Planetary Coordination Without Sovereignty: 1 Why Global Problems Are Not “Big” Versions of Local Ones

There is a comforting mistake that underwrites most global political discourse: the assumption that planetary problems are simply local problems scaled up. Climate change becomes pollution plus more of it. Financial instability becomes greed multiplied. Democratic erosion becomes bad actors with wider reach. If only enough people agreed, coordinated, or behaved better, the thinking goes, the system would correct itself.

This intuition is wrong — and not just empirically, but structurally.

Global problems are not bigger. They are different in kind. They arise not from the aggregation of individual failures, but from the dynamics of coordination fields that no individual, institution, or collective controls.

Scale Is Not Size

When we talk about scale, we typically mean quantity: more people, more resources, more interactions. But planetary scale is not additive. It is ecological. What changes with scale is not the number of agents but the constraint landscape within which coordination occurs.

At small scales, coordination is revisable. Misalignments are visible. Feedback is relatively fast. Actors can adjust their behaviour in response to local breakdowns. Ethics functions as an ongoing calibration of relations.

At planetary scales, coordination becomes opaque. Feedback loops lengthen or disappear. Effects are displaced in time and space. Action here produces consequences elsewhere, later, to others. The system begins to behave less like a collective of agents and more like a self-stabilising field.

What looks like irresponsibility at the level of actors is often structural inevitability at the level of coordination.

The Myth of the Global Subject

Much contemporary political language smuggles in a fantasy subject: humanity, the international community, the global will. These terms imply a coherent agent capable of perception, intention, and action at scale.

No such agent exists.

Planetary systems — climate, trade, information, energy, migration — are not governed by subjects but by interlocking coordination pathways. They stabilise behaviour without anyone deciding. They reward certain actions and punish others without issuing commands. They persist even when universally criticised.

When we ask why “we” are not acting, the answer is often that there is no “we” at the level required by the problem.

Why Agreement Fails

Calls for consensus dominate global ethics: shared values, common goals, collective commitments. Yet agreement is one of the weakest mechanisms of coordination at scale.

Agreement operates symbolically. Planetary systems operate infrastructurally.

You can agree that emissions must fall while continuing to emit. You can endorse peace while funding war through pension funds. You can value biodiversity while consuming systems that erase it. These are not hypocrisies; they are coordination mismatches.

Symbolic alignment does not reconfigure constraint fields. Only changes in pathways, defaults, standards, and infrastructures do that.

Coordination Without Control

The defining feature of planetary problems is that they coordinate behaviour without anyone being in charge.

Markets coordinate consumption without intention. Supply chains coordinate labour without consent. Platforms coordinate attention without meaning. Energy systems coordinate futures decades in advance through sunk infrastructure. Once established, these systems do not need belief, loyalty, or legitimacy to function.

They only need continuity.

This is why moral outrage, political turnover, and even institutional reform so often fail to change outcomes. The system absorbs these disturbances and returns to equilibrium — sometimes harsher, sometimes simplified, but rarely transformed.

The Ethical Implication

If global problems are not failures of belief or will, then global ethics cannot be a matter of persuasion or condemnation. Ethics at planetary scale must begin elsewhere: with the design, maintenance, and disruption of coordination pathways themselves.

This requires a shift from asking:

• Who is responsible?
  to

• What patterns are being stabilised, and how?

From:

• What do people believe?
  to

• What behaviours are being made inevitable?

From:

• What should we agree on?
  to

• What futures are being locked in?

Where This Leaves Us

To think ethically at planetary scale is not to abandon responsibility — it is to relocate it. Responsibility no longer attaches primarily to intentions or positions, but to how one participates in sustaining or reopening coordination fields.

This is unsettling. It denies us villains and heroes. It refuses the comfort of moral clarity. But it offers something more valuable: a way of understanding why our best intentions so often fail — and where leverage might actually lie.

In the next post, we turn to one of the most misunderstood elements of global coordination: institutions — not as decision-makers, but as frozen solutions to past coordination problems, still exerting force long after the world that produced them has vanished.