Governing the Living Earth: A Constitutional Architecture for a World Environmental Governance System
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Despite the expansion of global environmental governance, no existing framework has the authority, coherence, fiscal capacity, and democratic legitimacy needed to address increasingly interdependent Earth-system risks. This article identifies a constitutional mismatch between planetary ecological processes and territorially fragmented public authority and proposes a World Environmental Governance System (WEGS) to address it. Drawing on Earth-system science, ecological constitutionalism, federalism, subsidiarity, polycentric governance, and deliberative democracy, WEGS treats ecological integrity as a constitutional value and planetary boundaries as science-informed limits on public authority, while recognizing the Rights of Nature as a basis for representation and remedy. Governance is distributed across Eco-Civic Communities, Eco-Regions, states, and a limited world level, aligned with ecological scale, externalities, and institutional capacity. Rather than creating centralized environmental administration, the model combines common planetary obligations with democratic self-government, independent scientific knowledge, public participation, accountability, and judicial protection. It also considers institutional pre-adaptation, selective use of existing United Nations capacities, and a possible Charter review under Article 109 as pathways toward progressive implementation. The article argues that such constitutional reconfiguration could provide a foundation for more coherent, legitimate, and democratically accountable global environmental governance.
Source: Preprints.org
Authors: Manuel Galiñanes, Michael Ellis, Francisco Plancarte, Julio Mas Estellés, Rudolf Schmitz-Perrin, Leo Klinkers
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213884445