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First developed in earth system science, the idea of planetary boundaries has gradually spilled over into social science research in the past decade. An interdisciplinary body of lit-erature has emerged as a result at the intersection of earth system science, law, and gov-ernance. In this paper we provide a bird's eye view of the state of the art, and examine how social scientists frame the planetary boundaries framework and what they identify as key regulatory challenges and implications. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of 80 peer-reviewed articles identified through keyword search. Our survey finds that social scientists have approached the planetary boundaries framework using four key problem framings, which revolve around the notion of planetary boundaries as embodying a set of interdependent and politically constructed environmental limits that are global in scale. We also identify four key clusters of governance solutions offered in the literature, which broadly relate to the ideas of institutionalizing, coordinating, downscaling, and democra-tizing planetary boundaries. We then apply the foregoing insights to the legal domain and explore their implications for law. More specifically, we discuss how the recently proposed notion of earth system law is related to these emerging problem framings and how it might contribute to these responses.

Complex adaptive systems are a special kind of self-organizing system with emergent properties and adaptive capacity in response to changing external conditions. In this article, we investigate the proposition that international environmental law, as a network of treaties and institutions, exhibits some key characteristics of a complex adaptive system. This proposition is premised on the scientific understanding that the Earth system displays properties of a complex adaptive system. If so, international environmental law, as a control system, may benefit from the insights gained and from being modelled in ways more appropriately aligned with the functioning of the Earth system itself. In this exploratory review, we found evidence suggesting that international environmental law is a complex system where treaties and institutions self-organize and exhibit emergent properties. Furthermore, we contend that international environmental law as a whole is adapting to exogenous changes through an institutional process akin to natural selection in biological evolution. However, the adequacy of the direction and rate of adaptation for the purpose of safeguarding the integrity of Earth's life-support system is questioned. This paper concludes with an emphasis on the need for system-level interventions to steer the direction of self-organization while maintaining institutional diversity. This recommendation stands in contrast to the reductionist approach to institutional fragmentation and aims at embracing the existing complexity in international environmental law. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractNexus governance recognises that sustainability concerns such as water, energy, and food security are interlinked and provides an alternative to fragmented governance. Although it has been applied mostly in the domestic context, the need for nexus governance is also apparent at a planetary scale, as highlighted by interacting planetary boundaries, global telecoupling, and global tipping cascades. However, international environmental law is unable to facilitate what we call 'planetary nexus governance'. This is mainly because international environmental law lacks an ecological Grundnorm and because its primary rules of conduct remain fragmented in the absence of effective secondary rules on how primary rules should relate to each other. Recognising this challenge, scholars have recently proposed earth system law as a new framework to rethink, in an integrated way, law in an Anthropocene context. Building on this framework, we suggest that international environmental law should adopt a unifying Grundnorm such as planetary integrity. We also suggest that international institutional law, as a body of secondary rules, has an important role to play in facilitating planetary nexus governance by bringing together fragmented bodies of international law. We briefly discuss ways in which international environmental law could reorientate itself to better facilitate planetary nexus governance.

First developed in Earth system science, the idea of planetary boundaries has gradually spilled over into social science research in the past decade. An interdisciplinary body of literature has emerged as a result at the intersection of Earth system science, law and governance. In this article, we provide a bird?s eye view of the state of the art, and examine how social scientists frame the planetary boundaries framework and what they identify as key regulatory challenges and implications. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of 80 peer-reviewed articles identified through a keyword search. Our survey finds that social scientists have approached the planetary boundaries framework using four key problem framings, which revolve around the notion of planetary boundaries as embodying a set of interdependent and politically constructed environmental limits that are global in scale. We also identify four key clusters of governance solutions offered in the literature, which broadly relate to the ideas of institutionalizing, coordinating, downscaling and democratizing planetary boundaries. We then apply the foregoing insights to the legal domain and explore their implications for law. More specifically, we discuss how the recently proposed notion of Earth system law is related to these emerging problem framings and how it might contribute to these responses.

First developed in Earth system science, the idea of planetary boundaries has gradually spilled over into social science research in the past decade. An interdisciplinary body of literature has emerged as a result at the intersection of Earth system science, law and governance. In this article, we provide a bird?s eye view of the state of the art, and examine how social scientists frame the planetary boundaries framework and what they identify as key regulatory challenges and implications. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of 80 peer-reviewed articles identified through a keyword search. Our survey finds that social scientists have approached the planetary boundaries framework using four key problem framings, which revolve around the notion of planetary boundaries as embodying a set of interdependent and politically constructed environmental limits that are global in scale. We also identify four key clusters of governance solutions offered in the literature, which broadly relate to the ideas of institutionalizing, coordinating, downscaling and democratizing planetary boundaries. We then apply the foregoing insights to the legal domain and explore their implications for law. More specifically, we discuss how the recently proposed notion of Earth system law is related to these emerging problem framings and how it might contribute to these responses.

AbstractIn 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an "integrated and indivisible" set of policy objectives with the aim, among others, to unite the diverse and vast system of international organizations under one shared normative agenda. And yet, have these SDGs really become such an integrative force in global governance? Our conclusion here is negative, and our research suggests that the SDGs have not lived up to these high expectations. We find instead that the 17 global goals have not been taken up by a substantial group of international organizations, and some organizations rather cherry-pick those goals that best fit their own agenda and interests. To overcome these challenges and to fulfill the promise of integrated global sustainability governance enshrined in the SDGs, we propose three urgent actions: first, to further push the use of the SDGs across all international organizations, in particular regional organizations outside the United Nations system; second, to facilitate better collaboration across policy domains; and third, to focus attention on those SDGs that are so far "left behind."