If Anthropos seems unconvincing as a political subject for the Anthropocene, do the requirements for addressing climate change push the world towards world government? (a state of affairs that may be as unlikely as it is unappealing). Is climate change an argument for a geo-government of scientists? Are global climate treaties the only path towards effective action on climate? But as there is no world government, the provision of a stable climate still requires collective action.
Mancur Olson claims that collective action is more likely to be unsuccessful in large groups where actors deem that their impact on collective action outcomes is small and as a consequence have a stronger incentive to free ride…so perhaps articulating the challenges of climate change through multiple noncomprehensive solutions are a more likely outcome than one, all encompassing governance solution.
A promising form of collective political action is through the self-government and interdependence of cities, through urban networks. Like nations, cities earn their sovereignty through the obligation to protect their citizens. (see We, Us and Them)
Rather than examining the science itself, perhaps the social organization of science is instructive in this connection. In The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi argued that the success of science was mainly due to its “polycentric organization” —a social system of many decision centers, each having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules — in which participants enjoy the freedom to make individual and personal contributions, and to structure their research activities in the best way they consider fit. Polycentric organizations are usually organized around abstract ideals, such as objective truth or justice, that embody their values and provide criteria for success. Polanyi’s key point is that an abstract ideal as objective truth, cannot be imposed on the participants by an overarching authority. (Paul D. Aligica and Vlad Tarko, “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom,and Beyond)
For Polanyi and later for Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, a polycentric arrangement has a built-in mechanism of self-correction, and this is the crucial operational feature that explains in good measure an important part of its performance. A polycentric system is “one where many elements are capable of making mutual adjustments for ordering their relationships with one another within a general system of rules, where each element acts with indepedence of other elements”
A discussion of polycentricity has to deal with the issue of spontaneity or spontaneous order. For Polanyi, spontaneity is an additional defining characteristic of polycentricity. For Vincent Ostrom, Polanyi’s spontaneity means that “patterns of organization within a polycentric system will be self-generating or self-organizing” in the sense that “individuals acting at all levels will have the incentives to create or institute appropriate patterns of ordered relationships.” That is to say, in a polycentric system, “spontaneity” is a function of self-organizing tendencies occurring under specific conditions at several different levels.
See: Elinor Ostrom, “Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change” Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 550–557