James Quilligan on the Social Contract for the Planetary Commons
Podcast via https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144292/213530/A-Social-Contract-for-the-Planetary-Commons-A? [1]
Source
* Article / transcript: A Social Contract for the Planetary Commons — A Conversation with James Quilligan and Hagen Schulz-Forberg. Global Perspectives (2025) 6 (1): 144292.
Description
“In this episode, we sit down with one of our hosts, James Bernard Quilligan.
With over three decades of experience in international development and monetary policy—as both analyst and administrator—Quilligan now serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance.
In the conversation, we explore key concepts shaping our planetary future—the idea of the planetary commons and the ecological limits of carrying capacity. Quilligan reflects on the importance of distinguishing globalization from planetization, and considers how principles from thermodynamics might shed light on the climate crisis.
What forms of planetary governance and stewardship could help us navigate these complex challenges? Most importantly, we ask whether embracing a degrowth mindset is essential to building a sustainable future. Quilligan argues for the need to adopt a new worldview—a new epistemology and narrative—that can guide us through the planetary transition ahead.”
Excerpt
Defining the Planetary Commons
James Quilligan:
"What are the commons? Let’s start there. Before there was a private sector or a public sector, meaning government, the territories in which we live were actually referred to as commons in ancient times. And then gradually, as Elinor Ostrom has discussed, while people were beginning to privatize their commons, other people were still managing the commons from within and more or less disregarding the private control that they had through governance. So, in other words, there were two kinds of governance that developed in parallel. One was a sort of public sector, meaning government. And then the local commons had a governance through the local people who were managing their own commons. So, there’s always been that dichotomy, but it’s gotten more pronounced now. So, now that we’re taking it to the planetary level, one of the distinctions I think we’re making is that as we move from what we see as global, which has to do with private sector and public sector managing the Earth, now we’re moving into a more different kind of sector, which moves us back into the understanding that the Earth is ecological, which is something that the private and public sectors don’t treat. So, the ecological component is very pronounced. It also has to do with the fact that the public sector and the private sector are really dedicated to exponential economic growth. And the planetary commons are more into, I wouldn’t call it degrowth, but I would say a slowing down of growth to what’s also called logistic growth. But we can get into that in a while. So, it’s just a different kind of framework for looking at the Earth from a more holistic point of view."
Defining Planetization vs Globalization
James Quilligan:
"Globalisation was saying there are no limits to growth. Planetization says, yeah, the planet does have its own limits. The work of Johan Rockström shows the planetary boundaries. But it’s even broader than that in some ways, because it really means that we need a new kind of paradigm, which I think is what planetisation is, because in the past, we didn’t have the problem of climate change. And we didn’t see the world as ecologically interdependent. We always just assumed that it would always be working. Nature would work it out in the background, and we didn’t have to assist it in any way, or we didn’t have to worry about it creating scarcity on a level that would be a major collapse to civilization or anything like that. Those are some of the challenges we’re facing right now. And so, part of this has to do with the fact that the way things are being governed right now is through the paradigm of Westphalian sovereignty. Nation states are individual. They can do what they want. And there’s an idea of noninterference that other nations can’t interfere in the internal affairs of one state. At least in theory, that’s the case. In theory, right. But when it comes to international negotiations, that theory is stressed very strongly. Of course. Yes. So, that’s right. And that’s a factor that I’d like to get into in a little bit about sovereignty. But that’s a characteristic of planetisation that we need to get beyond the area of sovereignty. And then, of course, there’s the idea of becoming stewards of the planet, which actually is a field that I’m very interested in. And it’s a part of what I’m calling planetary commons is that we can be."
Becoming stewards of the planet
James Quilligan:
"By adopting a perspective of the idea that politics and economics are not going to save us, people are going to have to take greater care of the planet. We don’t know how to do that. We’ve lost our we’ve lost our understanding of what the commons are. So, we have to create a new epistemology around the planetary commons because most people growing up either say the solutions will come from the private sector or the public sector, meaning government. And we don’t have a third point like commons to say, no, the commons are all of us together without the private and the public, again, public meaning government. But the common sector, and that’s more understandable as through David Bollier or Elinor Ostrom as being something local or regional where communities could be defined as commons. Now we have to transport that idea, transpose it really to the to the earth. And that’s really where the planetary commons come in. And it’s the idea that people in their own bioregions or own eco districts can get together and create their own form of governance so, that they can manage their resources and become better stewards. At the same time, we have to have that same principle happening at the global level. So, it’s not easy to do. But that’s why this idea of bridging it is also called translocal, because it means that the local is actually helping to inform the planetary decision makers about how they can work more closely with people at the global level. I’m sorry, at the local level. So, in other words, there’s got to be it can’t all be top down or bottom up. There has to be a kind of symbiosis taking place between the two. So, that’s what I think planetization is going to really entail."
Entropy
James Quilligan:
"Entropy is really a principle of disorder. So, what it’s saying is that in in terms of the industrial process, it’s saying that we’re creating pollution, we’re creating waste and we’re creating toxins that are going into not only the atmosphere, but also into the seas, into our soils. It’s everywhere. And that we have an epidemic now of entropy because we’re not paying attention to it. And that’s what I was beginning to say, the governments have stepped in or at least had been stepping in to say, well, we’ve got to slow this down, and we’ve got to protect people from the ill effects of heat waste or entropy. So, you can look at it as that the first law of thermodynamics and also of freedom in government has to do with order. The second law of thermodynamics has to do with disorder because what’s been created through the process of over-determination of order has led to disorder. So, it’s nothing that we’re doing wrong. It’s that we we’ve actually failed to understand science to the extent that we could create our economics and governance around it to make sure that we did that are our administration of order didn’t actually lead to disorder. And in fact, many theories of civilization have said that that’s exactly what happens. We build up order and then the costs of the order get so, great that it begins to create disorder. The societies collapse as a result of that."
More information
Further Readings:
Chapman, Eric J., and Carrie J. Byron. 2018. “The Flexible Application of Carrying Capacity in Ecology.” Global Ecology and Conservation 13: e00365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2017.e00365.
Quilligan, James Bernard. 2024. “Who Will Pay Back the Earth? Revaluing Net Energy through the Sustainable Yield of Regional Ecosystems.” Global Perspectives 5 (1): 122343. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2024.122343.
Rockström, Johan. 2015. “Thriving Within Planetary Boundaries: To Prosper the World Needs a Great Transformation to Global Sustainability.” Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development, no. 4: 214–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48573570.
Richardson, Katherine, et al. 2023. “Earth beyond Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries.” Science Advances 9 (38): eadh2458. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458.
Stråth, Bo. 2024. “The Value of Energy: Three Conversations with James Quilligan.” Planetary Perspectives. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/the-value-of-energy-three-conversations-with-james-quilligan/