Earth system governance is an increasingly popular concept that captures multi-level governance in social-ecological systems, a large multi-national project that joins hundreds of researchers, and the title of this book. Frank Biermann is the link between these three—the instigator of the field, the Director of the Project, and the author of this book. Not all of those who have joined the project would endorse the specific positions taken in Earth System Governance (as Biermann allows), or its conceptual scheme, but all would recognize the significance and pressing nature of the topics this book tackles. The Anthropocene in the subtitle connotes both urgency and novelty; this is the name for the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system, the successor to the unusually stable Holocene in which human civilization began (though for most of the book the Anthropocene and its challenge fade into the background, and most of the analysis does not depend crucially on the concept).
Biermann defines earth system governance as “the sum of the formal and informal rule systems and actor networks at all levels of human society that are set up to steer societies toward preventing, mitigating, and adapting to environmental change and earth system transformation” (p. 9). Such systems and networks can be analyzed empirically at any number of levels, but Biermann’s emphasis is normative and global, a “realistic utopianism” (p. 13) that develops proposals for institutional change. The “normative context” is given by Gro Harlem Brundtland’s classic 1987 definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 9), which enables attention to justice and legitimacy, as well as effectiveness in confronting social-ecological challenges. For Biermann, governance needs to be credible (in terms of the commitments states in particular make to it), stable, adaptable, inclusive, and with responsibilities that are differentiated according to the capacities of different actors.
Having established this basic orientation, Biermann attends to questions of agency, architecture, accountability and legitimacy, allocation, and adaptiveness in global governance. For Biermann, an agent is an “authoritative actor” (p. 48), architecture is institutional structure, allocation is really about distributive justice (but that would interrupt the alliteration), and adaptiveness refers not to adaptive governance in general, but rather to adaptation governance in the sense of coping with the negative effects of environmental change. A chapter is devoted to each of the questions. Democratic values come to the fore in Chapter 5 on accountability and legitimacy, where Biermann explores ideas for different sorts of global assemblies, as well as the variety of accountability mechanisms. Chapter 6 on allocation is limited by its emphasis on two views on justice: one libertarian, the other egalitarian and cosmopolitan. Specific governance proposals (such as emission trading schemes) are then assessed in light of these views. Here Biermann tries to figure out what adherents of the two views would think, as opposed to what they actually do think about such proposals; some of the extrapolations (for example, that libertarians would support emissions trading) are contestable. In addition, libertarianism and cosmopolitan egalitarianism do not necessarily define the ends of a spectrum on which all normative theories of justice can be located—where for example would one fit the capabilities account of justice as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum? Their theory is quite influential in the politics of development, and starting to be applied to ecological questions.
Though he is careful to distinguish governance from science-based management, Biermann’s prescriptions for earth system governance are mostly centralized and multilateral. Calling for “new forms of multilateralism,” Biermann declares that “there is no way around strong and effective international institutions” (p. 207). In taking this position, Biermann rejects the arguments of those who celebrate polycentric, decentralized, or minilateral initiatives, or public/private networked governance. Such arguments (associated with people such as Elinor Ostrom, David Victor, and Matthew Hoffmann) are especially prominent when it comes to global climate governance, as analysts search for alternatives to prolonged impasse in multilateral negotiations. For Biermann, decentralization means only “fragmentation” and partial and ineffective solutions. So any arrangements (such as clubs of nation-states) with small membership would have to have extraordinarily ambitious targets to make any global difference. Such arrangements reinforce the most powerful actors in the international system, and they undermine global negotiation of targets and measures to achieve them.
Biermann is quite right that the various decentralized initiatives are currently inadequate when it comes to confronting global ecological problems—let alone the larger challenge of the Anthropocene. The trouble is that existing multilateral efforts are also failing, while the sheer number of international environmental agreements is large—at the time of writing (mid 2015) the last demonstrably effective major multilateral agreement was the 1987 Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer, and it took a quarter of a century for measurable improvement in the ozone layer to result from that. Biermann would reply that his analysis is prescriptive: In this light, the problem is that we do not have enough effective centralization and multilateralism. But his polycentric critics might reply that we do not have enough effective decentralization either: If Biermann is allowed his realistic utopia, why aren’t the decentralists allowed theirs too?
Biermann’s specific prescriptions include the establishment of a World Environment Organization on a par with the World Trade Organization; a permanent Global Environmental Assessment Commission; a high-level United Nations Sustainable Development Council to integrate earth system governance with other areas of governance; qualified majority voting as an alternative to impasse-producing unanimity requirements in multilateral negotiations and assemblies; United Nations trusteeship over the high seas, Antarctica, and space; and limitations on national sovereignty under ecological governance. Biermann gets more specific still when it comes to (for example) how a global fund to assist countries coping with climate migrants (displaced from their homes as a consequence of climate change) might be financed and managed. To get from here to there, he believes that “interaction management and incremental change” (p. 94) are not enough. More dramatic moments of multilateral institutional creation will also be necessary, in a “constitutional moment’”(p. 210) of the sort not seen in global governance since the aftermath of the second World War. Yet a critical juncture of the kind that enabled global institutional transformation after 1945 does not seem likely when it comes to global social-ecological systems; the problem is that catastrophic tipping points or state shifts in social-ecological systems that look sudden in geological time are quite slow-moving when it comes to the timescale on which dominant political institutions and practices currently operate. Moreover it is surely the task of earth system governance to anticipate and prevent such shifts.
The package of institutional reforms Biermann proposes is in one sense not especially radical—its equivalent already exists in the area of global economic governance. This non-radical aspect helps render Biermann’s institutional utopia “realistic.” Yet the fact that global economic governance got there first is also a source of major problems for Biermann’s vision that he addresses only very partially in lamenting fragmentation across economic and environmental governance and in calling for restrictions on trade to be allowed on environmental grounds. The more important challenge involves the degree to which global economic governance, the neoliberal political economy in which it is so firmly embedded, and their supporting discourse imprison both states and other arenas of global governance—including environmental governance. Figuring out how to escape this prison should surely be high on the earth system governance agenda. It is by no means clear that integration with, as opposed to escape from, global economic governance would be the better first step.
More generally, it seems there are alternative plausible pathways and alternative institutional specifics to the set prescribed by Biermann (I have mentioned polycentric and decentralized approaches, there are others). Currently we do not know which would work best, or even which would work well enough. So one crucial precondition for effective global institutional reconstruction is surely the development of an enhanced reflexive capacity in the processes of global (meta) governance—before we rush to any detailed set of institutional prescriptions.
As Biermann recognizes, there is currently a massive gap between the reality of global environmental governance and the requirements identified by natural and social scientists who have taken the condition of the earth system seriously. Biermann has provided a thorough and credible program for starting to bridge that gap. Even those who do not share his prescriptions will have to grapple with the analysis that underpins them; Earth System Governance is now a clear and standard reference point, and as such should be required reading for all those who care about the condition of the earth system and its governance.
