Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SPHERE (Study of the Planetary Human-Environment Relationship: The Rise of Global Environmental Governance)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-04-01 bis 2024-09-30
SPHERE was a historical study of humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints and how it became a governance issue. The key argument and central point of departure has been that Global Environmental Governance (GEG), which has arisen in response to this issue during the later decades of the twentieth century and continued to the present, has become inseparable from the rise of a planetary Earth systems science and a knowledge-based understanding of global change that has affected science, politics, diplomacy, business, and civic society.
The overarching achievement of SPHERE’s research is an entirely novel approach to the longstanding issue of Global Environmental Governance, and its perceived fragmentation and weak performance. Instead of seeking the causes of its weakness, which has been common in previous research, we outline a revised understanding of GEG as a historical phenomenon of increased normalization. Our historical arc connects the post-WWII moment of early globalizing conservation with the intensifying attempts to govern the human-earth relationship through an ever-growing assemblage of "governable environmental objects", a concept we have developed and their quantifiable indicators as "proxies", yet another of our essential concepts.
In SPHERE, we proposed and substantiated three main points. 1) GEG has followed a trajectory of dispersal of actors, institutions, conceptual tools and responsibilities from the micro- and local scales to the planetary. We analyzed how these trajectories have unfolded in three essential domains: Earth System science, sovereignty, and neo-liberalization. 2) GEG is performative. The governance itself has created the dynamic environmental objects under governance. 3) GEG has, in this way normalized the environment as a policy object, and we could say that "normalized dispersal" is hence a third key concept emerging from this project.
This novel understanding of GEG has emerged through a sequence of SPHERE studies (including, e.g. Westermann & Höhler 2020, Isberg 2023, Paglia & Sörlin 2023, Sörlin & Paglia 2024) and finalized in a major 17.000-word long article in the respected environmental journal Ambio (Sörlin et al 2025). The progress has been further propelled by four PhD dissertations (Isberg 2023, Höglund Hellgren 2025, Samosír 2025, Schröder 2025).
The overarching achievement of SPHERE’s research is an entirely novel approach to the longstanding issue of Global Environmental Governance, and its perceived fragmentation and weak performance. Instead of seeking the causes of its weakness, which has been common in previous research, we outline a revised understanding of GEG as a historical phenomenon of increased normalization. Our historical arc connects the post-WWII moment of early globalizing conservation with the intensifying attempts to govern the human-earth relationship through an ever-growing assemblage of "governable environmental objects", a concept we have developed and their quantifiable indicators as "proxies", yet another of our essential concepts.
In SPHERE, we proposed and substantiated three main points. 1) GEG has followed a trajectory of dispersal of actors, institutions, conceptual tools and responsibilities from the micro- and local scales to the planetary. We analyzed how these trajectories have unfolded in three essential domains: Earth System science, sovereignty, and neo-liberalization. 2) GEG is performative. The governance itself has created the dynamic environmental objects under governance. 3) GEG has, in this way normalized the environment as a policy object, and we could say that "normalized dispersal" is hence a third key concept emerging from this project.
This novel understanding of GEG has emerged through a sequence of SPHERE studies (including, e.g. Westermann & Höhler 2020, Isberg 2023, Paglia & Sörlin 2023, Sörlin & Paglia 2024) and finalized in a major 17.000-word long article in the respected environmental journal Ambio (Sörlin et al 2025). The progress has been further propelled by four PhD dissertations (Isberg 2023, Höglund Hellgren 2025, Samosír 2025, Schröder 2025).
An overarching ambition of the project has been to make sure that empirical investigation takes place in several world regions (we call this ‘global fieldwork’) and in different kinds of institutional and organizational settings to make comparisons possible and to turn the history of GEG into a truly global history. Four PhD projects have covered: Asia (2), Latin America (1), Europe (2), and North America (1) (two of the projects cover two continents). Research by five senior scholars and one postdoc has had a global coverage with a focus on Europe, the Arctic and the North Atlantic.
Results from this large research project are complex and range from small details to shifts in understanding on an aggregated historical level. Below are five generic conceptual insights that the project has developed.
1. Governable objects. This concept is so new that it wasn’t even mentioned in the application in 2017. It comes out of work we have done on Anthropocene. A unifying element in these approaches was the idea that environmental governance presupposed governable objects, phenomena that could be subject of governance. Much of our work on the rise of GEG has been informed by this conceptual innovation. Importantly, this implies a potential shift of orientation for the idea of GEG itself. In previous understanding, it has typically been seen as horizontal processes of sequential negotiation, often on the global level. Our approach rather connects GEG with its material and elemental roots in ice, oceans, atmosphere, forests, deserts.
2. Environmental temporalities - and related ideas about planetary timekeeping and synchronization. It underscores the temporal element of governable objects and how these have acquired ‘historicity’. Our research here has identified and articulated how natural elements got, so zu sagen, time, direction, and acceleration, or perhaps better: ‘velocity’. The atmosphere is a good example. The word ‘climate’ is nowadays shorthand for an atmosphere that has gotten into a dangerous state as a consequence of human action in the past and still in the present. This speaks to new work in theory of history where an integrative turn is ongoing to connect the history of societies and cultures with the history of (earth) elements.
3. Environing technologies and environing media. Here we looked at how this production of the material environment itself (by terraforming, widely construed) and of the (scientific and political) understanding of it (through data gathering and concepts) actually takes place. This work has expanded the concept of ‘media’ to elements (such as air, clouds, ice) and the collection of 'elemental' data which speaks to environmental timekeeping, visualization, communication, and, ultimately, evolving possibilities to govern the elements.
4. Environmental understanding in governance institutions. This has been an empirical approach to the diffusion of environmental governance ideas and tools that has been remarkably absent from research in political science and diplomatic and environmental history. So far, our work has comprised the World Bank with a focus on Asia, and on the governance of resource industries (forestry, minerals) in Latin America.
5. Neoliberal GEG. We examined tools and methods of governance under what we may call the neoliberal period, since the 1980s. Neoliberal Environmental Governance linked the growth and spread of capitalism and finance to the responsible shaping and fine tuning -- through various kinds of goals, targets and boundaries -- a ‘future nature’ or even a future planet in some kind of trade-off state between rapidly globalizing economies and an ‘Earth in the balance’.
SPHERE has also, on a more concrete and detailed level:
*shed new light on how the monitoring and data collection of glaciers in Argentina has supported environmental governance in ways that now is part of innovative thinking on glacier protection on the global scale;
*uncovered, through primary sources, how the World Bank started taking up global environmental governance concerns as early as the early 1950s;
*analyzed global ‘progress hubs’ to promote complex leadership on global environmental governance, that was pioneered in the preparations of the UN 1972 conference on the “Human Environment”.
Results from this large research project are complex and range from small details to shifts in understanding on an aggregated historical level. Below are five generic conceptual insights that the project has developed.
1. Governable objects. This concept is so new that it wasn’t even mentioned in the application in 2017. It comes out of work we have done on Anthropocene. A unifying element in these approaches was the idea that environmental governance presupposed governable objects, phenomena that could be subject of governance. Much of our work on the rise of GEG has been informed by this conceptual innovation. Importantly, this implies a potential shift of orientation for the idea of GEG itself. In previous understanding, it has typically been seen as horizontal processes of sequential negotiation, often on the global level. Our approach rather connects GEG with its material and elemental roots in ice, oceans, atmosphere, forests, deserts.
2. Environmental temporalities - and related ideas about planetary timekeeping and synchronization. It underscores the temporal element of governable objects and how these have acquired ‘historicity’. Our research here has identified and articulated how natural elements got, so zu sagen, time, direction, and acceleration, or perhaps better: ‘velocity’. The atmosphere is a good example. The word ‘climate’ is nowadays shorthand for an atmosphere that has gotten into a dangerous state as a consequence of human action in the past and still in the present. This speaks to new work in theory of history where an integrative turn is ongoing to connect the history of societies and cultures with the history of (earth) elements.
3. Environing technologies and environing media. Here we looked at how this production of the material environment itself (by terraforming, widely construed) and of the (scientific and political) understanding of it (through data gathering and concepts) actually takes place. This work has expanded the concept of ‘media’ to elements (such as air, clouds, ice) and the collection of 'elemental' data which speaks to environmental timekeeping, visualization, communication, and, ultimately, evolving possibilities to govern the elements.
4. Environmental understanding in governance institutions. This has been an empirical approach to the diffusion of environmental governance ideas and tools that has been remarkably absent from research in political science and diplomatic and environmental history. So far, our work has comprised the World Bank with a focus on Asia, and on the governance of resource industries (forestry, minerals) in Latin America.
5. Neoliberal GEG. We examined tools and methods of governance under what we may call the neoliberal period, since the 1980s. Neoliberal Environmental Governance linked the growth and spread of capitalism and finance to the responsible shaping and fine tuning -- through various kinds of goals, targets and boundaries -- a ‘future nature’ or even a future planet in some kind of trade-off state between rapidly globalizing economies and an ‘Earth in the balance’.
SPHERE has also, on a more concrete and detailed level:
*shed new light on how the monitoring and data collection of glaciers in Argentina has supported environmental governance in ways that now is part of innovative thinking on glacier protection on the global scale;
*uncovered, through primary sources, how the World Bank started taking up global environmental governance concerns as early as the early 1950s;
*analyzed global ‘progress hubs’ to promote complex leadership on global environmental governance, that was pioneered in the preparations of the UN 1972 conference on the “Human Environment”.
In addition, we have explored the role of industry and business in GEG in the second half of the project. We have been particularly interested in how the business community engaged in governance issues and if and how they contributed to the shaping of tools of governance.
We have also explored the topic of ‘environmental memory’. This is an important dimension of GEG insofar as it links this mega-dimension of the modern world – that of governing environment, climate, and sustainability -- to places and spaces where the fate of the Earth and Humanity have been shaped. Just as we have sites of memory for the birth of nations and religions, for major battles, the end of wars, disasters – the world will be shaping memories of how it discovered and managed the human-earth relationship.
We have also explored the topic of ‘environmental memory’. This is an important dimension of GEG insofar as it links this mega-dimension of the modern world – that of governing environment, climate, and sustainability -- to places and spaces where the fate of the Earth and Humanity have been shaped. Just as we have sites of memory for the birth of nations and religions, for major battles, the end of wars, disasters – the world will be shaping memories of how it discovered and managed the human-earth relationship.