In thousands of years … our wars and revolutions will count for little … but the steam engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic times: it will serve to define an age.
One of the central themes of classical philosophy is persistence and the puzzling nature of change. There is a similar fascination in the sciences with the oscillations between order and disorder. The impermanence of our everyday world is a trope of many religions. Politics too – ‘the art of the possible’ – is an ongoing negotiation (and often struggle) between stability and transformation, utopianism and realism, the ideal and the feasible.
Our lives and the contexts in which they unfold are but moments in the history of the universe. Our own little planet, peaceful as it may seem when photographed from space, is in fact a cauldron of unruly forces occupying a violent neighbourhood given to cataclysms. The earth is constantly remade by such phenomena as solar radiation, movements in tectonic plates, volcanic activity, meteorite strikes, shifts in orbit and changes in the earth's tilt on its axis. Life itself is among the forces that have changed the planet, from cyanobacteria producing the first molecules of oxygen to human beings now increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. How ironic that human beings, who have lived on the earth during only four-thousandth of one per cent of its history, are now the main drivers of planetary change.
This chapter explores the ways in which the Anthropocene, this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process or system escapes the reach of human activity, puts under pressure some traditional categories and concepts of liberal democratic theory. We begin by explaining the notion of the Anthropocene, and then show how it may affect traditional liberal notions of agency, responsibility, governance and legitimacy. We conclude by describing the challenge of designing new institutions appropriate to the Anthropocene.
According to current geological classifications, we live in the Holocene. This epoch, part of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era, began almost 12,000 years ago following the end of the last Ice Age. The Holocene has been characterized by relatively stable planetary conditions, especially in regard to climate. This has proven quite congenial to the reproduction and proliferation of Homo Sapiens. Human life as we know it – from the beginning of written history to the first cultivated fields, from unconnected settlements to our mega-cities and satellite-based monitoring of ourselves and earth systems – has unfolded during the Holocene.
In 1997, a distinguished group of scientists published an influential article in which they assessed the human impact on the earth (Vitousek et al., 1997). They calculated that between one-third and one-half of earth's land surface had been transformed by human action; that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased by more than 30 per cent since the beginning of the industrial revolution; that more nitrogen had been fixed by humans than all other terrestrial organisms combined; that more than half of all accessible surface freshwater was appropriated by humanity; and that about one-quarter of earth's bird species had been driven to extinction. Their conclusion, even at the end of the last century, was that ‘it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet’ (1997: 494).
In recognition of the human domination of nature, some scientists have proposed that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This term was coined by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s, but came to widespread public attention in a short article that he co-authored with Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen and Stoermer claimed that humanity had come to exert such pervasive influence on the earth as to have effectively become the main driver of its geological and biological evolution (for a more recent presentation of the concept of the Anthropocene, see Steffen et al., 2011).
While the word ‘Anthropocene’ is relatively new, the idea has been around since at least the nineteenth century as scientists, theologians and naturalists struggled to give voice to the dawning realization that humanity, with its sheer numbers and technological power, was remaking the planet. In 1864, the American polymath George Perkins Marsh was struck by the massive changes he had witnessed from the time he was a child in Vermont, living alongside Native Americans, to the deforestation and desertification he witnessed as a diplomat working in the Mediterranean region. He wrote:
There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call ‘the historical period’, they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows...
In 1873 the Italian scientist and priest Antonio Stoppani seemed to glorify what he called the ‘Anthropozoic era’, when he wrote: ‘We are only at the beginning of the new era; still, how deep is man's footprint on earth already!’1
Today, a proposal to declare the Anthropocene a new epoch in the earth's history is under formal review by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the authoritative scientific body that makes decisions about geological taxonomies. The classificatory decision it faces is highly controversial. Geologists think in long temporal spans, and the only evidence they countenance for their classifications is what can be found in the earth's crust. In geological terms, the 12,000 years we call the Holocene are a fraction of a second: the preceding epoch – the Pleistocene – lasted more than two million years. It has been difficult to find anything as sweeping or significant that has appeared in the earth's crust during these last 12,000 years as, for instance, the iridium-rich sediment that marks the distinction between the Cretaceous and the Paleocene.
The scarcity of evidence fuels disagreement even among proponents of the Anthropocene about when exactly the transition from the Holocene is supposed to have occurred – and a concomitant race to find congenial stratigraphic support (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011). Most scholars, however, simply point to the industrial revolution that began in the nineteenth century as the beginning of the Anthropocene. It is also often noted that the biological and geological changes that have been most transformative have recently been subject to a ‘Great Acceleration’, which began around 1950 and is still ongoing (Hibbard et al., 2006). The Great Acceleration also coincides with what may be the closest thing to a significant change in the composition of the earth's crust: the increase in radionuclides such as plutonium-239, which has occurred as a result of nuclear testing (Zalasiewicz et al., 2016). A recent review by Waters et al. (2016) argues vigorously for a mid-twentieth century Anthropocene onset.
Whatever the stratigraphic evidence for the proposed transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that a vast range of major, ongoing anthropogenic processes may be leaving durable marks (i.e., millions of years) on the planet. These processes include habitat disruption and massive and increasing rates of species extinction; ocean acidification and alterations of the hydrological cycle; increases in sedimentation rates and soil erosion on land; and an unusually high concentration of climate-changing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, caused by our massive utilization of fossil energy sources. Because earth's geological and biological fabric is to a large extent a function of its climate, climate change in particular can be expected to remake our planet.
Climate change thus ushers us grandly into the Anthropocene. It tracks the very form of life that Homo Sapiens has come to live – one that is resource-intensive, globalized and production- and consumption-driven. It also reminds us that the Anthropocene is not the age of perfect human mastery of nature. Humanity is changing the climate as an inadvertent by-product of other activities, and this will have unforeseen consequences, many of which will be damaging to the very species that is bringing them about: more frequent, extreme weather events; more sweeping epidemics; food and water shortages; and vast and diverse ranges of second- and third-order problems (such as political instability and mass migrations), whose details will vary in different places, times and sociopolitical contexts.
Even if the ICS declines to declare the Anthropocene a geological epoch, it will still be an important concept for understanding the defining circumstances of our present condition: unprecedented numbers of humans, rapid technological change, global interconnectedness, massive exploitation of nature and consequent ecological degradation. Each of these circumstances and their various combinations have political dimensions and consequences, and contribute to the configuration of novel operating spaces for political theory.
The most obvious feature of the Anthropocene is the growing human population and its demand for energy, food, goods, services and information, along with the need to dispose of its waste products. At the beginning of the Holocene there were probably about six million people living as hunter-gatherers; today, there are more than seven billion people, expected to grow to nine billion within the next 30 years, and into eleven billion by 2100. Many of these people command resources that not even the nobility would have enjoyed a few centuries ago; and all of them have legitimate aspirations to decent standards of living.
Improved healthcare and increased food availability have allowed many people to live better and longer, while globalized markets and technology enable constant access to all kinds of goods and services. However, none of this is for free, and many cannot afford the price. The earth is home to almost one billion people living in extreme deprivation at or below $2 a day. Many more are malnourished, die young of easily curable diseases, have no access to important information flows or are socially and politically marginalized.2 While it is true that never have so many had so much as in the Anthropocene, it is also true that never have so many had so little.
Technology is another important part of the story. The humanity that is transforming nature is organized in highly complex systems bound together by oil and gas pipelines, electrical wires, air travel, highways, train tracks, fibre optic cables and satellite connections. Technology enables the production levels that have allowed humanity to grow in size to today's unprecedented numbers. It enables shipping raw materials and goods across oceans and continents, and empowers people to move around in search of a better life, inspiration or simply a good time. It also enables ‘action at a distance’ that would once have seemed inconceivable, whether as the instantaneous transfer of wealth, resources or power; as a remote exchange of corporate or diplomatic information; or as a sexual encounter in virtual reality with someone on the other side of the planet. Technology has penetrated our lives deeply. If the screens of our computers or phones, for whatever reason, never switched on again, many of us would suddenly find ourselves with no money, no job, unreachable distant lovers and few, if any, friends. Technology is no longer something that we use: it is now an integral part of who we are.
The conjunction and effects of large population, high consumption and powerful technologies have unprecedented implications. In some respects we feel empowered: we can save a child in a faraway land by making a phone call and pledging a contribution; someone in Las Vegas controlling an unmanned drone can stalk and kill a group of terrorists on another continent; the swipe of a credit card can deliver all sorts of amenities to remote parts of the world; a few clicks at a computer allow us to instantly register our opinions about pretty much everything and share them globally.
Also, because of technology small acts can now reverberate far beyond their spatial and temporal locations in surprising and unwanted ways. By flipping a light switch I may tap into some distant source of energy and activate, reinforce and further promote the emission of greenhouse gases that will remain in the atmosphere for centuries. The accumulation of such apparently trivial, localized, individually innocuous acts can alter fundamental planetary systems in ways that have global consequences, which in turn are locally actualized. Together we change climate, drive species to extinction and acidify the oceans – thus harming and burdening humans and ecosystems in faraway places and times, and ultimately bringing trouble to the very places where we live, to ourselves and to the families that we love.3
The arguments over the demarcation of the Anthropocene fundamentally turn on whether some region in time can usefully be spoken of as qualitatively different from some previous region. Qualitative distinctions can supervene on quantitative differences rather than requiring irreducible differences of kind. It is against this background that Vitousek et al.'s study is a good marker: done a thousand years earlier, it would have produced radically different results. Life has always affected the earth, but the extent to which humanity today affects the planet (and thereby itself) is unprecedented. Whether or not this is of geological interest, it is of great cultural and political importance.
Political theory analyses the conceptual foundations of political life and evaluates the principles and institutions that regulate it. It has descriptive, explanatory and normative dimensions. Modern and contemporary Western political theory, to which we make exclusive reference in this chapter, has been mostly liberal and democratic. Liberal democratic political theory typically (though by no means exclusively) focuses on questions of agency, responsibility, governance and legitimacy.4
Questions of agency have to do with the units of descriptive/explanatory analysis and evaluative/normative concern: what are the protagonists of political processes and institutional realities? Whose decisions and actions do (or should) we evaluate: those of states, individuals, corporations, organizations, institutions, or others? Questions of responsibility have to do with who should do what, and why it is them rather than others who should do it. Questions of governance have to do with the operational structures and architectures of political life. Questions of legitimacy have to do with who has the right to make what decisions, on what grounds, and with what authority. In the next four sections, we discuss how the Anthropocene bears on these questions.
The democratic revolutions of the modern period brought us the idea that governments should act in the interests of all those who are governed, rather than acting only in the interests of a governing elite. The basic strategy of democracy is to make the governed and the governors coextensive by having the governed themselves, or their representatives, do the governing.
One of the functions of political theory is to define the political community. Democratic theory typically presupposes that the political community is constituted by agents who initiate and conduct political action, and who themselves, and their interests and welfare, are what matter politically. These agents (often dubbed ‘citizens’) are the members of the community who warrant participation and consideration. Call this the ‘agency presupposition’.
The agency presupposition explains why, historically, excluding women, slaves, children and others from the political community has been regarded as consistent with democracy. At various times and places, the members of these groups have not been regarded as full agents, so they and their welfare and interests did not matter politically or were heavily discounted. In a system in which being governed implies participating in governance, those who are not agents may be constrained, but they are not governed.
At different times and places democratic communities have become uneasy about many of these exclusions. This contributed to the abolition of slavery and the expansion of the franchise to include non-property-owning males, women and others. Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) have advocated citizenship for domesticated animals, and the philosopher Eric Wiland (2015) has argued that citizens of any age should have the right to vote. Parity arguments are often employed in these efforts at democratic inclusion. For example, Donaldson and Kymlicka write that ‘animals also exhibit various forms of agency’ (2011: 65), and Wiland compares children to illiterate adult voters. In both cases, the argument is that members of an excluded class are agents and thus already are, or should be, citizens, and thus have rights to democratic participation. In both cases, the agency presupposition remains central to the characterization of the political community.
The agency presupposition arose at a time in which democratic principles, norms and institutions were being developed to govern relations between agents who lived in close proximity to one another in space and time, and whose decisions and actions had relatively direct impacts on each other. Institutional agents were created to mediate the decisions and actions of citizens and to resolve conflicts between them. These mediating agents took different forms, and democratic polities became more or less representative (rather than direct) democracies. Still, the doctrine of popular sovereignty remained the foundation of democratic theory and practice, and the political community continued to be viewed as a community of self-governing agents.
Following the rise of the nation-state, the agency presupposition was not only maintained, but extended. International relations were theorized as a domain in which bounded political communities, themselves pictured as self-determining agents, confronted one another, each promoting its own interests. There was of course always something mythical about this picture. Nation-states, like other human communities throughout history, have always interacted with each other through cultural exchanges, trade, alliances, migrations and wars, reflecting and creating various forms of interdependency and restrictions on self-determination.
Around 1950, however, ‘a structural shift’ occurred ‘in the organization of human affairs: from a world of discrete but interdependent national states to the world as a shared social space … such that distant events acquire very localized impacts and vice-versa’ (Held and McGrew, 2007: 2–3). In this globalized world, the fates of nation-states and their peoples became not just effectively interdependent but also structurally interconnected, with social, political and economic activities, interactions and infrastructures stretching beyond political frontiers, leading to a deepening enmeshment of the local and the global (Held and McGrew, 2007: 2–3). Political decisions and actions taken locally (in selected powerful countries, many of which were democratic) now systematically had planetary implications, impacting for better or worse the welfare and interests of people in all corners of the world. In response to globalization, political theory has produced sophisticated perspectives on global justice and democracy, as well as discourses on global governance. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in its many forms, has become ascendant (Held, 2010).
Meanwhile, globalized infrastructures of production and consumption, powered by technological advancements in key industries, have damaged ecosystems, spread pollution and altered the physiognomy of the planet. This has caused disruptions of the earth's fundamental systems, including those that govern climate, whose effects we are just beginning to experience. Because such systems configure the very context of human and nonhuman life on earth, their alteration inevitably impacts the lives of future as well as present people, along with the nonhuman world.
Political theory enters the Anthropocene confronting these vast changes in both nature and culture. Political agents (living humans) have gained unprecedented power over a vast universe of non-agents that comprises animate and inanimate nature as well as those living on the periphery of both space and time. We are now in an epoch in which the circle of affected non-agents has expanded beyond cultural, genetic and spatiotemporal boundaries to include virtually everything on the planet, now extended indefinitely in time. This establishes an enormous asymmetry of power. Those on the periphery, and nature, cannot initiate and conduct political action: they cannot reciprocate, they cannot participate, they cannot protest, they cannot retaliate. In the Anthropocene, political agents have their way with the world to an extent and on a scale that is historically unparalleled. While the great empires of the past colonized great areas of the planet, the empire of the present now colonizes the global future as well.
New kinds of agents have also emerged in the Anthropocene: global agents such as multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), financial networks and rating agencies, transnational social movements, private military companies, cross-border criminal cartels, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and others. Since they are neither individual people nor governments, these new agents escape the traditional agency categories of liberal political theory, as well as those of international relations theory. Peculiar as they may seem in theory, these new agents can nonetheless be extremely effective in practice. Their decisions and actions can have very significant impacts on the lives of people the world over, on the relations of states, and on the fate of future generations and nonhuman nature. Because they incarnate very different sets of interests and pursue different goals in very different ways, it is inevitable that the agendas of these agents can be mutually antagonistic. This lack of harmonization complicates the already unstable relations among states.
These new global agents are also largely unaccountable for the ways in which they pursue their agendas, at least by traditional democratic forms of governance (Keohane, 2003). In traditional liberal political theory, agents are reciprocally accountable: individuals to each other and to governments, and governments to each other and to individuals. The new global agents of the Anthropocene are not very accountable to individuals, and in many cases they are not very accountable to governments either. Ironically, the new global agent that many hope could order this proliferating complexity and coordinate a shared plan for the future of the planet – the United Nations – is all too accountable to governments, and thus too heavily constrained by competing national interests to play these roles.
In addition to such global agents, we may be creating altogether new forms of agency that were previously unknown in nature: digital agents such as super-intelligent computers, self-directing drones, robots, distributed sensory systems, and so on. What is born as a digital support for human activities can quickly become a determining force in human affairs. Without painting overdramatic pictures of sapient machines gone bad, we can point to the apparently more mundane case of ‘smart urban infrastructures’ – a case that matters especially since life in the Anthropocene is largely life in cities. Continuous monitoring, ubiquitous computing, and the real-time manipulation of ‘big data’ are increasingly becoming embedded in urban infrastructures, enabling the city to sense the events and activities that take place within its provenance. Powered by a capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, these distributed digital systems can reflexively monitor our environments and our behaviours and, in many cases, respond without human input – thus becoming active agents in the organization of daily life (Shepard, 2011: 20). While many liberal theorists would agree that in some cases paternalism may increase the welfare of citizens and thus be politically desirable, digital agents risk introducing inappropriate, radically invasive forms of paternalism that become ‘normalized’ because they are practically unnoticeable. Traditional liberal political theory may not be well equipped to address such paternalism, especially since its sources seem not to be human, and it is difficult even to imagine how digital agents can be held accountable and to whom and for what exactly.
The collective action problems we face in the Anthropocene go far beyond those that exercised traditional democratic theory, such as the apparent irrationality of voting. Even if I am convinced that my vote matters in a national election, my country may still seem powerless to address climate change.
No single agent can solve the problems of the Anthropocene. Cooperation among political agents is necessary, but remains structurally elusive. Individuals have their daily preoccupations, politicians have their constituencies to protect, governments have national interests to promote, global agents have their own very different agendas, and digital agents are a vast, enveloping force whose contributions are crucial yet unstable. The fact that the required cooperation also extends across generations complicates matters further (Gardiner, 2011). This shifting and only partially coherent landscape of agency leaves us disoriented and sceptical about our capacity to manage our ecological entanglements. Indeed, the main obstacle to taking action on climate change may well be the deep sense of its inevitability and our inability to affect its course.
Many people see no real alternatives to the choices and actions that are taking us over the cliff. Of course I can stop using electricity, but that will throw me out of step with the world around me and do little to stop climate change. And yet the second I flip a light switch I am forced into a global network of eco-altering financial and economic interests, political agreements and avenues of cultural reinforcement whose solid yet ever-changing configuration is largely unknown to me, but which I am at no liberty to side-step and which I suddenly find myself sponsoring with my behaviour (Di Paola, 2015).
Even firms may have relatively little room for manoeuvre. As long as markets are structured in such a way that the cheapest forms of energy remain fossil-based, companies that want to do something about climate change must accept loss of competitiveness, which is just the opposite of what companies normally seek to do.
States are similarly constrained in the Anthropocene. As the global spills into the domestic, a globally changing climate may have pernicious local impacts on the territory and population of any given state. Each state can do something to alleviate the domestic, and even the global, pernicious ecological implications of the activities of its own population – through laws, education and other means. But a state can do very little against the domestic and global implications of the activities of populations other than its own, since these populations belong to other self-determining states. However, no self-determining state is immune from the pernicious consequences of global climate change (Di Paola, 2015).
What is true of climate change is true of other anthropogenic processes now under way that involve the disruption of the hydrological cycle, the nitrogen cycle and other fundamental earth systems. They enmesh us in vast collective action problems that have intra- as well as intergenerational dimensions and pose unprecedented threats: multiple, multiscalar, probabilistic, indirect, often invisible, spatiotemporally unbound, potentially catastrophic and apparently beyond anyone's control (Jamieson, 2014).
The irony is that after centuries of modernity and its contributions to human welfare and autonomy, we find ourselves at the portal of the Anthropocene with the widespread sense of a loss of agency. Together, we are remaking the planet and undermining the conditions of our own existence, though no individual or collective decision was ever made to do so. Natural and human systems are being transformed not as a result of any rational (or sensible) plan, but rather because of the unintended effects of systemic, interlocking forces and structures that have congealed and stratified in such a way that they seem to dominate our lives, our economies and our politics. Never has humanity been more powerful, yet never have ‘things’ seemed more in control.5
Questions of responsibility are closely related to agency, and just as central to liberal theory. Liberalism sees responsibility as central because among its core values is the idea that political agents are morally autonomous. Autonomous agents should be free to make choices and take actions, but they should also feel and be held responsible for these choices and actions, particularly for their impacts on other autonomous agents. The circumstances of the Anthropocene problematize this picture.
Climate change, like other problems of the Anthropocene, has been brought about by humans and will have negative impacts on humans (as well as nonhuman nature). Yet it may be surprising how difficult it can be to move from this (often denied yet relatively uncontroversial) general claim to more specific claims about who is responsible for what.
One reason is causal fragmentation: collective action problems are not only impossible to solve in isolation, but also impossible to cause in isolation. Agents of all kinds – individuals, governments, corporations and global agents of other kinds – are implicated in the rise in global temperatures. What makes this fragmentation especially problematic in the case of climate change is that it is global and intergenerational.
Another reason why it is difficult to assign responsibilities is the complexity of the causal mechanisms at work. Climate change will kill people, but increasing the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas like carbon dioxide does not directly cause people to drop dead. Vast, complex, multiscalar physical and social systems mediate between the perturbation of the carbon cycle and the deaths, making causal knowledge or attribution extremely difficult or even practically impossible. What is true of deaths is true of other damages as well: to property, species, ecosystems, and so forth.
It is widely held that causal responsibility is necessary for moral and legal responsibility: for how can I be morally or legally responsible for something I did not bring about?6 This view is closely related to Mill's Harm Principle, according to which autonomous agents can do whatever they want as long as they do not harm others: choices and actions that do impose harm on others are, other things being equal, morally wrong.7 While philosophers and political theorists argue about the scope of the Harm Principle and the details of its exact specification, it surely is the mark of a liberal state that it largely keeps its nose out of its citizens' harmless behaviour. It does the same with the harmless operations of firms and of other states. Traditionally, liberal political theory and practice want a harm for there to be a victim, a victim for there to be a wrong, and a wrong for holding an agent morally and legally responsible.8
In the case of climate change and some other problems characteristic of the Anthropocene, this sequence is upset. No one in particular seems to be harming anyone in particular: hence, no one seems to be morally or legally responsible for the deaths and damages that occur. Here is one way of reconstructing the problem: all agents are parts of the cause of climate change as they all contribute to it. To be part of a cause, however, is not to be the cause of any specific part of its effect, or any one of its many effects. The emissions produced by my car, for instance, will accumulate with those of the other billion cars in the world, travel across space–time, disperse into the workings and feedbacks of various physical and chemical systems at different scales, and at no point ever cause any specific flood, drought or hurricane. This in turn means that my emissions will not cause any of the harms that these phenomena will bring to people (or property or ecosystems).9 The nonlinear, multilevel causal rollercoaster that goes from emissions to climate change and from climate change back to deaths and damages ensures that specific instances of the latter cannot be imputed singularly to any agent in particular.
In addition, because of the enlarged spatiotemporal reach and complexity of the causal mechanisms at work, both before and after anyone dies or anything is damaged it will be impossible to say exactly who or what are the victims of climate change. Before, because we will not know their identities in advance: looking ahead we will see no more than probabilities distributed across populations (Heinzerling, 2015). After, because we will never be sure that the culprit is climate change and not something else, as climate change will only kill and damage in indirect ways, sending hitmen like floods, droughts, food scarcity, respiratory deficiencies, epidemics and armed conflicts. No obituary will ever say of anyone that she or he was killed by climate change.
In short, when it comes to climate change, no particular agent harms any particular victim by emitting greenhouse gases. If we stick to harm-causation as a condition of moral and legal responsibility, then no such responsibility can be assigned to any particular agent for climate change and related damages, suffering and deaths. In a traditional liberal framework, this means that no moral or legal wrongs are committed.
In various societies at various times, people have been held morally responsible for the acts they have performed and not just for what these acts have brought about. Indeed, many people today are morally appalled by such apparently harmless acts as consensual gay sex or flag burning, while being completely unmoved by deaths caused in war or by environmental pollution. Contemporary psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Gilbert have argued that our everyday moral conceptions, even those of many liberals, are in fact only loosely associated with harm causation. According to Haidt (2012), at the foundation of morality as experienced by most people are considerations of fairness and reciprocity, in-group loyalty, authority and respect, and purity and sanctity, in addition to considerations about the causation of harm. The problem is that climate change does not really excite any of these further considerations any more than it provides a clear example of harm-causation. In an article in the Los Angeles Times in 2006, Gilbert wrote:
When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action. Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn't make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don't feel compelled to rail against it.10
By and large, individuals do not feel greatly moved by the climate problem, nor by the fate of the spatiotemporally distant people, natural entities and systems that will suffer its worst consequences. Coupled with the difficulty in applying the Harm Principle, this results in almost no one feeling morally responsible, and in no individual, organization or institution being held morally and legally responsible – which in turn leads to widespread disengagement and thus inaction.
Liberal political theory and practice will have to navigate some uneasy waters in order to counter such disengagement. The individual behaviours that contribute to climate change and other systemic global problems of the Anthropocene are not only apparently harmless, but also generally regarded as private: driving cars, eating this or that, investing here or there, having children, and so on. Yet today, these apparently private behaviours have public consequences, however indirect, across spatial, temporal, genetic and cultural boundaries. Public and private behaviour is thus blurred in the Anthropocene in novel ways, generating new problems for liberal political theory and practice.11
At the heart of liberalism is a distinction between what is private and what is public. This distinction has its origins in two important junctures in modern history: the emergence of the sovereign nation-state, which helped configure the notion of a distinctively public realm; and the reactions to the claims of monarchs and parliaments to unrestrained legislative power, which developed into a ‘countervailing effort to stake out distinctively private spheres free from the encroaching power of the state’ (Horwitz, 1982: 1423).
One of the main theoretical functions of the public/private distinction is to help justify political respect for individual autonomy and diversity. Historically, this was mostly meant to guarantee religious toleration, later extended to toleration of cultures more generally, and recently extended to a broad range of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (see Rawls, 2005/1993). Respect for individual autonomy and diversity of beliefs and behaviours is one basic value of liberalism, but a commitment to it is also a source of political instability. The liberal philosophical grandmaster, John Rawls, considered ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’ to be the single greatest cause of instability in liberal political communities.
Rawls's guiding assumption was that the leading threat to stability would come from diverse and discordant behaviours, largely tracking diversity and discordance in beliefs. But the behaviours that drive the problems of the Anthropocene are largely uniform and not belief-driven at all. Whatever our ‘comprehensive doctrine’, we all cook and take showers; and even back-to-nature environmental activists have children. These widely shared behaviours, unrelated to particular beliefs, contribute to problems such as climate change. It is agreement in these relatively belief-independent behaviours, not diversity and discordance in beliefs leading to diverse and discordant behaviours, that is at the root of the problems of the Anthropocene, and traditional liberal theory has little to say about this novelty.
Liberals have not just traditionally postulated a clear-cut theoretical distinction between the private and the public, but have also been very concerned with ensuring that the distinction was respected in practice. In many cases – including the paradigmatic case of religious toleration – this has meant ensuring that the differences in the (harmless) private behaviours that individuals engage in were respected, both by governments and by other individuals. The response of governments to private behaviours that have pernicious public consequences, on the other hand, has been to regulate them coercively. In the Anthropocene, even taking a long hot shower is a type of action that has pernicious public consequences. Yet, from a liberal perspective, the desirability of top-down regulation of such apparently private behaviours as those concerning personal hygiene, diet, housing, investment, mobility and reproduction is most unwelcome, given the encroachments on individual liberty that it would entail.
The uneasy realization is that, insofar as one of the central tasks of a politics in the Anthropocene is to restore stability to earth's natural systems, the most effective way of doing so may involve disrupting patterns of everyday life in ways that liberals would find unacceptable. Sometimes, it seems, the Anthropocene forces us to choose between liberalism and environmental stability. Even worse, there is no guarantee that sacrificing environmental stability would not itself lead to the erosion of liberal ideals.
As we have seen, the private/public distinction is blurred when agents acting in pursuit of their own private interests have significant impacts on other agents or non-agents. The problem is magnified in the Anthropocene by the plurality of agents operating at different levels of social organization, often with unclear causal powers and even less clear permissions and mandates. In this sea of agency it is difficult to assign responsibilities because responsibilities are enmeshed across units and levels of agency: the responsibilities of one agent (or set of agents) may only be activated by the fulfilment of responsibilities of other agents (or set of agents) operating at other levels of social organization. There is often no clear way to decide which agents are relevant in a particular case, which should act first, and what exactly are the duties of particular agents even when it is clear that they have them.
This problem seems especially acute with multinational corporations, which, as noted in section 3, are one of the largest and least tamed and understood creatures swimming in this sea. Liberal political theory has traditionally had much more to say about the relations between individuals and governments and their respective responsibilities than about the relations of corporations to both individuals and governments and their wider responsibilities to society and nature. The planetary influence exercised by multinational corporations today counsels a reconsideration of priorities.
In a landmark paper, Richard Heede (2014) showed that just 90 firms were responsible for 63 per cent of all carbon and methane emissions occurring between 1854 and 2010 (see also Frumhoff et al., 2015). Of these firms, 83 are industrial producers of oil, natural gas and coal, and 7 are cement manufacturers. And 50 of them are investor-owned, 31 are primarily state-owned and 9 are entirely government-run. They are headquartered in 43 countries: 54 in industrialized countries and 36 in developing countries. They extract resources everywhere in the world, and the energy and materials they produce are embodied in products that virtually everyone in the world consumes. These firms are all still operative today (with the exception of five, previously headquartered in the old Soviet Union) and their names are quite familiar. They include Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Saudi Aramco, BP, Gazprom and Statoil. More than half of these firms' emissions have occurred since 1988, and their emissions continue to rise each year. While these firms have different organizational cultures and behave in different ways, in many cases they fund misinformation campaigns and put pressure on governments to allow them to continue business as usual – that is, when they are not run or co-run by governments themselves, possibilities that liberal political theory seldom considers, since it tends to conceptualize business in contrast to government. Many of these firms are committed to using their power and market share to aggressively oppose or inhibit moving into a non-carbon future, thus devoting themselves to the unprecedented enterprise of trying to prevent humanity from adapting to potentially catastrophic environmental change.12
Multinational corporations often act in these ways, yet they also have the potential to act effectively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They have the financing and competence required to change their own practices, and they operate at a scale that can make a difference. Yet individual companies will not act aggressively on their own if others do not. Government action can ‘level the playing field’ and change incentives. But corporations that benefit from the existing system resist change, and governments themselves face the same collective action problems as corporations and individuals. NGOs and civil society can change corporate incentives by stigmatizing particular investments and behaviours and rewarding others, yet they too face important strategic challenges when it comes to proactive mobilization, such as poor networking, lack of funding or solid organizational structures, and internal competition. In the Anthropocene, we have multiple agents operating at different levels of social organization, with structurally enmeshed dynamics, facing problems at various levels and across levels. The result is that it is often just not clear who is responsible for doing what. Everyone, even the worst actors, can claim ‘plausible deniability’.
This unsettled sea of agency is expressive of the systematicity of the forces that generate the problems of the Anthropocene. The manipulation of the carbon cycle is intrinsic to the global economy in the same way that driving a car or flipping a light switch are intrinsic to our daily lives. Coal is mined in Australia, shipped to China where it powers the manufacturing of cars, computers and other products that are then exported to Europe and the United States. We drive to work, switch on our computers and write papers about the Anthropocene. Others engage in their version of the same activities, with the same results for the planet: tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere every day. Who is responsible? Australia, China, the United States or Europe, the multinationals involved, the WTO that oversees global trade, the financial networks that fund it through investment, the digital agents that monitor trans-continental shipments, me, everyone else, or no one at all? There are no clear answers to these questions.
Moreover, these processes are dynamic. As the global economy changes and morphs, Australia may be replaced as the energy provider, China as the manufacturing site, and the United States and Europe (and their citizens) as the consumers of finished products. Agency in the Anthropocene is an unsettled sea, but deep beneath the waves runs a constant current of fossil fuels. As long as the global economy is carbon-based, the problems of the Anthropocene will persist regardless of which countries, companies and individuals are occupying which roles. In this sea of agency, each wave contributes, but can be perfectly replaced by other waves.
Everything influences everything else in the Anthropocene, but responsibilities are elusive. The Anthropocene challenges liberal political theory by disabling the application of the Harm Principle and blurring the private/public distinction, most notably when it comes to the operations of new global agents such as multinational corporations. In this world, cooperation among all political agents old and new is required, and yet the systematicity of the forces that generate its defining problems enmeshes responsibilities in such a way as to efface them. In the Anthropocene, it seems, there are no causes, only effects.
The Anthropocene is difficult to govern. There is a plethora of agents operating at different levels of social organization, with different goals, no clear responsibilities and no cop on the beat.
At the global level, there is a disquieting gridlock in international cooperation (Hale et al., 2013) as the world order attempts to adjust to shifting power distributions following the emergence of new giants such as China, Brazil and India. When tackling the problems of the Anthropocene, the cooperation of these once second-line countries is no longer just desirable, but absolutely essential. As their cooperation becomes more valuable, the price for obtaining it rises accordingly. This complicates negotiations, causing gridlock, which seems only destined to worsen because this logic applies not only to presently emerging world powers, but also to those that have already emerged and those that will emerge in the future. Global governance in the Anthropocene is cooperation-hungry, and this increases the price of obtaining cooperation from every country. Worse still, as we have already noted, effective governance in the Anthropocene cannot be as state-centric as it has been in the past, yet attempts at governance continue largely to conform to the old paradigm.
In the Anthropocene, a multitude of agents must cooperate on complex issues that are still only beginning to be understood and are open to multiple ways of framing, each of which finds different resources relevant to their solution and counts different responses as successes and failures (Hulme 2009). For example, if climate change is a geopolitical problem, then new agreements and institutions are needed. If the problem is market failure, then we need effective carbon taxes or a functional cap and trade system. If the problem primarily reflects a technological failure, then we need a programme for clean energy or perhaps geo-engineering. If climate change is just the latest way for the global rich to exploit the global poor, then we need to renew the struggle for global justice. The phenomenon of multiple frames, each of which is plausible, is characteristic of what are called ‘wicked problems’, which are notoriously difficult for political systems to address successfully (Jamieson and Di Paola, 2014: 105).
Whatever framing is adopted, climate change remains a multidimensional problem that concerns ecology, demography, development, production, consumption, resource use, trade rules, health, security, urban planning, mobility, migration, and more. Each of these domains is owned by this or that international organization, this or that department of the United Nations, this or that ministry in this or that country. There is a great deal of operational interconnectedness among these agents, but little integration. No action can be taken without involving each organization or institution claiming jurisdiction over a given domain, but because no domain can be effectively managed without dealing with other domains as well, operating at different levels of social and geographical organization, each organization and institution sees its jurisdiction fade into that of others. Jurisdictions stratify, but responsibilities dilute.
Scepticism about global institutions is likely to increase. Global institutions are not just failing to inspire and push for progress on many urgent and important planetary issues, but they are failing even to ensure a solid and authoritative framework for sustaining themselves (Hale et al., 2013). Bilateralism is again the norm and the condition for the outcomes of multilateral negotiations to have any real force; functioning regional forums for cooperation are still but a distant aspiration, as recently shown by the poor performance of the European Union in matters as crucial as public debt management, migration and foreign policy. And yet there is little to go back to: the ability of individual states to respond to the problems of the Anthropocene is hampered by many of the same forces that hobble global or other supranational institutions, and by other problems which are distinctively their own.
It was Confucius who said: ‘The Ancients who wanted to manifest their bright virtue to all in the world, first governed well their own states’ (The Great Learning, 4).13 It is unclear whether the Moderns can match the Ancients in this regard. In the Anthropocene, the global spills into the domestic, but the domestic also spills into the global.
Political dysfunction in one country can cripple efforts at global governance. Political divisions in the United States, for instance, have adversely affected attempts at global climate governance for almost 30 years (Jamieson, 2014: 22–60). Domestic policy gridlock, though most striking in the United States, is generally in evidence around the world, including in important European countries such as Italy, France, Spain and the United Kingdom.
One way of thinking about this dysfunction is through the concept of ‘veto players’ (Tsebelis, 2002). A veto player in a political system is an agent who can prevent a departure from the status quo. Veto players are specified by constitutions (e.g., the President, the Congress, the Courts in the United States), but can also emerge from a political system (e.g., political parties that are members of a government coalition in Western Europe), or from civil society (e.g., powerful industries, unions or other interest groups).
Veto players can protect minority interests, prevent destabilizing change and preserve important values and policies through periods in which they are unpopular. Veto players prevent a system from being excessively fluid and flexible. This is attractive when the status quo is desirable or an exogenous shock is beneficial; however, when the status quo is undesirable or an exogenous shock disturbs a desirable status quo, fluidity and flexibility are needed in order to respond quickly and decisively. This is arguably the situation in the rapidly changing world of the Anthropocene, with many important challenges such as migration, resource depletion, financial, cybernetic, and military insecurity, global health threats and climate change, all of which demand nimble political responses to which veto players would have to acquiesce.
Every political system has some number of veto players, with specific ideological distances among them, and each veto player displays some particular level of internal cohesion. Some veto players are relatively unified agents (e.g., the President of the United States), while other are relatively fragmented (e.g., the Democratic Party in Italy). These and other characteristics of veto players affect the set of possible outcomes that can replace the status quo. Significant departures from the status quo are extremely difficult when the set of possible outcomes is small – that is, when veto players are many, when they have significant ideological distances among them, and when they are internally cohesive. Veto players are also agenda setters, and the more of them there are, the less power each has to set the agenda. At the limit, where change from the status quo is impossible, it does not make any difference who controls the agenda (Tsebelis, 2002).
The presence of many veto players leads to domestic policy gridlock. Democracies seem particularly vulnerable to such danger, and the more veto players in a democracy the greater the degree of vulnerability. An especially high concentration of veto players explains why a powerful, rich, technologically leading country like the United States is uncannily slow to address consequential public issues like the politics of distribution, racial equality, immigration, the proper balance between liberty and national security, and of course climate change. The US Constitution separates powers in the federal government, reserves a broad range of powers to states and ‘the people’ and includes a bill of rights that in some instances effectively gives veto powers to individuals. In addition, practices have developed through time that also inhibit action, such as requiring supermajorities for certain kinds of political decisions.
The number and influence of veto players are associated with a wide range of political outcomes that go beyond blocking departures from the status quo. For example, political scientists Stepan and Linz (2011) have observed a positive correlation between the number of veto players in a national political system and the nation's economic inequality. They have also observed that the less representative the upper body of a national legislature, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. Their data show that the United States has the most veto players among 23 countries surveyed, the least representative upper house, and the greatest degree of inequality.
These problems may be extreme in the United States, but they occur elsewhere as well, albeit in different forms. The European Union is also a complex constellation of veto players including the Council of Ministers, appointed by the member countries; the European Parliament, elected by the peoples of Europe; and the European Commission, appointed by the member countries and approved by the European Parliament. The Parliament in turn comprises an even more complex party system reflecting various ideologies and nationalities (see Tsebelis, 2002: 1). European Parliament parties ultimately refer to their national bases, which in national parliamentary systems function as veto players themselves. In most EU countries, vetoes are exercised by the parties that are members of a ruling coalition; in some – notably Italy, Spain and Greece – the parties themselves have strong, direct, historical ties to industry, unions or religious associations. Political consensus in such countries is often elusive even on relatively minor policy issues.
All this reinforces the scepticism generated by the global policy gridlock that we described in the previous section, and also breeds more general worries regarding the ability of systems of governance at every level to negotiate the pressing challenges of the Anthropocene. For every possible policy change, there is always a ‘do-nothing’ alternative (sometimes more respectably presented as a ‘wait and see’ alternative) that is invariably attractive to many people – even some who claim to want action – as well as to various institutions and organizations at every level.
Among the reasons to resist change are those based on a rational choice calculus of transition costs and uncertainty about both the process of transition and the final pay-off structure. Veto players give voice to such considerations, as well as other considerations that we have already noted. They also may give voice to less rational tendencies, however, which are inevitably present in society and are crystallized in votes and market choices. Among these may be heightened attention to sunk costs, avoidance of cognitive dissonance through various forms of rationalization (after all, if something potentially catastrophic like climate change tracks the very ways in which we live, the nagging thought is there that there must be something fundamentally wrong about these ways), search for refuge in ‘what has always worked’, fear of regretting the changes made, and even the desire to maintain and transmit a sense of control by not acceding to the demands of new circumstances (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988).
At the dawn of this new epoch, our global, regional and national institutions are failing to act resolutely (and perhaps, seen with the eyes of future generations, even sensibly) to address the problems of the Anthropocene. These problems are processed differently by different countries and different political agents with different objectives, prompting different and differently motivated responses, often in contradiction with one another. But the result is undisputable: the challenges of the Anthropocene have thus far largely been met by inaction, squabbling and denial. The imperatives of change are often hard to accept.
In light of these failures, it is not surprising that there is a crisis of legitimacy for liberal democracies the world over. In the United States, confidence in government has never been lower. Only 9 per cent of Americans say that the Republican Congress is doing a good job. Republicans give the Republican Congress even lower approval ratings than do Democrats. Many voters consider never having served in public office to be a better qualification for election than experience. In a recent poll, the majority of likely Republican voters indicated that they simply did not care about presidential candidates' policy positions.14 Such lack of interest seems to be transcontinental: the EU parliamentary elections of 2014 registered the lowest voter turnout since 1979, when European elections were first held.15
Meanwhile populist movements are on the rise in the United States, as they are in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Scotland, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and other European countries. These movements oppose incumbent power structures that they portray as detached from citizens' everyday realities and needs; are critical of current policy trends for reasons that often cut across traditional ideological divides; and advocate change by popular demand, circumventing entrenched veto players and institutional agents and procedures.
What is often characteristic of these movements is a yearning for a mythologized past in which politicians came ‘from the people’, citizens' opinions and expertise were integral to the mechanisms of governance, bureaucrats did not rule, and work was rewarded rather than rent-seeking and speculation. These mantras are often coupled with a romance of the nation (and sometimes even the ethnic) state. In most European countries, these movements are strenuously anti-EU. They are fed by systems of governance with long and opaque chains of delegation, which to some extent occur precisely because of the complexity of the problems of the Anthropocene. They are fired by vivid, visceral and even uncivil expressions of disagreement that seem to ricochet permanently around the world on the internet, which in turn seems to intensify anger and impatience.
In some respects these movements are not political at all. When they come close to power they typically fracture. On the one hand, the very act of assuming the reins of power is seen as a betrayal of the impulse that gave rise to them; on the other, they are often co-opted into the traditional power structures against which they were born protesting. Either way, even the raw populist voice of the people seems quickly silenced by the status quo.
Nonetheless, these signals of popular disappointment express substantive challenges to the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions in the Anthropocene. These challenges are of two basic kinds: first, liberal democratic systems of governance at various levels seem incapable of making effective policy in many important and urgent domains; second, their actions seem distorted by unequal access and influence. The ‘dignity of legislation’ (Waldron, 1995) is devalued by arcane procedures, delegated to courts and administrative agencies, and corrupted by partisan interests (Lepore, 2015). At the same time, citizens register a loss of jurisdiction over political life and even express difficulty in or indifference to developing informed views about key issues.
Traditionally, the sources of liberal democratic legitimacy are consent (in the spirit of Hobbes and, with differences, Locke), beneficial consequences (in the utilitarian legacy of Bentham and Mill), and public reason (in the Kantian and Rawlsian tradition). The circumstances of the Anthropocene threaten to block all those sources in one way or another.
The sea of agency, the multilevel complexities and governance gridlocks, and the systemic global spill-over into the domestic mean that much of what goes on in any given democratic country in the Anthropocene is, in fact, never consented to by its citizens. The route from individual vote to domestic policy is constantly and vertiginously perturbed by the incursions of various global or other agents and by their demands and vetoes.16
As for beneficial consequences, the two most basic functions of the liberal state are to provide security and to solve coordination problems, thus providing benefits that cannot be provided by private actors acting independently. The failure to address the emerging problems of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, combined with the erosion of the sense of security in many parts of the world, is a profound challenge faced by liberal states and the institutions for supranational governance that they have constructed (e.g., the EU, WTO, UN). If the state and these other institutions prove unable to provide the fundamental public goods of security and coordination at both domestic and global levels, this legitimacy is compromised.
Public reason theorists maintain that ‘political power is legitimate only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten), the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse in the light of their common human reason’ (Rawls, 2001: 4). It is unclear that reasonable and rational individuals of such Kantian disposition could endorse the systematic dumping on future generations of the costs of climate change and other environmental problems of the Anthropocene – a dumping in which all contemporary liberal democracies are implicated. It is arguable that by Rawlsian lights no present democracy is fulfilling its intergenerational obligations of justice.17
There have always been tensions and trade-offs between these three sources of legitimacy, but typically there was also synergy. In the past, the governed could be expected to consent to policies that had beneficial consequences and were justifiable by the lights of public reason, primarily because these policies were meant and understood to bring benefits to them and had to be justifiable to them alone. In other words, the agency presupposition applied and the fate of non-agents was of little or no political concern. In the Anthropocene, the correlation between consent and the other two sources threatens to break down.
A phenomenon like climate change creates the potential for ubiquitous tensions and trade-offs between the present and the future, and more generally between agents and non-agents – those who are governed, and those who are affected. The latter will suffer most from climate change, but a democracy responsive to the claims of future generations (or those living beyond its borders, or nonhuman nature) may often have to forgo opportunities for bringing beneficial consequences to those who empower it with their votes, favouring instead the interests of those who do not vote because they do not yet exist (or live in different countries or are not human). Even if those benefits to non-agents were great and conferring them was justified by the lights of public reason, such non-agent-oriented policies might not be consented to, particularly in democracies that are already being accused of not being responsive enough to their citizens. Many believe that ignoring or heavily discounting the welfare and interests of non-agents is morally wrong, but if consent is important, that may be a wrong that democracies cannot avoid committing.
It is difficult to see how these tensions and trade-offs can be addressed from within a perspective that is founded on the agency presupposition and makes government responsive to those who are governed but not to those who are affected beyond borders in space, time, citizenship or genetic make-up. A basic presupposition of liberal democracy appears to be threatened by the very actions that would have to be taken to express concern for all those affected by the actions of its citizens.
Widespread disappointment with the performance of liberal democracies and the supranational governance institutions that they have created has already translated in many countries into populist attempts to penetrate incumbent power structures. While these attempts are often politically inchoate, occupying the space between keeping it real and getting it done, they are unequivocal messengers of strong legitimacy challenges. These challenges address concerns of both justice and efficacy, and can be theoretically reconstructed as responses to blockages of traditional sources of liberal democratic legitimacy that are variously connected with the new circumstances of the Anthropocene.
Liberal political theory has always recognized the right to resist and even overthrow illegitimate political power. This right has been used to justify historical events that liberals typically applaud, including the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Despite their blemishes, these revolutions forwarded liberal values and helped to entrench them in institutions. Unable to find consistent responses to challenges to their own legitimacy in the Anthropocene, liberal democracies may be in danger of warranting revolutions against themselves and the very institutions that should realize their values.
We began this chapter by explaining the notion of the Anthropocene. We went on to show how it puts pressure on traditional liberal notions of agency, responsibility, governance and legitimacy. We claimed that innovation in both theory and practice is required if liberal democratic politics is to secure the survival of its core values in this new epoch. It is extremely difficult even to sketch the nature of the required innovations, and we will not try to do so here. Instead, we will close with a summary of the main challenges ahead and mention some possible responses.
The existing democratic deficit in liberal states will generally have to be reduced; yet, in the case of climate change and other problems of the Anthropocene, states will have to muster both the internal coherence and strength to better resist populism, and the external coherence and strength to be more cooperative partners within the framework of supranational institutions. This seems to suggest, perhaps paradoxically, that political institutions for the Anthropocene will have to be more democratic in some respects and less democratic in others. Responding to such a challenge requires imagination that itself can scarcely be imagined. But this should not be surprising. The Anthropocene is being shaped in real time by the very problems that characterize it, along with our clumsy attempts to address them. It is one of the features of the change that is now under way that we and our new institutions will have to coevolve with it.
Governance in the Anthropocene is cooperation-hungry at multiple levels. Never has there been less of a role for ‘rugged individualists’, whether as individual people or countries. Noticing this, some advocate world government and others global federalism. While there are powerful considerations for and against both views, it is difficult to see how either could move from inchoate dream to concrete reality. Governance in the Anthropocene is also cooperation-hungry intergenerationally, and it is especially unclear what such models of governance would mean in this domain and how they might be implemented (but see Thompson 2010; and Gosseries and González-Ricoy, forthcoming).
What does seem clear is that institutions of governance will have to work at multiple scales in both space and time, incorporating the interests of the global with those of the local, and those of the future with those of the present. Currently, we heavily discount the interests of the future and the far. Besides being morally dubious, this practice may also lead to unworkable outcomes in the Anthropocene, as the traditional instruments of collective decision-making increasingly seem inapplicable (Jamieson, 2014). In any case, it is difficult to see how to adequately take into account the interests of the future and the far without unjustly subordinating the interests of the near and the present, especially given the centrality of the agency presupposition in liberal democratic theory. Democratic governments are supposed to be responsive to all those who are governed, but those beyond its borders in space, time or citizenship are not governed but only affected.
If a ‘social geology’ existed, it would describe the Anthropocene as comprising a relatively small but highly complex sea of agency, agitated by creatures that are both private and public, individual and collective, human and nonhuman, local and global, and whose choices and actions are systemically interconnected at various levels by technologically enabled networks. This sea beats on the shores of much vaster continents inhabited by non-agents who are beyond the borders in space, time and common genetic make-up. They are not citizens of the Anthropocene. They live in the darkest shadows of liberal democratic politics. Their fate is entirely in the hands of ostensibly autonomous agents whose causal powers are unclear, responsibilities enmeshed, who share no common agenda or vision for the future.
A political theory for the Anthropocene must navigate the complexities of this unprecedented social geology. It will have to coevolve with it while at the same time continuing to indicate normatively acceptable directions for much-less-than-ideal politics. To preserve liberal democratic values in the Anthropocene, such theory may need to call into question some of liberal democracy's own basic constructions.
The task is daunting, but it is also almost unbelievably stimulating. As we move deeper into the Anthropocene, perhaps the best we can hope for is that we are entering a period of intense experimentation in both political theory and practice. Non-agents may find refuge in our politics through the introduction of institutions for the future, innovative global redistributive programmes, science courts, green courts, enlarged suffrage to children and advocates for animals and the rest of nature, and novel possibilities for participation. These ideas are being theorized and to some extent implemented. It remains to be seen if and how they will work, who will win and lose, who will be made responsible for what, and who will decide about all this and on what grounds. While we must begin to act now, we will not know the answers to many of these questions for a very long time.