An exercise in Planetary Thinking for an age of crises.
Reading “Children of a modest Star” by Jonathon S. Blake and Nlis Gilman. According to the authors of this book, the current world order is an ad hoc multi-scale governance dominated by the nation-state. In this world order, the primacy of the sovereignty of nation-states determines the shaping of local, sub-national, and global, super-national governance. According to the authors, this world order stands in the way of solving climate problems. We should not think globally, where the primacy of the nation-state is still the starting point, but think planetarily. A world order based on planetary thinking starts with the planet as a whole and allocates political power based on the principle of planetary subsidiarity. The idea is to scale up or scale down government tasks to new functional entities when policy goals will be more effectively implemented by these entities. The authors acknowledge that many facets play a role in the formation of multi-scale governance, including facets o...