Planetary Politics: Challenging the Rules of the Game

The increasing transgression of the Earth’s planetary boundaries is calling attention to the urgent need for rethinking governance and policymaking to handle the multiple, interconnected climate and environmental crises of our time. International scholarly debates have emphasized the necessity of new global responses and planetary solutions to address these planetary-scale challenges. However, most regulatory work and decision-making regarding climate and the environment still take place at subglobal levels in national and local institutions. In this essay, we therefore argue for the need to engage in “planetary politics” at all institutional levels. To facilitate this, we suggest starting from a critical assessment of the institutional logics that shape and constrain climate and environmental policy today. Institutional logics represent the formal and informal “rules of the game” in policymaking that determine which problem interpretations, practices, solutions, and decisions are deemed acceptable and necessary. Based on the planetary boundaries science, we then propose four core “planetary logics” that can be used to assess and develop policies better aligned with the best available knowledge of the Earth system. We exemplify these logics in relation to prevalent climate policies today including emissions reduction target setting, carbon accounting in relation to bioenergy, positive discount rates, and net-zero policies relying on carbon dioxide removal technologies. In conclusion, we argue that rethinking the institutional “rules of the game” in a planetary perspective could ideally foster institutions that consistently produce policies, strategies, and initiatives aligned with planetary boundaries and frame a new planetary politics that is relevant beyond the planetary scale.