Rethinking Global Governance with the Planetary Compendium – A Conversation with Jonathan Blake

For the fifth episode of this season on “Global Governance Beyond Neoliberalism,” our host, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, had the pleasure of speaking with political scientist, Jonathan Blake. Blake is the Associate Director of the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute, an international network of experts focusing on developing innovative, foundational frameworks that tackle questions involving the future of global governance. Through the Planetary Program, Blake and his colleagues have developed the Planetary Compendium: a website made in collaboration with Dark Matter Labs that showcases interactive, audio-visual case-studies concerning issues of planetary governance, health, economics, ecology, and more. This episode explores some of these case-studies and navigates questions of thinking outside of the boundaries of democracy, the possible evolution of political processes, and working together towards planetary governance. 

Academic Reference: 

Jonathan Blake, Hagen Schulz-Forberg; Rethinking Global Governance with the Planetary Compendium—A Conversation with Jonathan Blake. Global Perspectives 13 May 2026; 7 (1): 161510. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2026.161510

This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

Transcript

Hagen: Welcome to this new episode of Planetary Choices. Today with me is Jonathan Blake. Jonathan works as director of the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute. He’s a political scientist with a vast amount of experience in various other positions at foundations across the United States. And since five years, he is at the Berggruen Institute, pushing the planetary agenda there. Lots of initiatives, ideas, outputs. He co-authored the Children of a Modest Star (2024), with Nils Gilman, whom we’ve had the pleasure to talk to, for another episode of this podcast. But today, I welcome Jonathan, particularly because of a new initiative of Berggruen, which is the Planetary Compendium, a wonderful, immersive sphere that we can all look at and learn and, well, be astonished by the “Wunderkammer,” as it’s called. But to cut it short, welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Hagen: Let’s start maybe with your background. What got you to Berggruen and what is this Planetary Program in a more broader perspective?

Jonathan: Yeah, thanks. I’m a political scientist by training, as you mentioned. I’ve been long interested in questions of governance, of world politics, of conflict. And then over, you know, that was kind of the training I had done in graduate school. But then kind of towards the end of graduate school, you know, kind of too late for a dissertation and all that. But my interests really started shifting as, you know, the climate, climate change became just a growing issue politically, and also just visibly. It became impossible to ignore. And I felt that too many people were ignoring it and wanted to try and understand how we could do better.

And then, of course, came the pandemic. So suddenly, we have these two planetary scale issues. And Nils and I were having conversations through the summer of 2020, basically kind of looking at these situations, you know, on the one hand, climate, this slow rolling catastrophe, and then, you know, this kind of acute crisis of COVID. And trying to understand, you know, what do they have in common? Why do we seem to be failing at both of them? And we arrived at looking at them through this planetary lens and trying to understand the problem through the lens of the mismatch of governance, right? That the reason that these two issues aren’t being governed is really because they can’t be governed. Because they are both bound only by the Earth system itself. They are products of the interaction or, you know, the entanglement of humans with the planet, with the biosphere, and with all the other kind of, you know, elements of Earth. And as a result, trying to solve them through this patchwork approach where we take this sphere, divide it into 193 parts, call them independent sovereign nation states, and then say, “All right, go out and try and solve these problems that…” you know, like carbon is kind of…the atmosphere of carbon being the most kind of canonical example in that, once it pumps into the air, into the atmosphere, it’s just there. It doesn’t matter that it came out of my tailpipe here in Los Angeles or, you know, your heater in Aarhus, like, it all becomes part of this planet, you know, planetary wide atmospheric, you know, chemistry that affects us all.

And so, we came to realize that there’s this fundamental mismatch. But in thinking about these issues, we didn’t, you know, we didn’t want to just recreate, you know, thoughts about kind of this top-down approach that thinks of the planet as a whole, undifferentiated because we’re also, of course, acutely aware that people both have varying degrees of causality to these planetary crises, to these planetary problems, not all of them are necessarily crises. Not even —- actually, let me correct —- none of them are even problems, but phenomenon, many of which are challenges, but not necessarily all of them. And people have…And, but they also experience them differently. So, we wanted to come up with a framework that allows us to understand the relationship between, on the one hand, this kind of these vast planetary processes, like atmospheric chemistry, or, you know, global biodiversity, things like that. But also, the lived experience of individuals in their communities, which are obviously quite local, quite grounded, quite, you know, emplaced around the world and that leads to, you know, very different things. So as a result, we thought that the planetary and trying to understand planetary dynamics, and then, you know, how these scientific principles kind of are mediated through philosophy, and then we took it as our job to think through as an opening gambit, not the final answer, but as kind of an initial provocation how they could map on to governance challenges.

Hagen: Well that’s, that’s quite the task.

Jonathan: It’s kept me busy. It’s kept me busy.

Hagen: I’m sure you still are busy! But already there in your exposé, you mentioned, okay, the top-down, you know, connections from the, you know, the local to the from down, down to the ground, and trying to capture the local phenomena that connects with the, you know, global geo-biochemical realities, and the impossibility of the existing governance system to effectively mitigate any kind of issues that occur there, particularly, of course, the environmental crisis that that is happening right now. So, you have a Planetary Program in order to do that. So, it wasn’t, it’s not only you and Nil’s, I guess. So, you have, there’s a broader agenda there.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Hagen: Tell us about that.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. So, the Planetary Program, which has been around for about five years at the Berggruen Institute, which I mean, just broadly, basically is a private research institution headquartered here in Los Angeles but also with offices in Beijing and Venice, Italy. That’s really about developing, you know, foundational ideas, you know about shaping the future about thinking through what are the…what do we need to be thinking about fundamentally about the 21st century. Building new conceptual categories and frameworks that really transcends the typical academic disciplines and drawing on both a global network of thinkers, and also thinking beyond any of the kind of established categories to really promote critical inquiry into the portion.

Hagen: Sorry, but what are those, what are those new categories when you move beyond? So, I imagine you move beyond, let’s say the nation state, or you move beyond classical political categories. What are the new ones? What happens to ideas of democracy, of representation?

Jonathan: Great question! Yeah so, there’s some categories that we think we just, you know, that need to be thrown out and move beyond. I mean these are all, you know, we all kind of know like, you know, neoliberalism. Let’s, let’s, let’s get a better economic framework. But things like democracy. So, that’s one of the main focus areas of the Institution will be in a program called Renovating Democracy is basically, we look around democracies are having challenges all around the world. This is not just an American problem; this is not just a European problem. That the pressures that come from a whole wide range of things, you know, vast economic inequality, the new information system that’s coming out of the internet and social media and now of course AI. And, you know, also just, you know, these vast technical systems that people no longer feel empowered, and that, you know, the whole point of democracy is to empower the people to have a voice in how they are governed, and a lot of people across the political spectrum no longer feel that that’s the case.

So, the work here is, in this program, really focuses on well how do we maintain, how do we get back to the roots of democracy? Into the roots of having a relationship between the people and the government? Looking at the systems that we have and realizing that maybe, you know, they’re not the best we have. So, a lot of the work there is about rethinking outside of the boundaries of just strict electoral representative democracy.

And you know we’ve been using elections as the mechanism for democracy since the Greeks. So, this is a very ancient technology, and we now have lots of new other ideas. And what I like to joke is that, in the American case, if you were to bring back the founding fathers —-Madison, Hamilton, you know, Jefferson, all them —- and show them how we run elections today, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly how we set it out 250 years ago,” right? Like this is…there’s no change. We get together on the, you know, second Tuesday or whatever, right, and you have a list of people that you can vote from, and you pick them. And you know, now we use computers to count them, but fundamentally it’s the exact same political technology. And we now have other ways to think about, you know, to basically gather and —- what I should, let me take it back —- during the Enlightenment, when they came up with this, this was cutting edge technology, right? This was like the best way that you could figure out what the people wanted. It was certainly better than just having the king say, “I want x I want y.”

But now, we have all sorts of different ways. We’ve tried this out now for 250 years and it works well for some things but maybe not as well for other things. So, this is not of course saying we give up on democracy. This is rather, what other tools could we use to return to the true promise of democracy? So, these are things like citizens’ assemblies. How do we engage average citizens in the, you know, in deliberative processes to actually come up with solutions themselves? And these are things that have been used, you know, to quite success in places like Ireland, most famously France, municipalities throughout the world. So, you know, what could democracy look like if we start to imagine other mechanisms, besides just, you know, representative vote, then let the politicians do what they want and then that’s back in four years. So, there are other more deliberative, more participatory, more engaged and engaging ways that we can move democratic processes to really get back, like I said, return to their fundamental promise. So, that’s kind of a lot of the work that we’re doing around democracy.

Hagen: Well, that sounds amazing. And it doesn’t at all sound like you want to get rid of democracy, but it more…Okay, so if I…but that would translate in my every day, that I could participate in democratic processes pretty much every week almost, you know, if this is up, you know, and cast my vote, be part of a discussion that feeds into a larger policymaking process. Now, there’s a lot of legitimacy that I would say.

Jonathan: That’s, yeah! A lot of legitimacy and also a lot of research shows that it leads to kind of better outcomes that we, you know, instead of electing politicians and let’s, you know, whether they’re left-wing, right-wing, centrist, whatever, like politicians are weird people, right? You know, like if you’re, you know, they’re not the average person who’s really, you know, wants to stand up in front of a crowd and say, “This is who I am, vote for me,” you know, “I want to be the center of attention,” and all that. That’s a particular type of person. But like, you know, research shows that when you actually take a cross section of society, get them in a room for a number of weekends in a row or whatever it is, sequester them for a month, you know, there are different ways you can do this. And really say, you know, bring your values, bring what you believe, but be open to other possibilities, be open to other people, be open to their humanity and let’s have a real conversation. Let’s have a real discussion. Let’s really deliberate, get, you know, you come up with really incredible things that are less polarizing, less extreme and people end up feeling happier about them. Not to mention, as you say, you know, extremely legitimate, these come from the people. This gets back, like I keep saying, to the core meaning of democracy.

Hagen: You mentioned the Enlightenment, and you criticize the way we have representative democracies today. So, is it that you want to basically cut out those representative institutions? And but what’s the promise? I mean, there’s mostly a theoretical promise in institutions. What’s the Enlightenment idea of a republic —- of a “res publica,” you know, that which affects the public, or that is what is the cause or the deed or what matters for the public —- is that Kantian idea of that any law that you are under, or that applies to you, you should have been part of writing.

Jonathan: Mhm.

Hagen: No? Do you see that echoing that kind of idea in what you’re saying?

Jonathan: So, I wouldn’t say that we should be tossing out all representative institutions. I mean, modernity is simply too complex to really to have one answer for everything. To say that, “Oh, it’s citizen assemblies for everything.” For example, you still need some sort of executive that can act quickly. You know, in the case of, obviously, of war, or to go back to the early days of COVID. You know, we didn’t really have enough time to…it wouldn’t have made sense to be like, okay, let’s quickly, let’s go around and, you know, randomly select a bunch of people, bring them together, which of course, you know, would have been dangerous —- it turns out, right —-like, or put them out together over Zoom to deliberate and let’s, you know, hear from the experts and, you know, we have to get them up to speed and teach them about virology and teach them about public health and teach them all this stuff, and then let them deliberate and blah, blah, blah. That’s good for some things. But you know, there are clearly still need to be some executive functions that are held by people who kind of can speak for that in the name of the people without necessarily checking their every move. So, it’s not necessarily saying let’s eliminate electoral representative democracy and replace it with these more deliberative processes. I think, but I think that there can be ways that we integrate the two or any…

Hagen: …You know, legislature, right?

Jonathan: Right.

Hagen: On a common level.

Jonathan: Exactly. And you know, there, but you know, we could still think of ways, you know, how could we have a legislature that maybe would serve, you know, for two or four, six-year terms. But, you know, imagine it being randomly selected citizens. Instead of elections every four years, every four years, there’s a process of what’s technically called sortition, right? That you would just get a letter in the mail, an email saying, “Hey, you’ve been selected to,” you know, “become a member of the legislative assembly.” And, you know, you have to report to the Capitol or, you know, whatever it is. And of course, and again, this goes back to these earlier meanings of how, you know, democracy was practiced in early republics in Florence and in Venice. In Athens, like, there was this random selection that really was the people. So, yeah, I think there…it’s not about one or the other. It’s about how do we integrate or take the best features of both of these systems and create new more creative ways of governing ourselves that would hopefully enhance outcomes and legitimacy.

Hagen: Does this imply, if we think now, if we bring another planet, this sounds great and innovative in terms of the technology that we have related to the democracy and the problems of representation that we sometimes have, or that we see all over the established liberal democracies and the wider world. Does this also imply now if we then bring the planetary perspective in here as well, that the scope or the borders of political constituencies that are governed democratically need to change as well? Would you, for example, envision, I don’t know, alright, let the biosphere or let a bioregion be our constituency.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Hagen: Right? And then, we not only govern our social and economic problems together, but we also include our environmental and our resource issue. And because that would be, for me, a question, do you see those as separate or do you see those as belonging together?

Jonathan: No, I fully agree with that. The existing boundaries that we have of nation states, but also of municipalities, of regions, come out of a history that just didn’t take into account many of the problems that we encounter today. Right? So nation states, the boundaries of nation states, and I’m here talking mainly about the places that kind of had some say in it, not the places where colonial authorities just drew lines on maps. But nation state boundaries were basically trying to match the people to the state, right? This is Ernest Gellner’s famous definition of nationalism, is aligning the boundaries of the nation with the boundaries of the state. And this took place through a process throughout basically the 19th century. You know, the end of World War I, they moved, moved boundaries to match the people. The end of World War II, they moved people to match the boundaries. “Moving” there is a very gentle word for what was actually happening, of course. Though actually, that’s worth highlighting. These were very violent processes the whole time, very violent processes of matching nations to states. But that didn’t take account of things like water governance, watershed management, right? You often have rivers, of course, cross boundaries.

Actually, one of the oldest international organizations was with the Rhine River Commission, right, between France and the Holy Roman Empire, to be able to manage the navigation and management of the Rhine. So, but now, of course, a lot of the problems that we face have exactly to do with things like, where’s the water going to come from? And these sort of more ecological problems have different boundaries. Like you brought up bioregions. There’s, of course, a big movement —- well, I don’t know big —- but there’s a movement to push for bioregional governance. That, like, let’s actually make our governance units match with these kind of more ecological boundaries rather than political, social ones. And this would mean, could mean, several things. On the one hand, it means, so, take an example I think a lot about is: I’m in Los Angeles, just two hours south of me is a megalopolis that is known as both Tijuana and San Diego. But those are really, effectively one city. I mean, they just run into each other, that happens to have an international boundary that runs through them. But if you cough on one side of the border, someone on the other side is going to get sick. And the Tijuana River itself, you know, goes through, you know, goes through [the border]. Birds fly back and forth. And as a result, like, it would make much more sense on certain issues that you have more holistic governance that crosses the border. On other examples, though, you’d want to think about within a nation state actually divided up into smaller bioregions, right? There’s the call, particularly for the Cascadia bioregion up in the Pacific Northwest, Washington, Oregon, parts of Northern California, that they have a more cohesive ecological unit than just the boundaries that divide, you know, the states, even if it’s all within the United States, you can think about how that how that might work.

So 100%, rethinking boundaries is precisely one of the ways when we start taking adopting planetary thinking adopt, you know, adopting this, this perspective that doesn’t take existing boundaries for granted, tries to think beyond them, tries to transcend national boundaries, or really any administrative boundary, lets us see things anew, and try and match the administrative units with the problems, rather than trying to squeeze the problems into the existing administrative units.

Hagen: If I were to play the devil’s advocate, and one could maybe then say, “Well, there’s so many problems, do we need to have administrative units for each of them?”

Jonathan: Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, yes, of course, right? Like you could say, well, but you know, “what about this, what about this, what about this?” I mean, I think at a certain point, we still have to make decisions, right, about which one what we’re going to prioritize. I mean, prioritization is always the central, you know, one of the central questions of politics. So, there’s still a role for politics here. There’s still actually a very important role. This is like, you know, another devil advocate could say that this is a totally apolitical, or even anti-political approach. But I would disagree to say that politics is still absolutely central to this. There will still be disputes over interests and desires. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t debate what the proper boundaries are and what or what problems we should be paying attention to are. Because from the perspective of ecology, from, you know, conservation, et cetera, if we can make the political case that this is a more important thing that we need to be thinking about rather than, you know, where language populations happen to live in, you know, the mid 1800s, when they drew these boundaries. Then, or actually, even in the case, you know, in Denmark, you know, like, you know, who happened to side with which part, you know, which group in World War I, you know, whether that determined the boundaries in many ways. So, maybe we need to rethink this and it’s time for an updated system now that we really recognize the force and scale of the challenges that we’re facing in the 21st century, which are just different than the ones we faced in the past.

Hagen: I think this call to rethink boundaries is absolutely fundamental. And I didn’t mean, I didn’t mean to actually argue against it. I would just imagine that obviously, this is something that a political discourse could throw against you.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Hagen: Another one with a wild idea, you know. Yeah, because obviously we need to take into account that what now we talked about political borders and the arbitrary nature of many of them. But sociology, sociology and sociological research shows that there are even more borders. Ironically, we live in a world, despite globalization going on for maybe 20 years now declining, that has erected even more borders. Both the physical, their fences and walls, you know, in more and more places. The Berlin Wall has been torn down, but there are physical borders everywhere. But then there are social borders, mobility borders, you know, borders of income. So that there’s an avalanche of borders, it has increased over the years. And to rethink that, I think is absolutely fundamental. I totally agree. And I think what you’re so, what you so importantly highlight with everything you do, is that we need to think this planetarily, that we need to bring in into this rethinking process. It’s not just a matter of well, it is a fundamentally social process as well, as you point out, right? It’s political. What does it mean that it’s political? That means it’s social. People have agendas. People have ideas. People have needs, and they utter them and they disagree and they need to come to terms with them. And to bring it to planetary perspective here is really important. And that’s, I think, I hope is a bridge to your Planetary Compendium, which is like a tool to dive into in order to help as something like a guide for these processes. Could you elaborate on that?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, thank you. So the Compendium, which was a collaboration between us at the Berggruen Institute and our colleagues and friends at Dark Matter Labs, is really intended as, I think, yeah, as a guide, as a tool, as an object of interest and inquiry that starts really from the fundamental realization that most people are not going to sit down and read my 300 page book. You know? And the other kind of great books and academic articles that there are. You know, this is largely a discourse that has existed in the academy. But we think that it’s politically important and we want these ideas to be out there to have people engage with them. So what we decided to do is to, rather than write another book or take the essays that are in the Compendium and write another edited volume that would go on a library shelf, is we decided to ask a bunch of leading experts on issues of planetary governance to write short, accessible, no jargon, et cetera, case studies of actual existing planetary governance, either from the past, the present, or one or two speculative cases as well of the future and try and make these things concrete. So we said, you know, we don’t want to have, you know, a new theory, we don’t want to have kind of new conceptual analyses.

Hagen: Tell us about how these things are working in practice. Can you give us some examples there, from the top of my head, I remember the North Sea. There’s like a utopian development or not a utopian, sorry, take that back. Possible futures. And then there’s the Himalayan landscape of glaciers. What else is there?

Jonathan: Yeah, so right. So there’s governance of like the Himalayan glaciers that’s ongoing, a transboundary ecological environmental issue. There’s an organization called the Embassy of the North Sea that tries to, is trying to imagine what it would mean to govern with the North Sea as a member of the community and all the things that live within it, the eels, the fish, the water itself. You know, how do we, how could we imagine those non-human things as political actors as involved in democratic processes? Nils and I wrote one on the International Atomic Energy Agency, arguing that it’s an example of kind of proto-planetary governance and that it starts to show the ways in which you can have a technocratic, technically focused international organization that’s able to override or kind of subsume sovereignty, national sovereignty, in a limited specific set of domains, in this case nuclear energy and their kind of regime that they work.

Let’s see, there’s a case study of the Owens River Valley, which is up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains here in California, where Los Angeles gets its water from. It was kind of a case, it was really kind of a sacrifice zone. They destroyed the ecosystem in order to get the water here in the city. So anyway, he looks at the restoration of that place and how that kind of hooks into planetary dynamics.

And then we have a case study of, again, it sounds science fiction, but it’s actually happening at a small-scale kind of pilot study, which is inner-species money. Which is basically different, yeah, different, specifically gorillas in Rwanda, that have basically been given essentially a form of cryptocurrency, whereby they are able to pay local residents to do things for them. So for example, you could pay a farmer to remove a trap or to fix a fence or things like that. So, it’s a way for the animals themselves to pay for their own welfare.

And then there’s another one that’s really interesting is actually a sci-fi story written by a science fiction writer and novelist, who imagined in a short story an example of a future war that takes place over cloud theft and kind of the political, or maybe not a war, but like a political conflict, international political conflict over the theft of clouds and how that would obviously affect all sorts of things.

So anyway, it’s a really, like I said, so you could see it’s a wide range of things that cross international transcend boundaries, that transcends the human as the only political actor, that transcends disciplines. And we really wanted this to be something that’s usable, something that’s exciting.

The other element that’s really important here is there’s a very strong visual element to it. We worked with artists and graphic designers, animation, to make a really compelling website. Again, not reading books, reading dense academic books is not for everyone. So, we wanted to have another way into this. So, these are these concrete examples presented in really beautiful and engaging way. There are all sorts of things you can click and engage with the website in the hopes that people will kind of explore this and look at the world anew and trying to understand, okay, yeah, these concrete cases make me think about my own work differently. They make me think about a political issue that I’m debating in my head or that’s actively being discussed in a new way, or just find it beautiful and interesting and let sit with it. There doesn’t have to be an immediate call to action, but we’re hoping that it will seep into people’s consciousness and really give them some food for thought as they just go about living on this planet.

Hagen: Well, I’ve been there. I’ve been to your wonderful URL, which is governtheplanet.org. It’s phenomenal. It starts with a beautiful, animated video and it has sound all the way through. You can have sound when you are in your case studies. So, I’m unashamed and making a little bit of advertisement. Everybody who listens now, go to governtheplanet.org, and have a good time!

I do also appreciate a lot what you just said, John, which is it’s not necessarily only to influence policymaking discourses or policymaking processes that you want to hook up with the next think tank or be in a gray paper or in some kind of white paper or end up talking to some state secretaries or somebody working in the ministries. I’m sure you want to do that too. But then this is really about offering something for anybody, really. That’s wonderful. That’s really, really great.

And I can say, I spent a lot of time in the Himalayan trying to figure out what all of these elements are and what happens to the passes and with conflicts that are out there. And there’s an incredible amount to learn and you’ve really managed, in most of the cases that I’ve looked at, you can spend a lot of time on your website. And I’m sure it took a lot of resources to come up with it and to maintain it. But, I congratulate you and I think people who will look at it will feel the same that you’ve really managed to multi-layered the complexity of what is this, what features into the planetary. Because, yeah, we talked about this is bottom-up, this is democratic, this is political, but it’s hard to imagine all of the other things that are in this word when we say “complex.” It’s very complex. There are many layers to this and you unpack all of that in these cases. And I think it’s just really brilliant. Would you like to tell us, so what did you hear from users or what are you doing now, now that it’s out there?

Jonathan: Yeah, so no, I mean, you’re right. It was a lot of work. It was a collaboration with Dark Matter Labs that really over the course of a year, working with artists and with the authors and edits and re-edits and of course all that and then building out the website, which was built all really from scratch to kind of, because I think you’re right, we try to mirror the complexity of the planetary in the website itself. There’s even some parts of the websites that are kind of designed to be difficult. You know, it’s…

Hagen: That’s true, yeah!

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s on purpose. We know it’s difficult. You know, in some sense, it’s trying to push back, even though, like I said, it’s a recognition that you’re not going to, maybe not everyone’s going to read a book about this topic, but also it’s more than a TikTok. It’s not there to like, addict you and kind of flip to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. We want you to spend some time on it. We want you to really just absorb and listen to the sound. There’s one case study about whales where you can kind of sit and listen to the songs of the humpback whales and just kind of listen to them in the context of the case study and what it’s telling you.

So it’s visual, it’s auditory, things are moving around and all that. So, this is all a lot of thought and I want to give a lot of credit to all the designers who worked on this, who just really did a phenomenal job. So we’ve…

Hagen: Is this a big website? I mean, is this growing? Will you, will there be…

Jonathan: Yeah, the hope is to grow, the hope is to grow. For right now, we’re, you know, it only launched two months ago or something like that. So right now we’re still working on promoting it and getting it out there. But yes, the plan is to have additional case studies over time. So, go to the website and then come back to the website in a few months. And, I think you could sign up for email so you could be the first to know about what’s new on governtheplanet.org. But yeah, no.

Hagen: How do you get the sources? How do you get the information for your cases?

Jonathan: From the authors, for the most part. Yeah, so we reached out to some of the top names in the field, many of whom are friends, and it was really just a great opportunity. And I think everyone was really excited to be asked to write something a little more creative, a little more punchy. You know, it didn’t have to be in dry academic language. In fact, we asked them not to do it in dry academic language. And I think people really, really appealed to them. So, you know, two colleagues wrote, for example, a speculative interview that kind of is supposed to be in Rolling Stone in several decades. I forget what…You know, it’s supposed to be an interview after the success of the world in avoiding the Amazon reaching a tipping point. And they were kind of celebrating. So, kind of being able to…so it’s both speculative, it’s hopeful. And, you know, like they said, they got to write it, you know, as a Rolling Stone interview. So, different from what they’re often doing. But it gives you a way to think, “Okay, hey, wait, what if we did this? What if we actually did roll out kind of bioregional governance in a way that allowed us to stop the devastation of the rainforest and succeed?” So, that’s another angle that we tried to be, it’s not all doom and gloom, it’s meant to be hopeful and inspiring as well.

Hagen: That’s a good message. And that’s actually something that you also, I think, point out on your website, also on your Berggruen website, but particularly on the, of course, in the Planetary Compendium’s website. That, all right, we all agree that there are planetary boundaries, you know, that this concept or this idea, I think, is widely acknowledged. But how do we make it fun to live within those boundaries?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Hagen: No? So, to move away from a discussion of, you know, this is not fun, this is something…we need to lose something in order to live within the boundaries. Here you’re proposing something to gain.

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. There’s a lot to gain from living actually with the planet and in a sensible and good way. So, one way to think about this was just proposed by my friend Boris Shoshitaishvili, who makes the case, I think, correctly, that right now we know that we have planetary impact. We have planetary, you know, we as a species and certain individuals in particular, have planetary effects. And we are, of course, affected by the planet. But we don’t have a voice yet. Because we lack any sense of planetary governance, we are, all of us, even the tech billionaires who are trying to intervene on the planet, don’t really have a voice. As a result, we are currently, all of us, disenfranchised planetarily. We don’t have a political voice. And that moving towards systems of planetary voice, systems of planetary governance, is a way to enfranchise humanity in ways that we currently have no ability to do because we lack systems, structures, jurisdictions that cover the planet as a whole. So, excuse me. So, this is one way to kind of look hopeful that we’re trying to build a new political, to give us additional political voice in this system that deeply affects us. But yeah, we don’t yet have the way to respond to.

Hagen: That brings me to two questions, I think. One would be more on the boring policymaking side. So, how does this now, how do you, as your program, do you as, okay, you’re the research director, so basically, you’re having all the fun, you’re getting all the, but is there a policy director, those who, the people who need to do the work, and I don’t know, call up when you call for this great conference in Venice, now a year ago, or one year and a couple of months ago, and you try to have effects on institutions that exist and policymakers that exist, right? So, that’s the question. So how do you do that? And what is your feedback from there?

And my second question is more about how digitally native do you need to be to be enfranchised? I’m thinking, I mentioned global borders, and I’m there, if we look to the Global South, if we look to societies that are poorer, localities that are poorer, regions that are poorer, how do you get those on board?

Jonathan: Those are excellent questions. So the first, so the way, so no, we don’t have a policy director, and we’re not really trying to, as of yet, impact policymaking processes, other than kind of seeding ideas. I think the way we understand this project is it’s quite long term, we’re talking decades, if not centuries, to really transform these systems in a fundamental way. And it’s just not the sort of thing that’s going to happen overnight, that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to happen with like, you know, passing one different regulation, or you know, one new law. I mean, there’s a really fundamental restructuring of the most basic and foundational systems and structures. So, this is, we’re in for the long haul. But we are, you know, working to build up the apparatus that you need to even get to that, those structural changes.

So, one of the things we’re working on now with several of the fellows of the program is trying to influence civil society and philanthropy to start thinking in this longer term way to start thinking, not just quarter by quarter by quarter, or you know, with another, you know, three to five year impact plan, but you know, what would a much more decadal or, you know, plan look like to move towards the planetary. Whether it’s about transcending boundaries, whether it’s about transcending, the human is the only, you know, you know, relevant actor, et cetera.

So yeah, that is something that we’re working on kind of actively, but it’s a slow process. And, and yeah, it’s not like, this isn’t really the field that you’d be like at another think tank where a legislator calls you up and says, “Hey, we’re,” you know, “about to pass this new budget.” You know, “Should we allocate money this way or that way? Let me know by tomorrow, because we’re voting.” You know? Like, it’s, that’s not, that’s not the set of problems that we’re working on. It’s much more about seeding the ideas, building up a constituency, building up popular support for just the basic idea that we are all entangled in the biosphere. That we’re entangled and interconnected with this planet. And that’s going to take time, that’s going to take lots of different ways. So it’s, you know, it’s not going to happen from a couple books and one nice pretty website. There’s a lot more that needs [to be done].

Hagen: It’s a start.

Jonathan: It’s 100%, it’s the start where there’s, you know, there’s a reason we’re doing these things. But this is it’s just the start. And we’re hoping that through giving people different ins, different angles, they’ll be able to find something that resonates with themselves and pursue it, yeah, in other ways.

Hagen: How about my second question?

Jonathan: Oh, the second question. Yes, the second question about…this is a really, like a core question. It’s a core question, of course, in contemporary systems of global governance and it would be so in the future as well, as we move towards some sort of more planetary structures. So, I’m not even sure it’s about being digital native or not. And in fact, we know that actually that’s not even necessarily, you know, there are there are still large gaps in digital infrastructure in the Global South, but plenty of people are digitally native there. In fact, even some senses more so, right? Like, you know, online banking and digital payments, you know, basically leapfrogged in a lot of places in the Global South and in other places. So, it’s not that’s not necessarily quite the right, but obviously there is a massive divide in resources and in political power and, you know, economic power.

So, one way to think that giving political enfranchisement in the planet would, of course, help most the people who lack it now, right? So, if we were to think even though, like I said that, you know, even the tech billionaires who are trying to, like, make direct interventions in planetary systems still lack a holistic voice, but they still, you know, if you were to look at a scale, you’d say they have more voice than, you know, if you’re just a peasant, you know, like, you know, a small holding farmer in India. And so as a result, creating systems where this voice is possible lifts, you know, I think, in my view, at least has the possibility. It’s not guaranteed, but it opens the possibility that you’d be able to lift up the people at the bottom higher. Now, maybe that’s naïve but it certainly opens up the possibility for it to happen that we don’t have even currently the possibility doesn’t exist at all. So, that’s one sense.

The second sense is that if living within planetary boundaries means or like, you know, let’s take the Doughnut Economic model from Kate Raworth. Which, you know, is a really, I think powerful way of thinking about this, right? That we both, on the one hand, need to stay within planetary boundaries, but also there should be a baseline minimum of, you know, human welfare for people. So, we have to raise up some people, but also reduce our planetary impacts in other ways. And this is the sort of thing that I think you need planetary governance to be able to enact, right? Because, if you, on the one hand, you need to raise up the living standards of many people in the Global South, while at the same time, restricting, I mean, there’s no other way around it, restricting the planetary impact of some people in the Global North. And this strikes me as the sort of thing that nation states can’t do. The global governance system has shown itself as incapable of doing. Because at the end of the day, the global governance system is made up of all the different nation states fending for themselves just kind of within a bit more of a structure. That planetary governance seems to me the way that it might have to happen. Again, maybe that’s a little naive, maybe that’s hope, maybe that’s just being too hopeful, too optimistic, but seems that without the structures, they’d be impossible.

Hagen: Yeah, I agree. There’s a there’s this concept of one health.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Hagen: How was that, are you inspired by that too? That you know…

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah, so there is one health, planetary health. There are a couple of different, they’re all slightly different. They all have slightly different derivations. I think one health, if I recall correctly, it comes more from veterinary health, planetary health, more from human health, but they all take this more broadly holistic sense that understands that human health is inextricably related and interconnected with the health of the ecosystems and the health of the biosphere and the health of the planet. And I think this is, I mean, quite obviously correct. You know, human health, you could be as strong as you want to be and healthy as you want to be and have, you know, all that stuff. But if, you know, the world around you is despoiled and falling apart, then doesn’t really matter in your quality of life, it’s still going to be…If that world produces the kind of food that you need to sustain your body and then, you know, and that isn’t good.

Hagen: So, of course…

Jonathan: Exactly. Exactly, and of course that new diseases are most often zoonotic and they come from, you know, so if we’re factory farming and dealing with all sorts of animals and all sorts of weird…and going into the forests more and deforestation brings out new diseases. If we have to like, if you’re trying to make a million cows live in, you know, one square kilometer, then you’re going to have to pump them full of antibiotics. And that’s going to lead to all sorts of antimicrobial resistance and all these things. It’s all connected. I mean, that’s the biggest point, kind of the most basic point of planetary thinking is that it’s all connected, you know? And yeah, so it makes complete sense. So yeah, it is. I know, I do think, those are inspiring and important ways and I’m glad that the health community, I shouldn’t say all of it, but there are some important voices within the public health and global health community that have started to think more robustly about the interconnections between human health and the health of the planet that we inhabit. We’ve been talking about various aspects of, you know, this multidisciplinary or holistic approach and social aspects, political aspects, now health aspects.

Hagen: How about economics? Arguably, when you say the North needs to cut down and the South needs to, you know, in order to balance it out. Or, in when we place all of these, when we place a new emphasis on what should be planetary perspectives that are built from bottom up and take, you know, give the North Sea biosphere or North Sea ecosystem a voice. How do we, well, not only pay for all of it, but how are economics supposed to happen? Do you think about that? So, I’m just keeping this question as open to….

Jonathan: Yeah, no, it’s an excellent question! And, you know, I think this is actually, really one of the frontier questions right now. This is one that we didn’t really talk about too much in our book, Children of a Modest Star. Not one that we’ve really dealt with now and, in part, it’s really tricky. It’s really tricky just to be honest.

But, you know, there are some people that are starting to think about it and that’s something. I encourage anyone listening, you know, if you’re looking for some work to do, if you’re a graduate student looking for a dissertation, you know, really trying to think through what planetary economics means, is, you know? How do you deal with, you know, all the standard questions of economics, whether it’s money and currency and inequality? All of these questions are alive and, you know, to the extent that we want to move forward, we need answers. Though I’ll admit that, I’m not the one to provide them. I’m a political scientist, not an economist. I would never try and step on their territory.

Hagen: There’s a range of political economy which could be some kind of…

Jonathan: That’s true. That’s true. So, 100%. So, you know, like I said, if we want to think of the planet as one unit, you know, and we need to think through how the economics of that works. And I’m hopeful that we can figure out these ideas.

I know that, like I said, there are some colleagues who are really starting to dive into this. It’s a fascinating door that opens or a fascinating world behind this door when you start to open it. You think economically through the planetary. Suddenly, as you said, pretty much everything is back on the line and should be rethought. Beginning with where we place value. You mentioned crypto money among gorillas but we should maybe rethink where we place the value, the sources of value for our own system. Should it really be human labor? Should it be something else?

Jonathan: Yeah! How do we price things? And of course, there are mechanisms for pricing nature, pricing carbon, all that, but they haven’t moved to the center of the conversation or the center of economic systems in the way that if we’re going to move really towards this kind of more planetary form of governance, they would need to be. So, yeah. This is a call for people to think about this and think this through.

Hagen: We have some essays and we have some stuff about that within our own “Mapping the Planetary” on our podcast where we talk about that. But also, I think it’s more about questions and needs rather than full solutions. There are of course books coming out that try to, I mean, Dani Rodrik’s book of Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World tries to, you know, to square that circle. But yeah, I can only echo that. So, more work to do and to come back to here.

How do you relate, otherwise —- okay, the economists are brought in the conversation as well —- how do you at Berggruen and you yourself, how do you relate to other organizations? I’m thinking about Earth for All, Club of Rome, people or other existing networks. Do you collaborate or do you…

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, those, the two that you happen to mention, no, I haven’t interfaced them at all. But we’re a very collaborative place. You know, the Institute itself is actually quite small. So like, when I want to think with others, that often means collaborating with others at different institutions. So, I work all the time with people at universities, with other global networks, other think tanks, other research organizations. So, yeah, no, extremely collaborative.

Hagen: Well, John, thank you! This has been phenomenal. We’re reaching the end of this. And I can only encourage everybody to go to the website, start reading, start clicking, because not only will you be able to navigate within the room and the universe that you provide, but you also get out of it through clicks on various articles and other websites and all of it. So, take the Planetary Compendium seriously, as you’re reading, as a little guidebook through life and points of orientation and inspiration. Thank you so much, John. This has been phenomenal and really, really interesting.

Jonathan: Yeah, thanks for letting me promote the Compendium. Like I said, yeah, please check it out: governtheplanet.org. Click around, explore, be in touch. We’d love to hear what you think. And like I said, I hope it just inspires people to think a little bit differently about the world around them. Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Further Readings
Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs. 2025. “The Planetary Compendium.” https://governtheplanet.org.

• Armstrong, Kate. 2025. “Whales and the Ecology of Value: Listening as a Planetary Imagination.” https://governtheplanet.org/case-study/whales.
• Bekker, Alexandra and Prateek Shankar. 2025. “Melting Borders: Glacier Governance in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.” https://governtheplanet.org/case-study/glacier- governance.
• Blake, Jonathan S. and Nils Gilman. 2025. “International Atomic Energy Agency: A Model for Proto-Planetary Governance.” https://governtheplanet.org/case- study/iaea.
• Blake, Jonathan S. and Nils Gilman. 2024. Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Burke, Anthony and Stefanie Fishel. 2025. “Amazon Tipping Point Postponed: Ecoregion Assemblies for a Living Planet.” https://governtheplanet.org/case- study/amazon.
• Chan, Stanley Qiufan. 2025. “Beyond Cloud Theft: When the World Remembered to Breath.” https://governtheplanet.org/case-study/cloud-theft.
• Fernández de Córdoba Farini, Claudia. 2025. “Reimagining Biodiversity Governance: The North Sea as a Living Marine Democracy.” https://governtheplanet.org/case- study/north-sea.
• Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• Ledgard, J. M. 2025. “Tehanu: Interspecies Money as a Layer of Planetary Infrastructure.” https://governtheplanet.org/case-study/tehanu.
• Robinson, Alexander. 2025. “Owens Lake: Repair as Planetary Reinvention.” https://governtheplanet.org/case-study/owens-valley
• Rodrik, Dani. 2025. Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate. Princeton: Princeton University Pre