Biosocial Compact for the Governance of Earth Systems
* Article: Negotiating the Planetary Commons: A Biosocial Compact for the Governance of Earth Systems. By James Quilligan. Global Perspectives (2026) 7 (1): 163283. doi
Description
"As Earth’s polycrisis heightens, the public and its leaders need to discuss the organization of a new world order. Negotiating a biosocial compact for the governance of Earth systems will require the delegation of sovereign power and responsibility downward to citizens in communities, municipalities, and bioregions for the flourishing of resource democracy in their commons; and upward to citizens and representatives of planetary institutions for the protection of Earth’s biosphere. States and corporations would then focus primarily on sustaining the needs of human and nonhuman beings through lateral fiscal allocations by governments and accessibility of products and services by businesses. Local, translocal, and transnational action is key in convening delegates from all nations with the aim of rebalancing the well-being, welfare, and wealth of their populations through an agreement for governance of the planetary commons."
Excerpts
The Way Forward for Planetary Governance
James Quilligan:
"A regenerative social contract may be developed among municipal/bioregional communities, planetary institutions, and state/corporate entities, each with distinct roles and shared responsibilities through international law and governance. This is fundamentally different from the social contract proposed by Thomas Hobbes in 1651, which called for sovereign governments to protect their citizens through a security covenant to avoid “a war of all against all.” Plainly, Hobbes’s guarantee of public trust has been betrayed. The modern interpretation of sovereignty has enabled oligarchs and plutocrats to co-opt governments by commodifying and securitizing private goods, repossessing public goods, and dismissing people’s commons as free resources (Kaul et al. 1999). In this time of imperial decline, neither sovereign multilateralism nor multipolarity is inspiring public confidence in top-down authority. To build an inclusive body politic and guide the world through its risky polycrisis, governance must be regrounded in communities, municipalities, ecological regions, and planetary institutions. A mutually dependent world system, in which all citizens are free to exercise their responsibilities as sovereign stakeholders, must involve reintegrating Earth’s primary resource domains—commons, public goods, and private property—within a planetary order based on the biocapacity of energy resources for all living populations.
To reconfigure the institution of state sovereignty, national governments would delegate power to their own communities and regions through subsidiarity, allowing decisions to be made at the lowest possible level, the commons. In turn, citizens agree to let governments transfer power to new planetary institutions that represent the highest level of shared consequence, the biosphere, focusing on the boundaries of Earth systems. The new role of states and corporations, then, is to ensure the organization and dissemination of credit and resources for their populations.
Based on the principle that biophysical systems maximize their use of energy where it is available, state sovereignty could be transformed downward, upward, and from within nations through a biosocial contract, including
- downward empowerment of local/municipal/bioregional commons by nation-states
- upward assignment of constraining power to planetary institutions by nation-states
- lateral responsibilities of nation-states for the fiscal allocation of credit and resources, and corporations through the production and accessibility of goods to sustain people’s needs."
Resource Sovereignty Through Local and Bioregional Commons Associations
James Quilligan:
"Local, municipal, and bioregional communities will be vested by their nations with the power and responsibility of resource sovereignty. In devolving subsidiarity to the areas where people reside and work, nations will grant their citizens the right to develop the local resources necessary to live within their own life force, abilities, and surroundings. Archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary science have shown that long before states or markets existed, tribal societies expressed their well-being through the smallest-scale organizations capable of governing generative activity through food, water, land, ritual, and knowledge. Empowering this was the energy of people working together in local and regional environments, where wealth is conjoined and reciprocal (Redman 1999). In its indigenous form, a “sovereign” commons expresses the legitimacy of people to participate in mutual agreements for the place-based labor and knowledge that originate in environmental resources, regional habitats, and cultural traditions, often recalling the survival of their communities through agriculture, industry, technology, or war. In most societies today, resource democracy continues to motivate a variety of groups through the production of energy resource systems maintained within their social and ecological capacities (Odum and Odum 2001, 183--249; Ostrom 1990).
By reinvesting resource surpluses in community well-being rather than for profit, most tribal areas, small towns, farms, and bioregions remain the ontological basis of this Earth-centric experience. New forms of decision-making have also emerged as these centers of local power incentivize broader partnerships and solidarity among indigenous lands, rural environments, collectives, workplaces, and cities (Odum 2007, 332--79). For decades, translocal and transnational groups have been shaping powerful coalitions of youth and future generations, ecologists, climate justice circles, scientific guilds, and digital cooperatives through their shared identities and work (Bollier and Helfrich 2015; Cato 2013; Ribo 2012). By anchoring the power of sovereign resources, commons associations are becoming autonomous yet strategically implanted within larger state and planetary commons structures, sowing within them the incentives for ecological resilience, mutual support, and regenerative cooperation (Bauwens 2023). This reconfigures bioregional communities into living organs with political power, since they are the only groups that habitually observe the constraints of their biocapacity (the bounded conditions of land, matter, energy, ecology, and demographics), while working within the bioregional feedback loops that are the basis of their regenerative well-being. Commons networks are already burgeoning in numerous town and pastoral settings, attracting new generations of coworkers (Bollier and Helfrich 2019; Brewer 2023; Dolsak and Ostrom 2003). Cross-boundary collaboration is also spreading among many ecological and cultural basins, such as the Amazon, the Andes, the Alps, Normandy, and the Sahel. In translocal areas like these, bioregional assemblies, comprising residents, indigenous stewards, aid networks, cooperatives, community planners, local governments, and scientists, are eagerly expanding. With newly found subsidiarity from their nations, these varied watershed councils, regional land trusts, and regenerative farms will gain greater political authority to administer local land use, water rights, and cultural norms through their energy budgets, using deliberative processes such as open source governance to track the stocks and flows of energy within their local and regional commons (Odum 1996; Ostrom 1990).
Instead of the core-periphery dynamics that have made municipalities bitter competitors with communities and bioregions for resources in the past, they will partner much more closely. For instance, as city planning and policy align with adjacent bioregional commons for watershed management, water-sharing compacts, seed banks, reforestation corridors, migration guidelines, and climate resilience buffers, they will confederate through mutual assemblies, knowledge exchanges, and community trading pools (Dolsak and Ostrom 2003). A commons reserve value could then be created to undergird redeemable vouchers in the collective exchange networks of thousands of municipal/bioregional communities. This rebalancing of power through the adaptive cycles within regional systems could be expressed through all strata of governance, not only in lawmaking, but thermodynamically synchronized at scale, engaging the self-sustainment and well-being of future generations and nonhuman life. Rather than draw upon debt-based assets, currencies, and investments that are underpinned by the “sovereign reserve value” of climate degradation and energy depletion, the biophysical practices in commons communities will result in block-level ledgers, commons reserve currencies, bioregional trusts, and public banks for bioregenerative financing."
Planetary Stewards for the Management of Planetary-Wide Risks
James Quilligan:
"While commons remain the local and regional anchors of cooperation, planetary stewards will now manage planetary-scale risks, monitor biospheric health and well-being, coordinate emergency responses, and authorize public goods based on the useful energy that society has available and whether its use can be sustained over time (Odum and Odum 2001, 133--70). Rather than a world government that commands extraction or accumulates resources, the stewards would serve as a counterbalance to state sovereignty through the revaluation of cross-border energy systems. The skills and expertise of citizens, indigenous representatives, regional commons workers, and Earth systems researchers may qualify them to work in these institutions, along with scientific experts from various transnational and accountable bodies. Elected to these positions by local and regional publics, they would set ecological constraints, protect transboundary commons for health and safety, and act as cross-scale auditors for climate stability, biodiversity security, ocean integrity, atmospheric commons, planetary data, and monitoring systems (Richardson et al. 2023; Rockström et al. 2025).
To embark on these duties, there could be three departments:
- Planetary Commons Assembly (PCA)—created alongside the UN General Assembly to measure, set limits, and trigger corrective action as biophysical thresholds are breached
- UNTrusteeship Council (UNTC)—reestablished to guarantee equal decision-making on the security and provisioning of biophysical resources for Earth’s population
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—transformed into a board of accounting standards to provide input to bioregions and municipalities that act as trustees for planetary boundaries, and to states and corporations as their auditing authority
Citizen conventions that deliberate on biospheric issues may submit recommendations to these bodies (Archibugi 2008). Evidence-based reports may also be received from translocal assemblies, consisting of delegates from bioregions, youth and future generations, indigenous representatives, transnational civic movements, and scientific agencies. Experienced in ecological accounting for climate, forest, soil, water, and ocean systems, commons groups may develop digital governance hubs to manage the resources of their own regions using AI, Web4, or satellite tools. Similar technology may be used to track Earth systems health, community resilience, and biophysical energy flows. A further use of biophysical metrics is to bring the BRICS, G20, and G7 nations together with small states for deliberations on Earth’s ecological infrastructure. As the atmosphere, soil, water, plastics, biodiversity, and ecological limits become new trusteeships of governance, alongside peace and safety, this council would consider a hard ceiling for growth increases and the expansion of public welfare. They would start by examining biocapacity resilience as a window on planetary security, including mutual climate accounting, biodiversity credits, and planetary adaptation funds. Potentially evolving into a negotiating entity, the council may provide input to PCA, UNTC, and UNFCCC on the planet’s resource thresholds and its energy security across bioregions. In the meantime, the IMF, World Bank, and other banking, accounting, and financial institutions would base their biocapacity metrics on the rate at which energy is mobilized, transformed, and reinvested in the adaptive throughput of ecosystems (Cohen 1995, 161--364; Gilman 2025; Odum 2007, 209--20). Rather than a single currency maintained by the hegemonic reserves of a United States or China, this may lead to negotiations for a new monetary system based on the biopower rate of Earth’s resources (Liu, Yang, et al. 2021; Quilligan 2024, 12--13)."
On the future role of corporations
James Quilligan:
"Rather than state capitalism, nations and corporations, now operating as utilities for credit and resource accessibility, will be legally bound to the planetary protocols for bioregional accountability. Just as commons are protectors of sustainable growth and planetary institutions are responsible for ecological ceilings, the functions of states and corporations are to reconcile these assets and liabilities to provide for infrastructure, technology, finance, ecosystem, and social needs. Hence, the economic data that decision-makers use will be sourced and accounted very differently. Currency value will express the surplus energy that is invested in the sustainment of life and civilization, including the real cost of energy, materials, and ecological services that support economic production and consumption. Untethered from sovereign restrictions and debt-based metrics drawn from within national or subnational political boundaries, value creation in state policies and corporate activities will be derived through the bioregional/planetary stocks and flows of energy across the biocapacity thresholds of population self-sufficiency and regeneration (Cohen 1995, 161--355; Odum and Odum 2001, 171--93)."
More information
- Bauwens, M. 2023. “P2P Founder Unveils How Global Connections and Commons Initiatives Can Transform Socio-Political Structures and Foster a Hopeful Future. Interview with Michela Ventin.” Design-Code.
URL = https://www.designdecode.org/michel-bauwens/