Project description
Confronting the chaos of space debris and beyond
Space-based satellite infrastructures are essential for global daily activities, but the rapid expansion of space activities has led to an alarming increase in space debris threatening the sustainability of Earth's orbit. Furthermore, resource competition on other celestial bodies is intensifying among spacefaring powers. These developments impact sustainability on Earth in various ways and perpetuate global inequality. The ERC-funded PLANETSTEWARDS project seeks to address these pressing challenges by pioneering stewardship frameworks for ‘earth-space sustainability’. By analysing various stewardship approaches (state-centric, market-centric and global community-centric), the project will formulate new governance strategies targeting the interrelations of Earth and space sustainability. Using comparative case studies and discourse-based network analysis, PLANETSTEWARDS aims to derive principles to guide future sustainability efforts in both terrestrial and space domains.
Objective
Space-based satellite infrastructures have become indispensable for daily activities on Earth. These opportunities are shaped by an increasing number and variety of actors: from hegemonic rivalry among leading nation states to competition between billionaire companies to build satellite constellations. The rapid expansion of Space activities has led to growing Space debris that challenges the long-term sustainability of the Earths orbit. These developments are furthermore causing global injustice in particular in terms of uneven development as countries grow increasingly reliant on Space infrastructures. Addressing the interrelations of Earth- and Space sustainability is therefore an imminent global challenge.
I argue that understanding these rapid developments in Space should be informed by the concept of planetary stewardship, i.e. the ambitions construed by actors to control large-scale system development on Earth and in Space. Spelling out the conditions and mechanisms of sustainable planetary stewardship will enable the formulation of new governance approaches for Earth-Space sustainability.
PLANETSTEWARDS will break new ground by theorizing planetary stewardship at the interface of sustainability transitions, economic development, and global governance literatures. I will investigate four main stewardship approaches: state-centric, market-centric, global community-centric, and technocratic approaches. I will i) identify actors value orientations and strategies; ii) analyze processes and mechanisms of stewardship within and across manifold socio-technical systems; and iii) determine possible outcomes of stewardship across different contexts. Based on a comparative, embedded case study design, and combining text-based data from multiple document stocks and interviews, I will conduct in-depth process tracing using discourse-based network analysis. PLANETSTEWARDS will derive principles-based stewardship frameworks for future Earth-Space sustainability.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands