Quick reminder: My talk on space sustainability and the governance of space debris and space traffic at CASSIS Bonn is in two weeks. This will be a nice follow-up to the second Schader workshop from March. I’m not sure if the event will be streamed or recorded but if you’re in Bonn, be sure to say hi. All the details: https://www.cassis.uni-bonn.de/de/veranstaltungen/kommende-veranstaltungen/24-mai-2023.
Schlagwort: Governance
I may not be going to outer space, but I will be going to Bonn to talk about outer space, which is pretty great, too. 24 May, to be specific. CASSIS (the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies) at Bonn University is organizing a lecture series called „Reach for the Stars“ and they’ve invited me to come and give a talk about an environmental perspective on outer space. Here’s the pitch: The problem of space debris has been known to experts and politicians for decades. As early as 1978, the dangers of a collision cascade of satellites and…
Why do we have the kinds of actors in global politics that we have? States, international organizations, transnational corporations, civil society organizations, experts – all of these are well accepted without question. Just open a textbook or ask a political scientist and these entities will be mentioned. But why do we have these „global governors“ and not others? In the past, nobility had a similar kind of international agency and nobles were frequently called upon to mediate in inter-state disputes. Not any longer. Clearly, global political agency is something contingent and evolving. Matthias Hofferberth and I had started to think about…
In 2021, Carlo Diehl and I published an article called „The Territorialization of the Global Commons“ in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the journal of the IR Section of the German Association for Political Science. The official version is here and an ungated version is over at ResearchGate. We compared governing regimes for five commons: the high seas, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, outer space, and the poles. Our finding was that the two „classical“ modes of governing these spaces beyond national jurisdiction – division into sovereign territory, and internationalization – had been supplanted by what we call „functional territorialization“,…
In 2010, Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore and Susan Sell coined the term „global governor“ to refer to „authorities who exercise power across borders for purposes of affecting policy“ (Who Governs the Globe?, p. 2). I’m not sure the term „authorities“ is the best one (I’d prefer „actors“) but the remainder of their book makes it clear that they are looking for authority in the legal sense but in the more practical one – a „global governor“ is an actor who gets a seat at the tables of global policy-making. The History and Future of Global Governors Who are the global…
This is my introductory statement for tonight’s panel discussion on the „Politics of (Dis)Connection“. [EDIT: The event had to be cancelled. I will let you know once a new date has been scheduled.] [EDIT: The discussion has been rescheduled for 8 February 2023.] In this input I want to talk about digital sovereignty, a very popular term, particularly from a European perspective. I want to make three points in this statement: 1) Digital sovereignty is useful for politics but bad for policy, 2) the EU and member states‘ governments use digital sovereignty to articulate a position vis-à-vis a threatening digitalisation,…
I seem to have an unstoppable logorrhea that this blog must satiate now that I’m off Twitter. Don’t get used to it, the posting frequency will certainly drop over time. But right now, I want to try a mixture of open science and personal note-taking. As indicated in yesterday’s post, I participated in a panel discussion on the governance of space debris. From the discussion, I have several thoughts stuck in my head that I want to write down here to get rid of them for the moment while preserving them in some fashion, so I can refer back to…
Space debris is a growing impediment to the sustainable use of low-earth orbit. From a political economy perspective, it is a straightforward problem of managing a common-pool resources in areas beyond national jurisdiction. However, while the problem is well-known, the current system of outer space governance is badly equipped to come up with workable solutions. In a working paper, Luca Wesel and I apply insights from Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons and polycentric governance to the space debris problem. Being political scientists, we couldn’t help but focus on the political obstacles rather than the technical, economic, and legal ones…