Planetary governance

Most of our politics is organised around the nation state — borders on a map, a government, citizens with passports. But a growing group of thinkers argue that the hardest problems of our age don’t respect those borders at all. Climate breakdown, pandemics, supply-chain shocks, mass migration, financial contagion, the flow of data: none of them stop at a checkpoint. As the writer Rana Dasgupta puts it, “the notion that power begins and ends at borders is breaking down.”

Planetary governance is the name for thinking — and eventually governing — at the scale these problems actually operate on.

Not global — planetary

“Global” still pictures a world of nation states trading and negotiating across borders. Planetary goes further: it starts from the fact that human life is inseparable from the living systems of the Earth. In the Anthropocene — the age in which humanity has become a geological force — the old dividing lines between human and nature, human and machine, even life and planet, begin to dissolve. We shape the Earth’s systems and they shape us.

Three layers, not one

A planetary lens doesn’t abolish the nation state; it adds layers. Jonathan Blake, who directs the planetary programme at the Berggruen Institute, describes three scales of loyalty and governance: the local (where our strongest bonds to people and place live), the national (where almost all our institutions currently sit), and the planetary (the scale at which the climate, the oceans, and the atmosphere actually work). The problem isn’t that we have a national layer — it’s that everything is centralised there, while the local and planetary layers are starved. The aim he describes is “sovereignty without centralisation, identity without exclusivity”: real commitments at all three scales at once.

A simple map of the planetary

One useful starting frame (from the Planetary Compendium, below) has three tiers:

1. The commons we share — bioregions like the Himalayas, the Amazon, the oceans.
2. The infrastructure we’ve built on top — satellites, energy grids, shipping lanes, the data centres behind AI. Together these have “terraformed” the planet into a human habitat.
3. The challenges that emerge — pandemics, biodiversity loss, drying aquifers — when the infrastructure we build is out of step with the commons it depends on.

Moving from a global to a planetary mindset means a few shifts: treating materials as commons rather than only resources; seeing security as a matter of shared vulnerability on a finite planet rather than each nation guarding only its own; and reading a crisis not as a one-off disruption but as a signal that some piece of our shared infrastructure is failing.

Why it’s here

This is a big-picture framing, not a programme — much like the metacrisis, it’s the backdrop a lot of civic thinking is responding to. It connects citizen infrastructure to its largest possible canvas: the same instinct that builds the commons locally, or a parallel polis outside the state, scaled up to a living planet. It also raises a concrete question — how would you govern something that crosses every border? — which the related ideas of segmented sovereignty and more-than-human governance try to answer. As Blake bluntly puts it: “there is no planet B.”

Sources

• The Launch of the Planetary Compendium — Berggruen Institute × Dark Matter Labs (2025): youtube.com/watch?v=hhTyUhc8Rm8. Explore the platform at governtheplanet.org.
• Jonathan S. Blake & Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford University Press, 2024).
• “The Death Knell of the Nation-State” — Rana Dasgupta & Jonathan Blake, Berggruen Futurology podcast.