Planetary Subsidiarity
Description
Jonathan Zawada:
"While grasping the new condition of planetarity may be a philosophical event that changes our way of seeing, it has not crossed the political and cultural threshold to the formation of a commensurate collective identity and the attendant legitimacy required for effective agency at the level it understands.
The primary contradiction as yet unreconciled is how to square the weighty centrifugal pull of tribalized identity with the centripetal imperative of binding planetary association.
Blake and Gilman address this conundrum through what they call “planetary subsidiarity” — a form of governance that seeks to accommodate both the diversity of plural jurisdictions and the necessity of joining together around common universal challenges.
In their multiscalar institutional approach, governance would be distributed, like natural systems themselves, reaching scale through networks, decentralized spatially in appropriate measure to the relevant action and empowered with authority at higher levels where necessary.
In essence, what can’t be handled at a lower level must be delegated to the next step up, while no higher authority should usurp what can be done at lower levels closer to the affected constituencies.
In practical terms, they thus envision, as is already emerging, “translocal networks” of cities and regions for everything from resource-efficient joint procurement policies to close coordination of climate or public health goals, not unlike military alliances such as NATO that seek seamless compatibility of force integration across nations.
Blake and Gilman also propose “planetary institutions for planetary issues.” As illustrative cases, they call for a “Planetary Atmospheric Steward” (PAS) and a “Planetary Pandemics Agency” (PPA)."
(Noema, April 2024)