Scientific evidence of the environment as a complex system of planetary dimensions has elevated several natural resources to objects of global governance. Primary forests and maritime biomes particularly capture global attention due to their systemic relevance to our planetary ecosystem. Nevertheless, international politics operates within a framework that locates authority over nature indivisibly within territorially discrete and independent states. This paper discusses the implications for sovereignty that stem from the construction of nature as an object of global governance. Drawing on cross-disciplinary debates on sovereignty, it conceives sovereign power as a combination of de jure sovereign authority and bundles of de facto sovereign competence. In the case of nature, while permanent legal sovereignty over natural resources is enshrined in state authority, a wider range of actors can be (and often are) involved in defining how these resources are governed, or even in governing them. In this sense, transformations in sovereign power arise from the tension between these two aspects, through the redistribution of bundles of authority for defining rules of human–nature interaction and the associated reconfiguration of networks of actors turning those rules into governance practices. The paper wagers that the construction of global/planetary ecosystems as policy objects can alter the web of actors that work with or parallel to states in governing parts of such ecosystems that lie within their sovereign jurisdictions. However, contrary to nationalist and recent populist discourses, it contends that these transformations may not necessarily erode state sovereignty and can even enhance and strengthen its social embedding and legitimacy. The extent to which states interact contentiously or cooperatively with local and transnational actors becomes an empirical question. To address this question, we propose an analytical framework to examine the interlinkages across networks of actors involved in governance initiatives produced by states, local entities, and transnational actors.
Lucas de Oliveira Paes is a senior research fellow at NUPI.