Governing the Anthropocene: Through Balancing Individualism and Collectivism as a Way to Manage Our Ecological Footprint

Abstract

The current way of life is unsustainable (Papadimitriou in The coming ‘tsunami of debt’. The Guardian.com, Sunday 15 June 2014 17.58 BST 2014) and in a bid to maintain the status quo—profit is extracted from people and the environment. The challenge of scaling up efforts to engage people in an alternative form of democracy and governance is that currently the response to social, economic and environmental challenges is that internationally politics is being shaped by so-called realist politics (Beardsworth in Cosmopolitanism and international relations theory. Polity, Cambridge 2011) based on (a) competition for resources, (b) the notion that profit and loss, win and lose is contained/carried by ‘the other’ and (c) Huntington’s ‘clash of cultures’ thesis rather than an understanding of our interlinked, co-created and co-determined fate.