Governance
This note is about governance and especially ecocentric, ecological, more-than-human, and interspecies forms of governance.
Cf. Participation, Participatory Design
Definitions
"What is government and what is it to govern? Governance structures chronology (our lived experience of time) and borders (our political boundaries of space and place); corporality and mentality; conviction and contentment. All governance operates between past and future, between the already and the not yet. But in our present, our everywhere now, the stakes are planetary and so too must governance be, because humankind now has a greater capability to disrupt nature than ever before." 4
Approaches
- governing through keystone species 1
- ecological law, systems thinking and the need to govern within ecological limits, such as planetary boundaries 2
- covenant of life 3
"an intuition that the inclusive wholes in which we participate are ultimately covenantal in character, which is to say that the cosmos, the Earth and the places we inhabit are integrated with an integrity not of a machine, or an organism, but of a community composed of semi-autonomous beings, each of value to itself, to the others and to the whole, and bound by mutual loyalties to the fulfilment of every member and the relationships that join them. The covenantal worldview reconciles human existence and ecological integrity in one unified moral and natural order whose realization is both the precondition and the outcome of the unique vitality of each unique individual and life-form."
- governance of ecosystems vs ecological governance 4
The Need for More-than-Human Governance
Some notes on the need for the direct involvement of nonhuman 'voices' expressed as limitations of or challenges with existing approaches.
The problem with rewilding is that it can be very cruel to individuals. Further, rewilding as it is envisaged by the salad dressing practise from Singapore can lead to short term tenure linked to the age of the buildings. This will undermine the Integrity of ecosystems and will lead to suffering and death.
The problem with care is that this approach is paternalistic. It presumes that care is delivered by some more powerful party, typically by humans. It is possible to imagine mutual care, however in most cases the relationship is asymmetrical.
The problem with conservation/preservation is that it is likely to be ascribed to entities that are already of some significance to humans. For example cultures that already have a special relationship to nature, such as Indigenous cultures of New Zealand or in Ecuador, will be in a better position to mount influential advocacy. However, all human cultures have a constrained access to the rest of the living world and are thus poorly positioned to advocate on behalf of all. Human preservation and human advocacy will also not be sufficient in environments where human presence does not exist or is uncommon, for example in Antarctica or on Mars and in the environments.
In relationship to heavily damages, barely living or nonliving environments such as the Aral sea, post-industrial landscapes or Moon and Mars, an interesting approach would be to consider interspecies forms of governance. For example, such governance could consider rights of non-human stakeholders such as plans. This approach would seek to obtain the permission from plants and compensate them fairly for their efforts.
The problem with the idea of native species is the cruelty or at least injustice/disproportionality that are often required to keep them viable in the face of increased connectivity, the already-existent presence of 'invasive' species, habitat change, climate change, functional extinction and difficulty or impossibility of natural recruitment, etc. Further, native in many cases does not mean self-sustaining at the scale of tens of thousands of years as the landscape have long been modified and managed by humans. The modifications by early humans are often substantial. The megafauna, keystone species and the character of vegetation are often very different, with ecosystem dynamics and the biotic communities also different from prehuman states.
The problem with spontaneous ecosystems is that in many cases they cannot really be spontaneous (while on the other hand some dynamics are always spontaneous irrespective of human intentions). Where spontaneity is possible, it is likely to be benefitting a rich and mutually poised ecological community where it is relatively old or - if it is closed, like on islands - in situations where it has expanded to fill the available niches. In other cases, spontaneity can result in all kinds of effect including reduction of complexity and die-off. That is spontaneity is not necessarily positive characteristic. Maybe in the same way as vulgar distributionism, or field-commander activism without checks on power can lead to trouble in human societies.
Footnotes
Jennings, Bruce. “Governing Ecological Governance in the Anthropocene: A New Covenant of Eco-Communitarianism.” In The Crisis in Global Ethics and the Future of Global Governance: Fulfilling the Promise of the Earth Charter, edited by Peter Burdon, Klaus Bosselmann, and Kirsten Engel, 126–42. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019.˄
Lorimer, Jamie. The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.˄
Anker, Kirsten, Peter D. Burdon, Geoffrey Garver, Michelle Maloney, and Carla Sbert, eds. From Environmental to Ecological Law. Milton: Taylor & Francis, 2020.˄
Engel, Roland J. “What Covenant Sustains Us?” In Reconciling Human Existence with Ecological Integrity: Science, Ethics, Economics and Law, edited by Laura Westra, Klaus Bosselmann, and Richard Westra, 277–92. London: Earthscan, 2008.˄