became one of the most influential actors in shaping health
policies and responses to infectious diseases across the world. Without the
vital financial support of the foundation, the League of Nations Health
Organisation (LNHO), one of the WHO’s predecessors, would not have
been able to carry out its international mandate (Youde 2013, 143–146).
After its creation in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
established itself as the twenty-first century equivalent of the Rockefeller
Foundation. With the profits from his former company Microsoft, Bill
Gates has turned the foundation into a globally acting funding agency,
investing in education, health care, research on infectious diseases, vaccine
delivery, agricultural development, water, sanitation & hygiene, and many
other development issues in the US and worldwide. Within two decades,
the foundation has become one of the most powerful funders in global
health governance. In terms of financial contributions to the WHO, the
foundation even dwarfs lots of powerful countries from the global north.
In the year 2014/2015, for example, the foundation donated roughly
US$440 million to the WHO. This was more than the amount of other
countries’ financial contributions, such as the UK (~US$398 million),
Norway (~US$ 99 million) or Japan (~US$161 million), all of which are
major funders in global health governance (Harman 2016, 356).
The foundation sits on lots of executive boards of major transnational

health governance mechanisms and global public–private partnerships,
funding transnational vaccine alliances, initiatives accelerating the research
and development of medicines and diagnostics, and emergency prepared-
ness responses to infectious disease outbreaks. With apparently endless
pots of cash and its participation in almost all major multistakeholder
mechanisms that emerged in global health governance over the past two
decades, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become a heavyweight
in shaping the global agenda, influencing how to tackle global challenges
and how to understand global governance.
Multistakeholder Organisations
Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, intergovernmental institutions have
been complemented by so-called multistakeholder organisations. These
platforms bring together representatives of almost all the different actors
crowding global governance today: states, international organisations,
NGOs and social movements, multinational companies and philanthropic
foundations. In contrast to the model of intergovernmental organisations,
where decision-making is limited to state actors only, in multistakeholder
organisations, several groups of actors (governments, civil society, private
actors, international organisations, individuals) take joint decisions, and
all of the representatives of the given groups have a say in how to govern
the organisation. This phenomenon was significantly promoted by the
unfolding impact of internet technology.
As telegraphy and other telecommunication technologies created
incentives for the first real attempts at international cooperation in the
mid-nineteenth century, so has internet technology. The vast new possi-
bilities of the world wide web have boosted new forms of international
and transnational cooperation since the 1990s. It has become much easier
for citizens, NGOs and social movements to organise across national
borders and form global movements. Internet technologies significantly
aided the spectacular growth of NGOs and social movements. In the same
vein, the internet has facilitated the rise of new governance models which
had been unthinkable before the internet revolution.
The organisation of international mass events like the 1992 Earth
Summit or the mass mobilisation of global civil society coalitions
committed to a particular global cause would have hardly been possible
without the new possibilities of the internet that made instant commu-
nication across different continents, time zones and cultures a widely
52 M. FRAUNDORFER
accepted reality. The emergence of the term global governance in the early
1990s coincided with the intensification of political, economic, social,
health and environmental challenges that had been largely blocked out
by the decades-long military confrontation of the two superpowers during
the Cold War.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international
standards-setting organisation for the world wide web, was founded, and
is still led, by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the world wide web.
Responsible for the development of the world wide web’s standards,
protocols and guidelines, national governments and traditional interna-
tional organisations have no control over the organisation’s work. Instead,
the organisation is governed by internet infrastructure producers and
consumers (Murphy 2015, 194).
In 1998, the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN) marked yet another turn in the deepening of
transnational authority and a further move away from traditional notions
of international authority. Established to organise and regulate the inter-
net’s key functions, including the distribution of top-level domains and
Internet Protocol addresses (IP addresses), ICANN represents one of
the first governance mechanisms exclusively controlled and governed
by non-state actors. Albeit based in the US (California), ICANN is a
non-profit corporation, rather than an intergovernmental organisation,
governed by internet experts rather than government representatives. In
fact, government representatives are only involved in ICANN as observers
(Kleinwachter 2003; Mueller and Chango 2008).
In today’s global governance, both intergovernmental and multistake-
holder decision-making models exist side by side. However, the multi-
stakeholder model has become the dominant governance form in many
transnational institutions, platforms and organisations established since
the 2000s. In the global governance of food security, the Committee on
World Food Security, reformed in 2009, has turned into the leading plat-
form for all stakeholders to discuss and negotiate the global agenda on
food security. The committee exists alongside the Food and Agriculture
Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), which follows the traditional
model of intergovernmental decision-making.
In other global governance sectors, the multistakeholder model has
entirely replaced the intergovernmental model. A case in point is the
global regulation of the internet. The central organisation, ICANN, is
governed by a multitude of technical stakeholders, including civil society,
internet experts, regional internet registries, country top-level domain

registries and so forth. Governments, however, are relegated to no more
than an advisory role. The emergence of the multistakeholder model in
global governance has been closely associated with the further intensi-
fication of the globalised, interdependent and interconnected dynamics
of global governance since the 2000s. The multistakeholder approach
tends to make decision-making at the global level more inclusive and
democratic, as it is able to reflect the complex multi-actor reality of
global governance much more adequately than the intergovernmental
model. But multistakeholderism is far from perfect (Bäckstrand 2006;
Fraundorfer 2018; Macdonald 2008). Criticism relates to the propor-
tion and composition of the different stakeholder groups, the selection
processes for those supposed to represent these stakeholders and the more
general question of (in)equality and power. In the case of civil society,
all too often stakeholder models are dominated by powerful and well-
connected NGOs from highly developed countries, which creates new
power imbalances and inequalities.
2.2.1.3 A Fragmented, Gridlocked and Overcrowded Architecture

All these global governance actors (states, international organisations,
cities, NGOs and social movements, companies, philanthropic founda-
tions and multistakeholder organisations) are so diverse in their organ-
isational outlook, mindsets, interests, resources and capabilities that the
obstacles to effective cooperation are higher than ever before. Essentially,
emerging multipolarity in the international system complemented by
growing fragmentation and worsening institutional inertia in long-lived
international organisations and agencies complicates the effectiveness of
global governance responses to global challenges (Hale et al. 2013,
2017).
After the Second World War, the new multilateral order with the UN
system at its centre was essentially shaped by a tiny group of state actors
from North America and Europe. In the same vein, the dynamics leading
to a more interconnected, interdependent and globalised system in the
1990s were dominated by the very same powers, particularly the US as
the only remaining superpower after the collapse of the USSR. In the
twenty-first century, the landscape has fundamentally changed.
Today we are moving towards a multipolar system with several
powerful states and trading blocks. While the US continues to be the
most important military power, its political, economic and military might
54 M. FRAUNDORFER
is increasingly challenged by an ever more assertive China. The EU is

the most powerful economic trading bloc and a regulatory superpower.
Continental powers like Brazil and India have reshaped global governance
over the past two decades. And after the fall of the USSR, its successor
state Russia has regained confidence in projecting its military power both
in its immediate neighbourhood and worldwide. This emerging multi-
polarity makes it harder to find compromises and agree on governance
responses to global challenges.
Intensifying trends of growing fragmentation further exacerbate these
difficulties. The increasing role of non-state actors, such as NGOs and
social movements, cities and other regional governments, multinational
companies and philanthropic foundations, has amounted to an accel-
erated proliferation of transnational partnerships, initiatives, platforms
and institutions with overlapping mandates, inefficient division of labour
and increased transaction costs. This kaleidoscope of constantly moving
patterns and the burgeoning growth of transnational multistakeholder
mechanisms continuously challenges the authority of intergovernmental
organisations and the UN system as a whole.
As a further complicating factor, traditional intergovernmental organ-
isations are increasingly out of touch with the new complexities of the
multipolar order in the early twenty-first century. The UN Security
Council is a case in point. Deemed as the central authority in main-
taining international peace and security, the membership of this UN body
reflects the power balance that emerged after the end of the Second
World War when permanent UN Security Council members like France
and Great Britain were still colonial powers. Today, however, the rule
of the permanent five (US, China, Russia, France and Great Britain)
with a permanent seat and more influence than non-permanent council
members is outdated and a fundamental reason for the failed attempts
over the last few decades to seriously reform the UN Security Council.
Based on the decades-long entrenchment of decision-making authority,
this institutional inertia reduces the flexibility of the principal interna-
tional organisations in global governance to develop effective response
strategies to global challenges in concert with other state and non-state
actors. Instead, these three interlocking factors (increasing multipolarity,
growing fragmentation and institutional inertia) amount to a gridlocked
system which hampers the negotiation of effective responses to global
challenges.
2.2.2 The Political Economy of Global Governance

As mentioned previously, the principal political and economic founda-
tions of the incremental evolution of the global governance architecture
were laid in nineteenth-century Europe. The first international mecha-
nisms and institutions were responsible for promoting international peace
and stability (the political foundation) and fostering industrial production
in the form of international trade, infrastructure development, indus-
trial standards and intellectual property (the economic foundation). The
promotion of all aspects related to industrial production was only possible
in an environment of relatively stable and peaceful international relations
among European powers, which had been achieved through the Congress
system (Murphy 1994, 49).
The first international organisations, the International Telegraph
Union (ITU) (today known as the International Telecommunication
Union) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU), are a case in point. These
first formalised international cooperation efforts reflected the emergence
of a vibrant international free trade movement across Europe, which in
line with the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo embraced liberal
economic policies and a belief that promoting international trade and
commerce and creating new markets in and beyond Europe would lead
to human progress and advancement (Hoekman and Kostecki 2001, 24;
Murphy 1994, 67).
These beliefs proved so strong that they outlasted both the collapse
of the Congress system and the breakdown of European civilisation in
the First World War. While many internationalisation attempts, including
the League of Nations, were washed away by the waves of nationalism
and protectionism, those international organisations that were initially
created to promote industrial production remained unscathed. Organisa-
tions like the ITU and UPU were supported by private lobby groups and
proved vital in providing the technological infrastructure to develop and
strengthen international markets in Europe and extend their reach beyond
the continent (Murphy 1994, 83–85). Thus, international organisations
primarily served to internationalise the various dynamics of the Industrial
Revolution by opening up new markets, fostering international commerce
and trade, building a global architecture through telegraphic cables, postal
services and railway and airline networks, as well as developing interna-
tional industrial standards and intellectual property rules (Murphy 1994,
109–117).
56 M. FRAUNDORFER
This context of steam-fuelled expansion propelled lots of European and

North American small-scale businesses to positions of global dominance,
allowing them to exercise a crucial role in shaping the central dynamics
and processes in global governance until this very day. As a case in point,
many of today’s dominant chocolate companies started as small grocery
or confectionery shops in the second half of the nineteenth century and
rose to global prominence in the twentieth century.
The famous Swiss chocolate company Lindt began as a small confec-
tionery shop in Zurich in 1845. The shop was set up by David Sprüngli
and his son Rudolf Sprüngli-Ammann to produce the first solid chocolate
bar in the German-speaking world, although the chocolate was still rather
hard and bitter. Thirty-four years later, the owner of another small confec-
tionery shop in Bern, Rodolphe Lindt, invented the conching process,
revolutionising chocolate production. Conching evenly distributes cocoa
butter with other chocolate ingredients and creates the smooth and
refined taste of chocolate which characterises chocolate bars to this
very day. In 1899, both companies merged and became Lindt-Sprüngli,
turning the company into one of the leading chocolate producers world-
wide (Lindt 2021).
Many other chocolate companies, such as Swiss-based Nestlé, UK-
based Cadbury or US-based Hershey, would follow similar trajectories,
taking advantage of the expansion of international trade routes and
markets, which made it easier to import ingredients like sugar and cocoa
from European colonies and then export the novel food products to other
countries and world regions (Leissle 2018). Other technological innova-
tions in the late nineteenth century, like refrigerated shipping, facilitated
the international trade of meat (see Chapter 5) and tropical fruits, such
as the banana, the most traded fruit commodity of all, along with the
emergence of powerful meat and fruit companies.
Concerns about protecting trade and commerce from interruptions
caused by infectious disease outbreaks led to the creation of the first
international health organisations, such as the Pan-American Sanitary
Organisation in Washington, DC, in 1903 and the Office International
d‘Hygiene Publique in Paris in 1907 (Murphy 1994, 135; see also
Chapter 4). As Murphy emphasises, international organisations “became
necessary to the further development of capitalist industrialism in late
nineteenth-century Europe simply because the market required by the
industries of the Second Industrial Revolution [late nineteenth and early
twentieth century] was larger than the domestic market of any single
industrial country except the United States, and in Europe an interna-

tional market of that size could not be created by private initiative alone”
(Murphy 1994, 135).
With the creation of the United Nations system after the Second World
War, the activities of international organisations would become ever more
widespread, focusing on development, public finance, peacekeeping and
democracy/human rights. But the promotion of industry, trade and
commerce through the expansion of markets, this time globally, would
remain the primary economic function of global governance organisations
(Murphy 1994, 188). Not least because leading decision-makers remem-
bered the negative consequences of the nationalist and protectionist
economic policies of the 1930s, including trade barriers, tariffs, import
quotas and competitive devaluation (Hoekman and Kostecki 2001, 25).
Thus, the US spearheaded the development of global trade liberalisation,
represented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank
and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (Hoekman and
Kostecki 2001, 25; Murphy 1994, 197).
In Murphy’s words: “The GATT, the Bretton Woods organizations
[the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank], and the other
institutions of the UN system finally began doing what the League [of
Nations] never did. The ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organiza-
tion] and the expanded ITU [International Telecommunication Union]
helped link the physical infrastructure for the world market that came to
knit the wealthy OECD countries and the dependent capitalist states of
the Third World into a single world economy” (1994, 226). Linked to
these institutionalised multilateral efforts of trade liberalisation was the
idea that free trade would lead to a more stable and peaceful world order
(Hoekman and Kostecki 2001, 25).
This global and multilateral approach of trade liberalisation, aided
by international financial institutions with the authority to intervene in
countries’ domestic economic policies, became known as embedded liber-
alism (Ruggie 1982). Civil aviation, ocean shipping and automobiles
further accelerated the capitalist logic of global governance, opening up,
connecting and extending markets across countries and world regions in
unprecedented ways (Murphy 1994, 192–196).
The global recession in the early 1980s triggered the introduction
of neoclassical economics (also commonly called neoliberalism), which
further intensified many of these trends. These neoliberal policies included
58 M. FRAUNDORFER
the aggressive rollback of the state, excessive deregulation and privati-

sation and tax reductions. Spearheaded by Ronald Reagan in the US
and Margaret Thatcher in the UK and backed by international (finan-
cial) organisations, these policies were swiftly incorporated into the global
governance architecture, with dominant global governance institutions
spreading these policies across the world (Biersteker 1992).
The World Trade Organisation (WTO), established in 1995, built on
the logic of embedded liberalism and extended the GATT’s organisational
structure, ultimately institutionalising and universalising the multilateral
trade regime (Hoekman and Kostecki 2001, 51–52). After the end of
the Cold War, many formerly communist countries turned into capitalist
economies. China, which is governed by the Communist Party, joined
the WTO in 2001 (WTO, n.d.). And the Russian government joined the
organisation in 2012 after 18 years of negotiations (BBC 2011; WTO,
n.d.). Heavily contested by NGOs and global social movements, the
WTO has played a crucial role in institutionalising and entrenching free
trade principles. These trade rules have often benefitted a few powerful
countries and industries in Europe and North America and disadvantaged
vast populations in the developing world (Ruggie 1982).
Through the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, international trade
rules finally encroached on agriculture, formally institutionalising the capi-
talist (and neoliberal) logic of free trade on the international stage and
entrenching the dominant dynamics of large-scale industrialised agricul-
tural production (see Chapter 5). The TRIPS Agreement (Agreement
on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) formalised and
entrenched the international regulation of intellectual property rights
among WTO member states. In the debate on intellectual property rights
of life-saving medicines, for instance, the agreement favours powerful
governments and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of devel-
oping countries and their needs to produce affordable generic versions
of medicines. These injustices were thrown into sharp relief in the debate
on the production of generic versions of antiretrovirals to combat the
AIDS epidemic in the developing world in the 1990s and 2000s (Fraun-
dorfer 2015). And this conflict flared up again with renewed intensity
on the production of vaccines as global public goods during the global
COVID-19 pandemic.
As with telegraphic wires in the nineteenth century, the emergence
of the internet in the mid-1990s represented only the latest example
of how a novel telecommunication technology can drive a new stage
of institutionalisation of the global governance system. And as in the

past, the organisations that emerged to govern the internet are primarily
responsible for facilitating international trade and commerce and different
aspects of industrial production related to the internet’s networked
architecture.
The leading global internet governance organisation ICANN, created
in 1998, became responsible for the creation of a global market of domain
names, the protection of intellectual property and the functioning of
the global architecture of the internet (Chenou 2014, 213). In this
sense, ICANN’s functions mirror those of the first international organ-
isations set up more than a century earlier, particularly the ITU, with
the fundamental exception that as a private and transnational corporation
national governments are only present as observers in ICANN’s decision-
making structures (Chenou 2014, 217). As such, ICANN also stands in
a long tradition of global governance organisations primarily responsible
for creating and expanding markets and facilitating trade and commerce
across countries, regions and continents as the principal economic driver
of cross-border cooperation.
In sum, the gradual evolution of the global governance architecture
has been driven by economic beliefs of trade liberalisation, open borders
and the creation of ever more global markets. Since the 1980s this logic
has been compounded by waves of deregulation and privatisation in
many countries (commonly understood as neoliberalism), resulting in a
shrinking (welfare) state, the privatisation of public goods and increasing
inequality. Thus, international cooperation has often been particularly
effective in promoting intellectual property, trade, technology and indus-
trial standards. In the same vein, the creation and distribution of global
public goods, such as international peace and stability, the containment of
infectious diseases or the reduction of CO2 emissions, has served capitalist
interests of economic growth and trade liberalisation. Given this capi-
talist logic, the commodification of nature and the exploitation of large
parts of the Earth-system for economic gains is deeply written into global
governance’s DNA.
2.2.3 Entanglements Between Geological Time and World Time

Fossil fuels like coal and oil are compressed versions of time and space.
For example, “a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-
five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that
60 M. FRAUNDORFER
organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced
over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the
fossil fuels we burn today in a single year” (Mitchell 2011, 15). As a
consequence, the massive burning of the planet’s past over the last two
centuries, compressed over hundreds of thousands of years in black rock
(coal) or liquid (oil), significantly reconfigured our understanding of space
and time.
The telephone, the locomotive and railways, the mass production of
cars, the mass commercialisation of air travel, the shipping industry or the
nuclear bomb—all these technological innovations in the nineteenth and
twentieth century changed our understanding of time and space beyond
recognition, which proved fundamental for international authority to
grow. Time and space began to shrink, reducing the travel time on inter-
continental trips from months (or days) to hours, weaving communities,
countries and continents together through telegraphic wires, fibre-optic
cables and ever more integrated international trade. In short, the release
of tonnes of compressed time and space into the atmosphere implicated
an ever-tighter compression of time and space in the international system,
generally known as globalisation.
Our civilisation in the twenty-first century relies on more integrated
planetary connections than ever before, scaling up and exacerbating the
environmental challenges that come with these planetary connections
(Scholte 2005, 60). Whereas in the past, environmental challenges were
limited in reach, today their consequences are as global and planetary as
our actions on the planet. Given the global and planetary nature of today’s
challenges, they affect our societies both instantaneously and simulta-
neously (Scholte 2005, 62). Like infectious disease outbreaks and the
manifold local manifestations of climate change, these challenges affect
us within no time in several world cities, countries and world regions
at the same time. This shrinking of time and space in the unfolding of
global challenges and their impact on human societies and the entire
Earth-system represents a fundamental dilemma for global governance.
Timothy Morton’s characterisation of these global challenges as hyper-
objects, “entities that are massively distributed in time and space […]
[so that] humans can think and compute them, but not perceive them
directly” (Morton 2014, 489), poignantly captures this dilemma. We can
make hyperobjects like climate change visible through satellite images,
graphs and other computer models that show the concentration of CO2
in the atmosphere, rising temperatures, sea levels or melting glaciers. But
the phenomenon developed gradually over several decades and centuries

(massive distribution in time), affecting the entire planet (massive distri-
bution in space) so that it is difficult to perceive it directly in all its
complexity and impact.
We cannot see climate change in all its temporal and spatial entirety. It
has gradually unfolded over two centuries and affects all human societies
globally in different ways. The frequent droughts and floods experienced
by many societies nowadays are just that: droughts and floods. They are a
consequence of human-induced climate change, a local manifestation of
the hyperobject climate change. But they are not the hyperobject climate
change. This means that many hyperobjects are only indirectly visible to
humans, mostly through their local manifestations.
Morton neatly summarised this globalising and planetary development
that gradually engulfed millions and billions of people worldwide through
the interconnected use of machines that had their origin in the Industrial
Revolution.
The very tools we use to see the Anthropocene are related to the tools
that got us into it. For there is a somewhat straight line between the
kind of machine a steam engine is—a general purpose one that one can
plug in to all kinds of things, creating gigantic systems of machines and
factories housing machines—and the kind of thing a computer is. […] A
steam engine is a multipurpose device. So is a computer. A computer can
pretend to be a calculator, a diary, a piece of paper, a telephone, or another
computer, or a machine that can assemble or direct other machines.
[…] [This explains] how millions of shovels full of coal chucked into
steam engines and millions of turnings of ignition keys sum up to global
warming. Unconsciously—even if I know I am doing it, in other words—I
am contributing to global warming, yet my individual contribution is a
statistically meaningless blip. (Morton 2014, 490–493)
Geological time and world time have become intrinsically entangled in

the Anthropocene. Our individual actions sum up to a global and plan-
etary impact causing challenges and threats to our modern civilisation
that ignore human-made borders. In this context, sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman held that “the idea of a geophysical border is increasingly diffi-
cult to sustain in the ‘real world’” (Bauman 1998, 12). But while today’s
global challenges are essentially borderless, we do not live in a borderless
world (Scholte 2005, 75). And global governance is not borderless, either.
Global governance is a historically grown and human-made construct
62 M. FRAUNDORFER
shaped by different political, economic and social forces, power struggles

and ideologies that unfolded over the past two hundred years.
And here, global governance is facing an existential dilemma: all too
often, we try to confront global challenges with hopelessly outdated tools
or instruments that are limited in reach and abide by entirely different
notions of space and time. Or in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “our prob-
lems are globally produced, whereas the instruments of political action
bequeathed by builders of nation states were reduced to the scale of
services territorial nation-states required” (Bauman and Bordoni 2014,
21–22).
This entanglement of geological time (or deep time) and world time
(or historical time) also has far-reaching consequences for the future of
the planet and its species, including humans (see Box 2.6). Today’s global
challenges will inevitably become the challenges of future generations.
The consequences of climate change will permanently alter the Earth-
system for hundreds of thousands of years to come. The deposition of
nuclear waste, for instance, will continue to pose a major threat to human
civilisations in thousands of years (Hanusch and Biermann 2020, 19).
And human-induced CO2 emissions have been so massive since the end
of the Second World War that humans have already changed the planet’s
natural climate cycles for thousands of years to come (Summerhayes and
Zalasiewicz 2018, 199).
Box 2.6: Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

“I start the engine of my car. Liquefied dinosaur bones burst into flame.
I walk up a chalky hill. Billions of ancient pulverized undersea creatures
grip my shoes. I breathe. Bacterial pollution from some Archean cataclysm
fills my alveoli—we call it oxygen. I type this sentence. Mitochondria,
anaerobic bacteria hiding in my cells from the Oxygen Catastrophe, spur
me with energy. They have their own DNA. I hammer a nail. In consis-
tent layers of ore, bacteria deposited the iron in Earth’s crust. I turn
on the TV and see snow. A sliver of the snow is a trace of the Cosmic
Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. I walk on top of life-
forms. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial outgassing. Oil is the result of
some dark, secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions
and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at
the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they
become almost impossible to hold in mind.”
Source Morton (2013, 58).
And not only have global governance actors and organisations severe
difficulties dealing with these global challenges in the present. No organ-
isations exist to deal with these problems in the future, what Hanusch
and Biermann call “a lack of an institutionalised deep-time perspective”,
meaning “that hardly any societal and political organisations temporally
correspond to the deep-time interdependencies in the Anthropocene”
(Hanusch and Biermann 2020, 20).
Deep-time organisations that take into account the entanglements of
geological-time and world time are only very slowly emerging at the
margins of global governance: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway,
the San Diego Frozen Zoo, the EAZA biobank and the first permanent
nuclear waste deposit in Olkiluoto, Finland (still under construction), are
among those institutions that incorporate a deep-time perspective and
recognise the entanglements between geological time (deep time) and
world time (historical time) (EAZA 2021; Hanusch and Biermann 2020;
Ialenti 2020; San Diego Zoo 2020).
Crop genebanks for the storage of seeds are nothing unusual. Approx-
imately 1700 of them exist in countries across the world (Asdal and
Guarino 2018, 391). But most of them are under national direction or
located in an unsafe environment. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the
only transnational and global seed vault, storing duplicates of seed samples
as backups from across the world to safeguard the planet’s biodiversity
and crop diversity. In a sense, the vault safely stores the history of human
agriculture of the last 12,000 years. Opened in 2008 in the Norwe-
gian archipelago of Svalbard and located in one of the most remote and
geologically stable places of the planet (between mainland Norway and
the North Pole), well above sea level and covered by permafrost, the Sval-
bard Global Seed Vault can safely store seeds for hundreds of years. With
a capacity to store 4.5 million different crops, slightly more than 1 million
samples are currently stored in the vault. Established and fully funded by
the government of Norway and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an inter-
national non-profit organisation based in Bonn, Germany, the Seed Vault
is operated by the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (Norwegian Ministry
of Agriculture and Food, n.d.; The Crop Trust, n.d.-a). While the Norwe-
gian government owns the vault, the seeds in the vault are the property
of the depositing institution (Asdal and Guarino 2018, 391) (Image 2.1).
In the midst of the planet’s sixth mass extinction of species, caused by
humanity’s planetary environmental impact, calls for a global approach
to the long-time storage of the gene material of endangered species to
64 M. FRAUNDORFER
Image 2.1 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Source The Crop Trust, n.d.-b)
protect Earth’s biodiversity for future generations are growing louder.

So far, however, formal international cooperation mechanisms to store
genetic material of non-human animals from across the planet in biobanks
(or genetic cryobanks) are lacking.
For decades, biobanks have been hosted by natural history museums,
charities, universities, research labs and zoos (Breithoff and Harrison
2020; Comizzoli and Wildt 2017; Radin 2015). For instance, San Diego
Zoo Global’s Frozen Zoo, in operation since the mid-1970s, is the largest
genetic cryobank in the world storing more than 10,000 individual cell
lines from more than 1100 species (San Diego Zoo 2020). In 2020, the
World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conserva-
tion of Nature (IUCN) called on IUCN members “to enable and support
establishment of a global network of biobanks dedicated to the achieve-
ment of global species conservation targets and operating to common
standards of good practice and information sharing” (IUCN 2020). A
case in point is the transnational biobank of the European Association
of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA biobank). The EAZA biobank relies on four
regional biobanking hubs with storing facilities located at the Institute for
Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and the zoos of Antwerp, Edinburgh
and Copenhagen. These hubs can store genetic samples from the over
400 EAZA member institutions in Europe and the Middle East (EAZA
2021).
On the Finish island of Olkiluoto, construction work is currently
underway to build Onkalo, the world’s first permanent nuclear waste
repository to store radioactive waste for 100,000 years, approximately
450 m underground in tunnels that extend up to 70 km in an area of
2km2 . The storage of nuclear waste begins in the 2020s and receives the
nuclear waste of Finland’s nuclear power plants for the next hundred years
until it will be sealed up for eternity (Madsen 2010; Posiva, n.d.). Like
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Onkalo takes into account the entangle-
ments between geological time and world time. The major difference is
that Onkalo is not a global project. Its repository is only destined for the
nuclear waste produced by Finish nuclear power plants.
2.3 Summary
2.3.1 The Anthropocene
The debate about the meaning(s) of the Anthropocene is far from settled.
First, there is considerable disagreement over the exact starting date of the
Anthropocene. And second, scientists diverge on the determining factors
that ultimately caused the global environmental challenges of our age,
be it the role of humanity and its drive for expansion, the role of capi-
talist structures or the role of technology. The Anthropocene is one of
the very few concepts that has gained considerable traction in different
disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.
The concept seeks to shed light on exceptional geological, Earth-system
and civilisational developments that scientists across disciplinary divides
are struggling to come to terms with.
In geological terms, different interpretations have been put forward
as to the geological starting point of the Anthropocene. From an
Earth-system perspective, interpretations of the Anthropocene tend to
universalise humanity as a geological force, suggesting that humanity’s
actions have inevitably led to the global climate crisis. As a consequence,
Earth-system scientists often propose technocratic and technology-based
solutions, such as geoengineering, to tackle the climate crisis. When
66 M. FRAUNDORFER
looking into the role of human civilisation more carefully, social scien-
tists have largely been dissatisfied with Earth-system perspectives, which
gloss over too many nuances as to particular socio-economic and political
drivers of the global climate crisis. Thus, many social scientists stress the
impact of capitalist structures and the role some human societies, classes
and groups in Europe and North America have played in bringing about
the global climate crisis.
A social scientist-inspired view puts a spotlight on capitalism as the
dominant economic ideology responsible for accelerating environmental
degradation on a global scale through socio-economic relationships of
power and dominance. The proposed term of the Capitalocene dissects
the monolithic construct of humanity and sheds light on those human
societies in Europe and North America that have exorbitantly benefitted
from unfolding capitalist structures—and thus put in place those socio-
economic and political relationships of power and dominance that have
driven environmental degradation across the planet. While some scholars
put emphasis on the development of capitalist structures since the Indus-
trial Revolution in the nineteenth century, other scholars go further
back in time settling on the European colonisation of the Americas from
the fifteenth century onwards, which created a (capitalist) world system
connecting for the first time all world continents through highly unequal
capitalist structures and prepared the socio-economic and political back-
drop against which the Industrial Revolution unfolded. Advocates of the
term Technocene shed light on the role of technology and technolog-
ical innovation, such as the transformative potential of the combustion
engine, telegraphic wires, turbines, aeroplanes and so forth, over the past
two hundred years as the primary drivers of the planetary transformations
of the Anthropocene.
Amidst various disagreements and different emphases on the causal
factors of the global climate crisis, there is growing consensus among
scientists that developments over the past two hundred years, and partic-
ularly since the end of the Second World War, also called the Great Accel-
eration, have played a significant role in the emergence and acceleration
of today’s global environmental challenges.
2.3.2 International and Transnational Authority

The gradual evolution of global governance dynamics over the past two
hundred years is intrinsically interwoven with the gradual emergence
of global and planetary challenges resulting from an ever more glob-
alised, interdependent, energy-intensive and highly unequal civilisation.
The Congress of Vienna in 1814/15 represented the first attempt of a
group of states to collaborate through an international forum and create
some form of international peace and stability on the continent as a Euro-
pean public good. Throughout the nineteenth century, technological
innovations like telegraphic wires connecting countries and continents,
the transboundary spread of infectious diseases, intensifying international
trade and the growing aviation industry put new pressures on European
states to cooperate internationally and jointly confront novel cross-border
challenges through the creation of international institutions. These inter-
connected developments gave rise to ever more frequent formalised
expressions of authority beyond the nation state vested in international
organisations and bodies (international authority).
After the Second World War, the Great Acceleration of human devel-
opment led to an unprecedented proliferation and deepening of interna-
tional authority, most importantly represented by the UN system. After
the end of the Cold War, the proliferation of various types of international
authority was complemented by the emergence of types of transnational
authority through the newly gained influence of multistakeholder organ-
isations, transnational city networks, global networks of NGOs and social
movements and the global activities of multinational companies and phil-
anthropic foundations. Not only did the Great Acceleration accelerate
the formation of a globalised human civilisation with an ever more
complex global governance architecture infused with different types of
international and transnational authority. The Great Acceleration has also
exacerbated global and planetary challenges to the degree that they are
now threatening the stability of our modern societies and putting major
strains on an ever more fragmented, overcrowded and gridlocked global
governance architecture.
68 M. FRAUNDORFER
2.3.3 The Political Economy of Global Governance

The emergence of international cooperation efforts and the rise of
different types of international and transnational authority since the
nineteenth century has been intrinsically tied to capitalist ideologies of
growth and expansion through trade liberalisation, free trade, industrial
production and open markets. International and transnational efforts to
guarantee international peace and stability, promote democracy, shape an
international human rights regime, contain infectious diseases and, since
the late twentieth century, reduce CO2 emissions have been at the service
of these economic ideologies and capitalist structures. Hence, ecosystems,
natural resources and the Earth-system have always featured in global
governance as objects (or commodities) to be used and exploited for
the sake of economic growth, industrial production, free trade and the
globalisation of capitalist markets.
2.3.4 Geological Time and World Time

The concept of the Anthropocene implicates complex entanglements
between geological time (or deep time) and world time (or historical
time). Reaching far into the future and extending across the planet,
today’s global and planetary challenges render the sticky and powerful
state-centric logic along with its various expressions of international
authority highly problematic. In the absence of an overarching global
authority, a global (or world) government that could unfold the power to
create a truly global response to these challenges, global problem-solving
efforts are fragmented, piecemeal and disjointed, giving rise to ineffective,
weak and inadequate responses to these challenges. As a consequence,
the global governance architecture is overwhelmed by the hyperobjects
of global and planetary challenges, which are so “massively distributed
in time and space” that world time becomes intrinsically entangled with
geological time.
As global governance actors have been exclusively formed by the
parameters of world time over the past two hundred years, their mandates
largely ignore these entanglements. In order to keep up with the chal-
lenges of today’s hyperobjects, global governance will need to incorporate
deep-time considerations. As the examples of the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault, permanent nuclear waste repositories and biobanks illustrate, this
is currently happening in some isolated cases. And yet, it will still be a
very long way before global governance reflects the entanglements of

world time and deep time in their dominant institutional architectures,
providing governance solutions not only for the immediate present but
also for coming centuries and possibly millennia.
Questions
• Discuss the role of capitalist structures in the emergence of the

Anthropocene! How has the economic mindset underlying interna-
tional cooperation (and ultimately global governance) exacerbated
the global climate crisis?
• What were the principal drivers behind the gradual emergence of
international and transnational authority? Which role did Europe
play in the birth of various types of international and transnational
authority?
• What are the consequences of the entanglements between geological
time and world time for global governance?
• Which role has technology played in the emergence of global gover-
nance—and the acceleration of global climate change in the second
half of the twentieth century?
• Even if the creation of a world government is unfeasible for the fore-
seeable future, do you think a hypothetical world government would
be better equipped to tackle the challenges of the Anthropocene?
References
Acuto, M. 2013. The New Climate Leaders? Review of International Studies 39:
835–857.
Altvater, E. 2016. The Capitalocene, or, Geoengineering Against Capitalism’s
Planetary Boundaries. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and
the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. J.W. Moore. Oakland: PM Press.
Asdal, Å., and L. Guarino. 2018. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault: 10 Years—1
Million Samples. Biopreservation and Biobanking 16: 391–392.
Bäckstrand, K. 2006. Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainable Develop-
ment: Rethinking Legitimacy, Accountability and Effectiveness. European
Environment 16: 290–306.
Baskin, J. 2015. Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene.
Environmental Values 24: 9–29.

Markus Fraundorfer - Global Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene-Springer (2022)-42-88

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Markus Fraundorfer - Global Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene-Springer (2022)-42-88

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CHAPTER 2

Global Governance and the Anthropocene:

2.1 A Very Brief History of the Anthropocene

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

The epoch of geological time during which human activity is considered

2.1.1 The Geological Dimension

The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492, and subsequent

Alternatively, the start of the Anthropocene can be pinned down to the

2.1.2 The Earth-System Dimension

to come. All these climatic changes rolling towards us with horrifying

In Jeremy Baskin’s view, this Earth-system perspective can lend itself

This universal interpretation of the Anthropocene and humanity’s respon-

Box 2.1: Geoengineering

2.1.3 The Civilisational Dimension

Box 2.2: The Great Oxygenation Event

actually means in this context. In his initial definition of the Anthro-

accumulation process by providing the fundamental assets capitalism is

countries (or empires) such as the Soviet Union, which participated in

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft represent an intriguing

2.2 A Very Brief History of Global Governance

As the following sections outline, the roots of today’s global gover-

2.2.1 The Emergence of International and Transnational Authority

2.2.1.1 Shades of International Authority: States

In the context of the Congress system, European cities turned

Box 2.3: Europe’s Geography

One decade after the creation of the International Telegraph

economic liberalisation, human rights, democracy and ever closer coop-

Box 2.4: The Great Acceleration of International Authority

2.2.1.2 Shades of Transnational Authority: Cities, Social

companies, philanthropic foundations and multistakeholder organisations.

Cities and Transnational City Networks

million. Together with other megacities worldwide, London has become

Box 2.5: The City Hubs of Global Governance

Some of these megacities have joined forces to form megaregions that

as dystopian. Polluted air and polluted rivers, gridlocked traffic and

NGOs and Social Movements

(so-called CARE packages). Today, CARE’s agenda is global, focusing on

Soviet Union, became the guiding ideology among governments, inter-

relevance of a global mindset, a global citizenry or a global consciousness

Multinational Companies and Philanthropic Foundations

The foundation sits on lots of executive boards of major transnational

internet experts, regional internet registries, country top-level domain

2.2.1.3 A Fragmented, Gridlocked and Overcrowded Architecture

is increasingly challenged by an ever more assertive China. The EU is

2.2.2 The Political Economy of Global Governance

This context of steam-fuelled expansion propelled lots of European and

industrial country except the United States, and in Europe an interna-

the aggressive rollback of the state, excessive deregulation and privati-

of institutionalisation of the global governance system. And as in the

2.2.3 Entanglements Between Geological Time and World Time

the phenomenon developed gradually over several decades and centuries

Geological time and world time have become intrinsically entangled in

shaped by different political, economic and social forces, power struggles

Box 2.6: Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

protect Earth’s biodiversity for future generations are growing louder.

2.3.2 International and Transnational Authority

2.3.3 The Political Economy of Global Governance

2.3.4 Geological Time and World Time

very long way before global governance reflects the entanglements of

• Discuss the role of capitalist structures in the emergence of the

You might also like