Global governance in the Anthropocenes
| Author | Lucian M. Ashworth |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231153870 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2022, Vol. 77(3) 469–484
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231153870
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Global governance in the
Anthropocenes
Lucian M. Ashworth
Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Abstract
This article adumbrates how we can re-envision global governance in the Anthro-
pocene. The first section explores the plurality of Anthropocenes through an initial
analysis of the Great Transformation since 1950. The second section focuses on what
this means for global governance through insights from the history of international
thought. The first insight comes from earlier works by the international functionalists,
who emphasized process over goals. The second is found in the international political
geography of Derwent Whittlesey, who outlined how we could take in ecological
concerns through a four-dimensional view of the industrial world. Here I will also stress
the growing importance of the concept of waste and refuse in global governance, a
concern that becomes visible when we think about global politics in four dimensions.
The final concluding section underscores how a messy and unprecedented crisis
requires an equally messy and unprecedented approach to global governance.
Keywords
Anthropocene, global governance, great acceleration, international functionalism,
Derwent Whittlesey, discard studies
The future will be messy, in more ways than one. In this article my focus is on how
global governance and the study of International Relations (IR) can confront the
ecological crisis. The premise of this article is the perhaps uncontroversial contention
that you cannot see a problem—no matter how major—if you do not have the
Corresponding author:
Lucian M. Ashworth, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Elizabeth
Avenue, St. John’s, A1C 5S7, Canada.
Email: lashworth@mun.ca
theoretical tools to see it. We face a global existential crisis at the moment that is
focused on climate change, but we largely lack the theoretical lenses to see it. Those
with influence on policy, both at the national and global levels of governance, are (to
paraphrase John Maynard Keynes) slaves of long-defunct theories.
In the first book of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has the
alien Vogon constructor fleet that will shortly demolish the Earth (to make way for a
bypass) move into orbit without showing up on Earth’s vast array of radio telescopes,
“which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all
these years.”
1
For those who study international affairs and global politics, the threat of
climate change has a family resemblance to the appearance of the Vogon constructor
fleet. Global existential crises that would threaten the very structures of global gov-
ernance are what we have all been looking out for since the last century. Yet, for many,
as the crisis built over the last half-century, the overwhelming analyses were oblivious
to it. There were exceptions. In 1999, Susan Strange placed the environmental crisis as
the most dangerous of three failings of what she dubbed “the Westfailure system.”
2
Overall, though, the great commentaries on the past, present, and future of global
governance to be found among IR scholarship and punditry just did not see the extent of
the challenge posed by the gathering environmental crisis until recently.
3
The study of
IR, with its long history of worrying about war, great power balances, and the direct
threat of nuclear weapons, lacked the tools to appreciate the danger coming from
stresses on the environment. Indeed, it was this lacuna in IR that inspired the planet
politics manifesto published in the journal Millennium in 2016.
4
This article’s goal was
to explore how we can retool our thinking about global governance in order to render
the global ecological crisis we face visible. In this sense, it was a call to see the world
differently, and to adjust our global governance accordingly.
Seeing the world in a different way is often a prerequisite for making an issue visible.
The two scholars who helped me the most in seeing new issues, by imagining different
ways of seeing, were Jane Parpart and Tim Shaw. Indeed, the direct inspiration for this
article comes from a tendency in Tim Shaw’s work to pluralize concepts that most
people use as singulars. Thus, Shaw’s analysis of the Commonwealth employs the
concept of Commonwealths, inviting us to explore the multiple layers that make up the
various aspects of Commonwealth structures and affiliated organizations.
5
This article
1. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan, 1979), 28.
2. Susan Strange, “The Westfailure system,”Review of International Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 345–354.
3. There are, of course, important recent exceptions that point us towards an IR for the era of ecological crisis.
See, for example, Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, Paths to a Greener World,second edition (Boston:
MIT Press, 2011); Peter Newell, Power Shift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Peter
Newell and Matthew Paterson, Climate Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and
Simon Dalby, Rethinking Environmental Security (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022).
4. Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel J. Levine, “Planet politics: A
manifesto from the end of IR,”Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016): 499–523.
5. Timothy M. Shaw, Commonwealth: Inter- and Non-State Contributionsto Global Governance (London:
Routledge, 2007).
470 International Journal 77(3)
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