Is global governance an effective political programme to avert ecological breakdown?

Written in 2018

The crisis is the age. It is on this terrain of an exhausted paradigm—both historical & metaphysical—that a battle is underway. (Wakefield, 2014)

If political programmes are designed in the long-term interests of the polity and social, civil and economic justice, and management is a coherent, integrous effort to address global challenges in meeting those interests, how viable a programme is today’s global governance?

Being constituted by neoliberalism, global governance is, for one thing, heavily constrained in its effectiveness by a lowest common denominator paradigm built on pervasive economisation logics. A highly illustrative case study to examine this argument is the current state of overall ecological crisis, as it engages all aspects, subjects and objects of global governance and a dense, sensitive nexus of power and knowledge relationships.

The key finding I will argue here is that irremediable contradictions exist between the economic growth imperative essential to neoliberalism, enforced by the multi-level structures and processes of global governance, and the potential to include in its political programme the autonomous, intrinsic value of human subjects, the biosphere as a living singularity and non-human individuals.

The following sections will

1. unpack the central features and dynamics of the global governance apparatus today,

2. consider practical issues in the management by global governance bodies and approaches of the ecological crisis, and

3. discuss, in relation to perspectives on knowledge and power, further ethical and structural evidence of the ineffectiveness of the co-constitutive norms and practices of global governance as a political programme to remedy the deep crisis that marks the capitalocene.

1. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE TODAY

Let’s put the following analysis in perspective.

While the concept of global governance has as many definitions as it has aspects and critics, here, I construe global governance as

the numerous activities which are significant both in establishing international rules and in shaping policy through ‘on-the-ground’ implementation even when some of such activities originate from actors that, technically speaking, are not endowed with formal authority. Usually included in this […] are international organizations, global social movements, NGOs, transnational scientific networks, business organizations, multinational corporations and other forms of private authority. (Okereke, Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009)

This coexistence of formal and informal, socio-political and economic actors that shape today’s global governance, and the multivalence of their interests, strengths, weaknesses, alliances and contradictions, are crucial to the assessment of global governance’s effectiveness as a political programme to tackle global challenges – with one especially crucial caveat: prioritising whose objectives and by what means?

Indeed, chief among the features of the neoliberal framework of global governance, which all contribute to a global, societies-wide focus on economic growth and financial value creation, are the unprecedented rise of transnational flows of goods, information and capital, supporting and supported by the globalisation of logistical and political infrastructure, and processes of economisation of the social and political managed by nodes of closely connected capital-holders (Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston, 2011). As Brown emphatically remarks, ‘[w]hen the expressly, intentionally antipolitical language of governance […] becomes the lingua franca of […] all public and private enterprise, economics has become the science of government‘ (Brown, 2015).

Other neoliberal features[1] influencing global governance’s processes and structures are liberal universalism, financialisation of the economy, a narrative compound tying together security, freedom, creativity, scarcity and the anthropocentric promise of abundance contingent upon performance, technocratic benchmarking, constantly increasing productivity and generation of new value and new markets, and, relatedly, technological innovation.  

Corporate-industrial activities thus play complex roles in governance through social, political and environmental externalities, investment in technology, aggressive resource use, intensifying lobbying[2], impacts on demand for goods and services, the exploitation of a ‘solidarity economy’ narrative (Chiapello, 2013) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) – through the funding of (sometimes indirectly) profitable initiatives and the consequent constitution of norms. This complements the agency of states, international institutions and non-governmental organisations, which, as power shifts from public to private actors, are increasingly seen as facing legitimacy and effectiveness crises (Harvey, 2014). Of course, that’s not to say government agency looks small – optimising socio-economic infrastructure to subject markets to the least possible friction requires a Kafkaesque public apparatus, since it still has the appearance of a mandate within the social contract, which the private sector is still working on. The conflation of corporate entities with civil society masks these somewhat diffuse, mercurial, but effectual dynamics of global governance.

Yet, states still tend to be conceived as the core of the global governance machine, as members of institutions, treaties, initiatives and markets. They constitute the primary level at which laws, taxes and ideologies are typically set up and enforced. Other actors wielding influence in global governance tend to be analysed in terms of their relations with sovereign power, which is associated with territoriality (Chiapello, 2013). However, globalised socio-political and economic governance is characterised by contestations of territoriality; indeed, ‘there is no such thing as a local effect in a networked world’ (Bridle, 2018).

2. PRACTICAL ISSUES WITH ECOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Let’s now look more specifically at current global governance practices in relation to ecological issues (henceforth, global environmental governance, or GEG). To what extent do these practices constitute a suitable framework to confront the ecological crisis?

• SUSTAINABILITY TALES

                The crux of GEG, as ubiquitous discourses by its government and civil society protagonists show, is sustainable development. This theme is fraught with flaws: it is as entangled with global governance as the latter is in neoliberal logics of profit creation. Furthermore, it obscures the abyss between economic sustainability, i.e. the point above which the output value exceeds the input value, and ecological sustainability, which it is generally taken to mean, as Marx’ concerns with what he called the metabolic rift caused by capitalism already prefigured, the viability of the human activity within the limits of what the biosphere requires to remain in a state of equilibrium to sustain human and non-human life on the long term. It’s important to avoid the damaging confusion between

a) the intractably chaotic character of natural systems,

b) what human life requires from the biosphere to exist sustainably, and

c) the clearly observable, substantial shifts provoked by the kinetic and entropic essence of global capitalism.

However, the very possibility of economic sustainability is uncertain if it is to be based on the political practices embraced by global governance (Short et al., 2015). Even actors meant to be the guardians/pioneers of a viable future, like the World Business Forum for Sustainable Development, are unequivocally entrenched in the economic growth-centric model of extractive value creation. The WBFSD, by the way, is run mostly by oil and gas industry leaders. The blueprints meant to ensure our survival and the planet’s viability to continue harbouring the other life forms we know, therefore, rely on a highly kinetic, i.e. resource-intensive, societal system. They are characterised by extremely energy-consuming technologies such as factory farming, deep sea and shale fossil fuel extraction, big data ‘farming’, convoluted and increasingly automated speculation, and ever shorter consumption cycles, all of which lead to irreversible disequilibria and depletion. This mirrors the fact that other areas of global governance operate through similar mechanisms of assessment, incentives, and the constantly evolving threats of insecurity, inequality and scarcity. The core of the problem is simple: ‘[o]nce we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resources use back up‘ (Hickel, 2018).

Global corporate governance actors set standards through organisations and schemes with sizeable and complex vested interests and little accountability, but also substantial resources. How can this not inevitably interfere with any efforts, when these efforts are made at some level, to grapple with serious issues based on evidence and essential priorities? This is especially true because ‘distrust of “inconvenient” science has become entrenched in market fundamentalist ideology.’ (Allan, 2017). To look at this from a vaguely critical perspective, ecological stewardship supposes a reifying relationship with the object being tended to. Again, this is clearly a case of conflicting priorities, with economic priorities being treated as equal in importance to the balance nature requires to sustain life for a while yet. It follows that this stewardship is only being enacted in so far as it represents an opportunity or clears an obstacle for capital at any of the points where the interplay between humankind and nature becomes the conversion of ‘resources’ into financial capital.

By the way, continuing the critical remark above regarding ‘stewardship’, this will probably be a banal reminder to some, but since these words are used without flinching everywhere, I’ll say it – we need to be mindful of the implications of the words we use when we think about our place within the wider world. ‘Resource’, ‘environment’, and ‘development’ are not value-neutral. They all serve to normalise our appropriation of the biosphere and the notion that the arc of history is in its optimal form when in the pursuit of growth and material expansiveness.

• INSTITUTIONAL CONTRADICTIONS

Forces within global governance institutions also affect its effectiveness in ecological protection – between 1992 and 2007, 25 times more World Bank funds were spent on fossil fuels than renewable energy, and significant projects routinely avoid ecological assessment (Newell, 2008).

General problems intrinsic to international institutions also impact global governance’s ability to tackle ecological issues. Many GEG bodies and international agreements strive to set norms while struggling to help enforce them, due to legitimacy crises stemming for instance from corruption, inertia or poor enforcement (Weiss, 2018); the withdrawal or disinterest of parties; or the impact of private funding on shaping priorities and operations. Weiss identifies a shift towards a transactional cost-benefit analysis in member states’ support to institutions’ operations, which, in the intricate context of the Capitalocene (more about that below), is a sterile approach – the very same approach, arguably, that has led to this ecological tipping point. In this sense, GEG is clearly unfit to solve its claimed objectives. The performative signalling that suggests that GEG organs, whether they are public institutions, corporations or the like, are doing anything to keep us speculating head first into the ecological abyss and taking entire ecosystems down with us, only distracts you and me from the fact that we’re too busy delving deeper into extractive capitalism to give our rather unfortunate predicament the detached consideration and problem-solving efforts it requires. A fitting closing show for the society of the spectacle, no doubt.

GEG institutions’ top-down technocracy is by definition removed from democratic processes imposed, inflexible and lacking in nuance in the face of complex, non-linear processes requiring both well-coordinated action and high responsiveness, creativity and multi-scale flexibility. This combination of capabilities ‘seem[s] to be difficult to maintain within the same institutional architecture’ (IIED and IUCN, 2016).

With over 30 UN organisations and programmes and over 500 agreements pertaining to GEG, dilution of funding and initiatives, poor cooperation (Najam, Papa and Taiyab, 2006) and inter-institution learning constitute considerable and rather fundamental weaknesses. The Kyoto Protocol or the Convention on Biodiversity’s poor results, for example, inspire little confidence or enthusiasm, perpetuating a loop of accepted failure and/or inaction.

The rise of knowledge networks, like the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, hint at ways in which practical combinations of GEG and local knowledge may improve ecological governance effectiveness (Feldman, 2012), but GEG currently fails to harness the non-zero-sum-game potential of knowledge and agency networks.

Only 0.2% of international waters are managed as marine protected areas (Raynal, Levine and Comeros-Raynal, 2016). This exemplifies GEG’s failure to prevent basic collective action problems. Some might say it conjures them into being where they may not otherwise exist, further enshrining into norms and minds the lack of alternative systems that might better address the ecological crisis (and other issues within global governance’s remit).

Consider
– on the one hand, the complexity, interconnectedness and wide ignorance of anthropogenic metabolism issues
– on the other hand, the narratives (e.g. CSR) ubiquitously presented as actionable solutions by GEG organs, the opaque and greenwashed commodification of externalities (e.g. virtual water or greenhouse gas emission trade-offs), and the lack of opportunity for grassroots and community-based initiatives to drive change, especially if these initiatives actually engage radically with the prospect of inducing systemic change.
You’ll get a fairly clear sense of what underpins our wholesale, irrational cognitive dissonance (Leitheiser, 2018) and the comparatively higher ecological stress faced by vulnerable actors (Feldman, 2012). When I say actors, feel free to consider human or non-human populations, states or other geographical or socio-political units.

Ecosystem-based Adaptation is a rather self-explanatory approach taken by some GEG organs. The mitigation solutions (IIED and IUCN, 2016) it entails are, by definition, essentially palliative. They are designed to enable neoliberalism to operate as usual until resources are depleted, while broadcasting concern regarding the welfare of vulnerable/underdeveloped [3] communities and suggesting this concern is being acted on.
Two key problems here.
1) Pragmatic solutions are often short-term fixes, as they act on visible causes and symptoms, from a narrow, rather than holistic, perspective. They risk merely displacing ecological or social strain on another part of the system whose part is being patched up.
2) There are path-dependency issues to consider. The approaches we invest in and normalise obscure other possible approaches, drawing limited resources and good will away from these other avenues. And because we’re talking about complex systems full of self-amplifying mechanisms, what may seem to be minor choices now can turn into a cascade of major, irreversible dysfunctions down the line. The fact that we can’t rule out the risk of a runaway greenhouse effect (Steffen et al., 2018) is a clear example of the fact that we need to take these side notes somewhat seriously.

Neoliberal global governance culture, being focused on cost-effectiveness, performance and co-opetition, is bound to favour this ‘adaptive’ approach. Conversely, identifying social relations responsible for environmental degradation would help recognise the actual interests at play and ‘the existing networks of environmental governance that inter-state responses need to engage and reform’ (Newell, 2008).

3. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF THE CAPITALOCENE

1. SYSTEM ILLITERACY

GEG decision-makers’ ‘lack [of] systemic literacy‘ (Bridle, 2018) or cynical instrumentalism is revealed by the foundational assumption that the biosphere is space, compressible and distortable at will, across which to carry out trade and control. The frenetic activity of trade agreements, routes and conflicts emphasises this focus on the engineering of frictionless, vacuum-sealed, deterritorialised (Reid, 2005) space for flows of capital/value/information and people. Over the past few years, citizens have repeatedly blockaded strategic transport infrastructure to protest misuses of nature, primarily by corporations, and tolerated or encouraged by GEG outfits. This form of civil disobedience, targeting logistical/transport nodes to demand ecological protection (Khalili, 2017), reveals a widespread public consciousness of the strategic importance of major transport routes for the corporations and institutions which play key, often turbid roles in GEG. Such protests indicate a frustration due to the exclusion of all possible forms of democratic process in the management of our impending ecological collapse. This degree of friction (Tsing, 2009) suggests grave dysfunction in the exercise of power regarding GEG.

It also belies the limits of the operation of the Gramscian manufacture of consent of the sustainability discourse that has supported the pervasively, confusedly technocratic neoliberal GEG machine. The global governance system is endangering the possibility of our survival, starting with the most vulnerable of Earth’s inhabitants, human and otherwise. Decisions based largely on self-interested economic priorities, but also on a simplistic understanding of nature and political economy, which call profit their master and sees endless growth as a social good despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, lead to the ultimate political consequence – which lives thrive, which lives survive, which lives die. To reprise a perspective formed by Reid (2005) with regards to another, non-ecology related failure by global governance organs to manage an international challenge, it can consequently be said that the ecological crisis is ‘a conflict fought along biopolitical lines.’ For the first time in our short history, however, the threat is potentially all-encompassing geographically and temporally. Our survivorship bias blinds us to the imminence of the precipice; our narratives, to its seriousness and reality; our intricately webbed-together, narcissistic and indoctrinated global governance actors, to its mechanisms and solutions.

Thus, what is best termed capitalocene (Moore, 2015) highlights neoliberal global governance’s role in critical structural damage to the biosphere. The term ‘Anthropocene’ wrongly implies the incompatibility of the very existence of humankind with that of non-human life, whereas, as this whole post seeks to demonstrate, it is in fact ‘a specific subset of the human, living within a particular form of social organisation‘ (Chandler, Cudworth and Hobden, 2018), which forms this existential threat. Thus the capitalocene is the epochial event horizon establishing
1) the cul-de-sac reached in the iterative process of development of neoliberal global governance, and
2) widespread disillusionment with regards to the possibility of attaining a liberal balance between security and freedom and between growth and ecological balance.
GEG’s institutions and power-wielders being either harbingers or products of this destructive model, it is therefore intrinsically flawed as an effective political programme to address the capitalocene’s disaster, being modelled after it and dependent on its distributional and relational arrangements of power and resources. Ecological needs are never going to be addressed as a matter of priority within a purely liberal system – they can at best be ancillary to neoliberal pursuits. This subordination dooms the resolution of the ecological crisis to fail because liberalism thrives on a ‘culture of danger’ (Foucault, 2010), such that liberal governance can only conceive to revolve around this appetite for destruction.

Indeed, because it can only generate reactive tools to manage issues outside the direct ambit of finance and trade, neoliberal global governance has birthed the International Monetary Fund, the International Criminal Court, and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, rather than mechanisms that would proactively prevent human and non-human individuals, states and ecosystems from exploitative integration into markets, by cultivating functional institutions, supporting the fair distribution of resources and prioritising social prosperity by design. The intrinsic potential for effectiveness of global governance to ensure human and ecological security – which fails to ‘go beyond actual physical survival’ (Turan, 2016) and even often falls short of that, whether through societal or ecological violence, or poor management generally – is thus inexistent.

• CAPITAL-CENTRIC BIOPOLITICS

The allocation of ‘life-making’ natural resources to corporations over populations is normalised within claimed common GEG goals, as can be seen in the untrammelled distribution of hybrid seeds to farmers, especially in the Global South, by key players of private global governance. It can also be observed, more generally, in food and agriculture policies advocated by UN governance bodies that often champion concentrated economic growth at the expense of communities’ and ecosystems’ welfare at the local level. New sites of biopower can be claimed, within GEG, by actors able to show signs of expertise or proactivity in ecological issues (Okereke, Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009), however instrumental their outlook on nature or the social.

The ‘bioeconomy’ narrative conceals extractive growth imperatives. Through it, the commodifying economisation of the biosphere and ecological protection are framed as compatible and equally important. For instance, the cross-sector GEG BioFuture Platform promotes biofuel, scientifically proven to be more damaging than coal, as ‘clean’ energy; the director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation claims ‘bioeconomy is a friend to the climate’ (BioFuture Platform, 2018), illustrating the illusory attempt by GEG organs to reduce the finitude and complex equilibria of nature to econometrics. Whether this attempt is honest or not is, comparatively, merely of academic value. As even the UN Environmental Programme admitted in 2017, ‘even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale‘ (Hickel, 2018). The problem with the neoliberal GEG apparatus is precisely that it fails to ask whether GDP is an appropriate measure for anything, other perhaps than the gullibility of MBA students or the ratio of verified alienation of a population.

Complementing this, a shift of responsibility onto individuals, communities and states, through calls to resilience, shows the instrumentalisation of GEG with a view to divorcing the impact of ecologically damaging industrial practices from the corporations profiting from them, at the cost of ‘degrading’ (Mezzadra, Reid and Samadda, 2014) humans.

What’s more, global governance’s technocratic framing of actors hinders the visibility of bodies, precluding neoliberal global governance from becoming what it needs to – an effective political programme to manage the biosphere and its human and non-human inhabitants in their own respective and common interests. Just like biometric markers or the poverty ‘line’ fail to indicate a measure of humans’ essence and needs, neoliberal global governance lacks the imagination, in the sense extensively used by Reid and Bridle in their works, to operate with nature, which points again to a practical and ethical dissonance between knowledge and power, characterised by the ‘disembodiment’ of the biopolitical subject (Wilcox, 2015).

All this puts in question the integrity and effectiveness of the GEG project – unless it is assessed for its ability to manage global challenges for the benefit of the private sector, which it is attempting by privileging ‘a particular rationality in the governance of social order’ (Okereke, Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009). Ultimately, even from a cynical, self-serving perspective, global governance fails to achieve even the illusion of managing Earth’s ecological breakdown because its rationalities and technologies of government are dominated and constrained by market forces and models that are incapable of serving either zoë or bios.

These symptoms indicate a need for radical transformation rather than capital-friendly, de-politicised amelioration, recognising the capitalocene ‘as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions’ (Chandler, Cudworth and Hobden, 2018), and an increasingly complex, meta-territorialised matrix of power, agency, threats and feedback loops.

I did not, in this post, touch directly on the dangerous inadequacies of current proposals for a green new deal. I absolutely recommend reading some of Cory Morningstar’s articles on this subject. However, this piece denounces the liberal project in anything even resembling what we currently know as fundamentally unable to preserve life on Earth, so hopefully this is a conclusion you will reach of your own accord. I have a lot of sympathy for Modern Monetary Theory, so I can only lament the lack of radical thinking on the part of some of its practitioners in this regard.

CONCLUSION

My objective here has been to shed light on crucial ways in which the salience of the ecological, socio-political and even economic dead end of the capitalocene illustrates neoliberal global governance’s structural shortcomings as a political programme to avoid ecological collapse.

These flaws include the irreconcilability of the pursuit of extractive profit and the survival of both humankind and the biosphere, and liberal governance’s tragic tension between providing security and providing freedom to bodies subjected to changing processes and contestations of hegemonic power – ‘to have’, as Haug and Reid write, ‘is the manner of being what one is not’ (2017). The best global governance can do is therefore offer a superficial performance that might ‘recuperate’ (Chiapello, 2013) neoliberalism’s criticisms. This suggests that global governance demands a radical overhaul beyond the palliative options offered by neoliberal frameworks of power, breaking the alienating scarcity narrative of accumulation of wealth and power through exploitation.

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[1] Davies (2014) and Mason (2015) have convincingly and thoroughly explored these aspects.

[2] See the Center for Public Integrity’s research, as quoted in Ferrial Adam et al., How carbon-intensive industry is preventing effective climate legislation, Greenpeace International, 2011, p. 18.

[3] Based on development as conceived by Duffield (2010).