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Governing the anthropocene: agency, governance, knowledge

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:12 authored by Gerard Delanty, Aurea Mota
The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

European Journal of Social Theory

ISSN

1368-4310

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

1

Volume

20

Page range

9-38

Department affiliated with

  • Sociology and Criminology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-02-16

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-02-16

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-02-16

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