Climate change governance has emerged as perhaps the most formidable and decisive test of humanity’s collective capacity for survival in the twenty-first century. Scientific research, accumulated over decades and consolidated through the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has presented mounting and converging evidence of a crisis that is planetary in scope: accelerating global warming, increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events, and the approach of irreversible ecological tipping points. These processes are not confined by territorial borders or political jurisdictions; they unfold within a planetary system whose cohesion transcends the fragmentary units of human political organization. Yet, despite this recognition, the response of the international community has been strikingly inadequate. Action has been fragmented, delayed, and often contradictory, filtered through the entrenched logics of nation-state sovereignty and the competitive imperatives of global capital, which prioritize economic expansion and geopolitical advantage over ecological survival.
The contradiction at the heart of climate governance is therefore stark and unavoidable. On the one hand, climate change is planetary in its causes, dynamics, and consequences; it demands responses commensurate with the scale of biospheric processes that envelop all human societies. On the other hand, the primary unit of governance remains the nation-state, a political form whose legitimacy and cohesion are historically rooted in sovereignty, territorial control, and the promise of economic development. This misalignment generates a profound dialectical tension: national interests, articulated through sovereignty and growth imperatives, frequently collide with planetary necessities, which require coordination, restraint, and collective responsibility across borders. The consequences of this contradiction are manifest in the repeated failures and partial successes of climate negotiations, the contested governance of global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans, and the acute ecological struggles of vulnerable regions like small island states or the Amazon basin. Each of these arenas reveals how the pursuit of national coherence, while rational within its own framework, produces planetary-scale decoherence.
It is in this context that the framework of Quantum Dialectics offers a powerful lens for interpreting climate change governance as a multi-layered and dynamic process rather than as a series of policy failures or technical shortcomings. In this ontology, social and ecological systems are understood as constituted by the constant interplay of cohesive forces, which stabilize and maintain structures, and decohesive forces, which disrupt, dissolve, and push systems toward transformation. Applied to climate governance, this dialectical dynamic reveals that cohesive forces—national institutions, community solidarities, and the infrastructures of global agreements—provide relative stability, but only within bounded and fragile limits. Decoherent forces—climate disruptions, sovereignty-driven conflicts, and capitalist competition—destabilize these arrangements and expose their inadequacy in addressing planetary-scale processes. The result is a condition of metastable equilibrium: a temporary, fragile balance in which contradictory forces coexist, producing recurrent crises and generating the possibility—though not the guarantee—of higher-order syntheses in governance. This perspective shifts the analysis of climate politics from the domain of failure and blame to that of contradiction, crisis, and emergent transformation.
Within the ontology of Quantum Dialectics, contradictions are not treated as accidental disruptions or anomalies to be eliminated, but as the very constitutive forces that drive systemic evolution across nature and society. Every organized system, whether physical, biological, social, or planetary, exists only through the interplay of opposing tendencies. Cohesive forces bind entities into relatively stable forms, maintaining identity, structure, and continuity, while decohesive forces push against these structures, destabilizing and transforming them. It is from this ceaseless tension between cohesion and decohesion that emergent properties arise, giving systems both their dynamism and their evolutionary trajectory. When applied to the analysis of climate change governance, this perspective allows us to move beyond a descriptive account of institutional failures toward a deeper understanding of the dialectical contradictions that shape the entire field.
Climate governance, when situated in this framework, can be seen as unfolding across multiple quantum layers that are interdependent, overlapping, and entangled. At the national layer, cohesion is provided by the logic of sovereignty, the pursuit of economic development, and the imperative of securing territorial and social stability. Yet this very cohesion produces decohesion when confronted with planetary instabilities: floods, droughts, and rising seas that pay no heed to borders, and global agreements that require compromises threatening national autonomy. The planetary layer, by contrast, is defined by the biosphere’s systemic interdependence. Here cohesion manifests in the tightly coupled cycles of carbon, water, and energy that sustain climate stability. But decohesion emerges in the absence of enforceable planetary sovereignty: while the Earth system functions as a whole, humanity’s institutions are fragmented into competing jurisdictions incapable of collectively enforcing ecological limits.
The global capital layer introduces a further contradiction. Cohesion appears in the integration of markets, financial flows, and technologies that bind national economies into a single global system. Yet this very integration fosters decohesion through the relentless competition for accumulation, fossil fuel dependency, and the technological lock-ins that make ecological transition extraordinarily difficult. Finally, at the civilizational layer, cohesion is generated by the shared scientific recognition of planetary boundaries and by the growing awareness, across cultures, of humanity’s common dependence on a stable climate. Decoherence, however, emerges through ideological conflict: the persistence of consumerist modernity, the inertia of extractive developmental models, and the cultural reluctance to accept limits to growth.
Seen in this light, the contradictions of climate change governance cannot be reduced to discrete failures of will, policy, or diplomacy. They must be understood as layered contradictions, where national, planetary, global-capital, and civilizational forces operate simultaneously, each embodying its own balance of cohesion and decohesion. These contradictions are superposed and entangled, meaning that no single layer can be analyzed in isolation. National sovereignty is shaped by global capital flows; planetary biospheric stability is undermined by civilizational ideologies of growth; global markets are constrained and destabilized by ecological tipping points. To grasp climate change governance, therefore, is to recognize it as a quantum dialectical system—one in which the interplay of contradictions generates crises, stalemates, and, potentially, emergent syntheses capable of transcending the limits of the present order.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 stands as perhaps the most emblematic attempt thus far to create a framework for planetary-scale governance of the climate crisis. It marked a historic moment of global convergence, in which nearly every sovereign nation on Earth formally recognized the urgency of climate change and committed to action. The central aim of the Agreement was to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational target of 1.5°C. To achieve this, states pledged what were termed Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—self-defined commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The very act of bringing together such a diverse array of states, from the world’s largest industrial powers to its most vulnerable island nations, represents a remarkable achievement of cohesion. Paris consolidated a planetary consciousness of shared risk, producing a symbolic unity of purpose that no previous climate treaty had achieved.
Yet this very framework also reproduces the deep contradiction between national sovereignty and planetary necessity. While Paris represents cohesion at the symbolic and institutional level, its operational foundation rests entirely on the principle of voluntarism. Each state retains the sovereign right to define, modify, or even abandon its NDCs. There are no binding enforcement mechanisms compelling compliance, no planetary authority with the power to sanction defection or ensure collective adequacy. In this sense, Paris embodies decoherence: it affirms the primacy of national autonomy precisely where planetary governance requires binding collective responsibility. The gap between the aggregated effect of current NDCs and the emission reductions necessary to meet the 1.5°C target is the clearest expression of this structural contradiction.
This duality reveals the metastable character of the current governance regime. Paris functions as a fragile equilibrium: it holds together because of its symbolic inclusivity and procedural flexibility, yet it constantly risks falling into inadequacy as national pledges fail to align with planetary thresholds. From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, this metastability is not accidental but constitutive. Paris embodies a transitional form, suspended between cohesion and decoherence. It is necessary, insofar as it crystallizes planetary consciousness and provides a minimal framework for cooperation; yet it is insufficient, because it leaves untouched the deeper contradiction of sovereignty versus planetary survival. The Paris Agreement thus illustrates the dialectical logic of climate governance: it is both an achievement and a limitation, a fragile compact that prepares the ground for—but cannot itself constitute—a higher-order synthesis of planetary coherence.
The Amazon rainforest, often described as the “lungs of the Earth,” has become one of the most visible and contested sites of the climate crisis. Its vast expanse, covering over five million square kilometers, holds unparalleled ecological significance: it regulates rainfall across South America, harbors nearly one-tenth of the world’s known biodiversity, and serves as one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks on the planet. Yet this ecological treasure has also become a battlefield of competing interests. Successive Brazilian governments, along with agribusiness, mining corporations, and infrastructure developers, have asserted the sovereign right of the Brazilian state to exploit the Amazon as a foundation of national development. Deforestation is justified in the name of agricultural expansion, energy sovereignty through hydroelectric projects, and economic growth, all of which are seen as essential to Brazil’s internal cohesion and its aspiration to consolidate its status as a regional and global power. In this sense, the Amazon embodies cohesion at the national layer: a resource to be mobilized for sovereignty, security, and prosperity.
Yet the ecological role of the Amazon extends far beyond Brazil’s borders, and it is precisely here that the contradiction arises. The destruction of this rainforest disrupts global carbon cycles, undermines biodiversity on a planetary scale, and destabilizes hydrological systems that regulate rainfall patterns across the Western Hemisphere. Scientists warn of a looming tipping point, at which continued deforestation would push the Amazon from being a net carbon sink to a net carbon source, irreversibly altering the global climate system. In this respect, Amazonian deforestation embodies decoherence: what strengthens Brazil’s national project threatens planetary stability. The contradiction is structural, not incidental, because the Amazon’s ecological functions are planetary in scale, while its political governance remains confined to national sovereignty.
This contradiction plays out in contentious disputes between Brazil and international actors such as the European Union, the United Nations, and global civil society organizations. Proposals for financial compensation, carbon credit schemes, and international partnerships—such as the Amazon Fund supported by Norway and Germany—attempt to bridge the gap between sovereignty and planetary responsibility. Yet these initiatives often reproduce asymmetries of power and raise suspicions of neocolonial intrusion, fueling Brazilian resistance to external pressure. Other voices, particularly among environmental movements and some international legal theorists, call for planetary stewardship that would supersede the logic of sovereignty, framing the Amazon as a common heritage of humanity that requires protection at the planetary layer.
From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, the Amazon functions as a node of planetary contradiction, where cohesion and decoherence are acutely entangled. On one side, the Amazon is indispensable to Brazil’s economic sovereignty; on the other, its ecological functions are indispensable to the biosphere’s stability. Neither pole can simply be negated: sovereignty cannot be abolished without undermining political order, and planetary necessity cannot be ignored without risking ecological collapse. The Amazon thus crystallizes the global dilemma of climate governance in its most acute form: the necessity of forging a higher-order synthesis in which sovereignty is redefined as stewardship, and development is aligned with planetary limits. The trajectory of this resolution will not only shape the fate of the Amazon itself but also determine the broader path of humanity’s capacity to reconcile national development with planetary survival.
The Arctic region has become a striking theater of contradiction in the unfolding drama of climate change. Once considered an inhospitable frontier locked in ice, the Arctic is now rapidly transforming as global warming accelerates ice melt. This transformation exposes profound tensions: on the one hand, the retreat of sea ice opens up new shipping routes, drastically shortening global maritime trade pathways; on the other hand, it makes accessible vast reserves of fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, and fisheries. For Arctic states such as Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (via Greenland), these developments represent opportunities for territorial consolidation and economic expansion. They press their claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), extend military and corporate infrastructures into the region, and frame extraction as a sovereign right tied to national development and security. In this sense, the Arctic embodies cohesion at the national layer: it is incorporated into the projects of sovereign power and capitalist accumulation.
Yet the ecological significance of the Arctic extends far beyond the territorial ambitions of its bordering states. The Arctic functions as a planetary commons, central to the regulation of the Earth’s albedo—the reflective quality of ice that stabilizes global temperatures. As ice melts, darker ocean surfaces absorb more solar radiation, accelerating warming in a feedback loop known as Arctic amplification. Melting permafrost threatens to release massive quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which could further destabilize the climate system. Rising sea levels linked to Arctic ice loss imperil coastal communities across the globe, far removed from the region itself. Thus, the drive for national exploitation in the Arctic generates decoherence at the planetary layer: it destabilizes climate systems that are essential to the survival of all humanity. The contradiction here is not only material but also ontological—the Arctic cannot simultaneously function as both a planetary regulator and a frontier for extractive sovereignty without producing systemic crisis.
This contradiction is sharpened by the overlapping roles of states, corporations, and international institutions. National governments promote extraction and territorial control; energy corporations invest in Arctic oil and gas development; meanwhile, environmental organizations and some intergovernmental bodies call for preservation and recognition of the Arctic as a planetary commons. Attempts at cooperative governance, such as the Arctic Council, provide a platform for dialogue but lack binding authority and remain largely subordinated to the interests of the Arctic states themselves. The result is a double-bind: sovereignty-based fragmentation propels competition and exploitation, while planetary necessity demands restraint and preservation.
From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, the Arctic exemplifies the contradictions inherent in commons governance. Cohesive forces—national sovereignty, corporate capital, and international law—stabilize claims and institutional frameworks at the national and global-capital layers. Decoherent forces—ecological destabilization, feedback loops, and climate tipping points—undermine this stability from the planetary layer. The contradiction is superposed: the same processes that strengthen cohesion for Arctic states actively produce decoherence for the planetary system as a whole. In this sense, Arctic governance illustrates the impossibility of resolving the climate crisis within the logic of sovereignty and competitive extraction. It points instead to the urgent need for a dialectical synthesis in which commons governance is reorganized at the planetary level, transforming the Arctic from a frontier of exploitation into a site of stewardship for global survival.
The Indo-Pacific region reveals a particularly acute dimension of the contradictions of climate governance: the radically uneven distribution of vulnerability to climate impacts. This vast maritime zone, stretching from the eastern coast of Africa to the Pacific islands, is home to both some of the world’s largest economies and some of its most precariously situated nations. On one side stand the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as the Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands, whose very existence is imperiled by rising sea levels. For these states, climate change is not an abstract threat but an existential crisis. The inundation of freshwater supplies, the erosion of coastlines, and the increasing salinization of soils are already undermining their livelihoods, while projections of sea-level rise portend the forced displacement of entire populations. On the other side of this regional spectrum are the major powers—India, China, and Australia—whose policies are shaped primarily by the imperatives of fossil-fuel–driven development, energy sovereignty, and geopolitical rivalry. In this juxtaposition, the Indo-Pacific encapsulates the profound asymmetry between those who contribute most to the climate crisis and those who suffer its gravest consequences.
At the level of cohesion, the dominant states of the region pursue projects of national growth, energy security, and strategic competition. India and Australia remain heavily dependent on coal, both as a domestic energy source and as an export commodity that underpins economic development. China, while also investing in renewable technologies, continues to expand its use of fossil fuels to secure energy autonomy and sustain its industrial base, all while asserting maritime dominance in contested waters of the South China Sea. These projects bind their respective societies together, providing material stability and political legitimacy through development and security. National cohesion is therefore achieved through strategies that reinforce sovereignty and power within a competitive geopolitical landscape.
Yet these very strategies generate decoherence at the planetary and regional levels. The continued reliance on coal and oil exacerbates global warming, accelerates sea-level rise, and intensifies climate volatility, threatening the survival of the island nations scattered across the Indo-Pacific. For SIDS, which contribute negligible emissions, the contradiction is existential: the cohesion of large states’ development projects directly produces their own decoherence, rendering them uninhabitable and forcing their populations into precarity and potential displacement. Climate injustice thus emerges not only as a moral category but as a structural outcome of the asymmetry of contradictions. The very policies that stabilize one set of societies destabilize another, revealing the fundamentally uneven geography of climate change.
From a dialectical perspective, the Indo-Pacific crisis underscores how contradictions operate asymmetrically across different layers of the climate governance system. National cohesion for some—fossil-fuel–driven growth and strategic autonomy—translates into existential decoherence for others, who bear the brunt of climate instability without having reaped the benefits of industrial development. This condition exposes the limits of climate governance frameworks that treat all nations as formally equal but materially unequal in both responsibility and vulnerability. It calls for a recognition of the Indo-Pacific as not merely a geopolitical theater but as a quantum dialectical field where the contradictions of sovereignty, justice, and survival converge. The resolution of these contradictions will demand more than technical adaptation or financial compensation; it requires a higher-order synthesis in which planetary justice becomes a foundational principle of governance, ensuring that the cohesion of some does not entail the annihilation of others.
Marx and Engels repeatedly returned to the notion of the commons, both as a historical category and as a horizon for human emancipation. In their analysis, the commons were not merely a type of property arrangement but the material foundation of social life, linking human labor to nature in cooperative forms. The violent enclosure of common lands in early modern Europe marked a decisive turning point: peasants and small producers were forcibly separated from the means of subsistence, and nature itself was transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for profit. Engels, in The Dialectics of Nature, grasped the destructive consequences of treating natural systems as if they were inexhaustible raw material, warning that capitalist development would produce ecological crises by undermining the very conditions of life. Marx, too, insisted that the capitalist mode of production, driven by accumulation, exhausts the “conditions of its own reproduction”—depleting soil fertility, degrading human labor, and destabilizing the metabolic relation between society and nature.
In this tradition, the commons were never simply pools of resources to be shared but rather the shared inheritance of humanity, the ecological and social substratum upon which all cooperative relations are built. For Marx, the vision of the “common ownership of the earth” was not utopian idealism but a practical necessity for overcoming the alienation of capitalist society and ensuring the conditions of survival for future generations. This vision resonates strongly in contemporary debates about climate change, where the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Earth’s climate system are increasingly recognized as planetary commons. Yet these commons remain vulnerable to new forms of enclosure: carbon markets that commodify the atmosphere, the privatization of ecosystems through biodiversity offsetting, and the assertion of territorial sovereignty over resources that are inherently global in character. The contradiction between the universal functions of the commons and their fragmentation under capitalism and sovereignty lies at the heart of climate governance.
Viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, the commons can be understood as a dialectical field structured by cohesion and decohesion. On the one hand, cohesion manifests in the way the commons bind humanity together through shared dependence on ecological systems such as forests, oceans, the atmosphere, and genetic resources. These commons provide the collective substrate of life itself, forming the conditions of planetary survival and reproduction. On the other hand, decohesion arises when capitalism and state sovereignty fragment these commons, enclosing them as property or commodifying them as tradable assets. Competing national and corporate interests destabilize planetary cohesion, transforming what should be a shared inheritance into competitive arenas of exploitation.
The oft-cited “tragedy of the commons”—the idea that shared resources are inevitably overexploited—appears, from this perspective, not as a universal law of human behavior but as a historically specific expression of capitalist and sovereign logics. The tragedy is not that commons inherently collapse under collective use, but that dominant political-economic structures relentlessly decohere them into fragmented property regimes and competitive advantages. The contradiction lies precisely here: planetary stability requires the commons to function as cohesive systems of collective stewardship, while the prevailing institutions of capitalism and sovereignty drive their continual decoherence.
To fully grasp the role of the commons in climate governance, Quantum Dialectics insists on a layered analysis. At the local layer, commons such as forests, fisheries, and watersheds are often managed through traditional systems of community stewardship, reflecting centuries of lived practices of cohesion. Yet these arrangements are increasingly threatened by appropriation through national development policies or corporate extraction. At the national layer, resources are framed as sovereign property, consolidated into state projects of cohesion such as economic growth, infrastructure development, or energy security. But here too, overexploitation frequently undermines long-term stability. At the planetary layer, commons such as the atmosphere, the oceans, polar regions, and the climate system itself resist enclosure altogether. These planetary commons are inherently decohesive under the framework of sovereignty, because they extend beyond national borders and demand forms of governance capable of maintaining planetary-scale cohesion.
It is at this planetary layer that the contradiction intensifies. No single nation can enclose or stabilize the climate system, yet the cumulative actions of nations can destroy it. The planetary commons therefore demand new forms of governance, in which cohesion arises not from property relations or sovereignty but from an emergent sense of planetary responsibility and the development of planetary subjectivity—a recognition of humanity as a collective agent bound by the same ecological limits.
Marx and Engels understood the commons both as a remnant of pre-capitalist social forms and as a horizon of post-capitalist society, a foundation for collective life beyond alienation and exploitation. Quantum Dialectics extends and deepens this insight by emphasizing that the commons are not static things but dynamic dialectical processes, continually constituted through the interplay of cohesion (shared use, interdependence, stewardship) and decohesion (enclosure, commodification, competitive exploitation). In the context of today’s planetary crisis, this dynamic becomes inescapable: the collapse of the commons under capitalism and sovereignty threatens the very continuity of life.
This recognition reveals the necessity of a quantum leap in commons governance, one in which the cohesion of planetary systems is institutionally acknowledged as the condition of all national existence. Just as Marx and Engels anticipated the transcendence of private property as a prerequisite for social emancipation, so too must today’s contradictions push toward the transcendence of sovereignty as absolute property over nature. This does not imply the abolition of the nation-state but its sublation into a higher planetary coherence, where sovereignty is redefined not as domination over resources but as stewardship within planetary limits. In this way, the dialectic of the commons points toward a new horizon of governance, one that preserves national identities while embedding them within the planetary whole.
Taken together, the case studies of the Paris Agreement, Amazon deforestation, Arctic governance, and Indo-Pacific climate injustice reveal that the contradictions of climate governance are not accidental outcomes of weak institutions or failures of leadership. Nor are they merely moral dilemmas to be resolved through appeals to ethical responsibility. Rather, they are the structural expressions of a deeper dialectical tension: on one side, cohesion in the form of sovereignty, development, and territorial control; on the other, decohesion in the form of planetary instability, ecological tipping points, and the universal interdependence of biospheric processes. The inability of current frameworks to reconcile these opposing dynamics underscores the necessity of moving beyond ad hoc negotiations and piecemeal reforms. Climate governance demands a transformation at the level of ontology itself, where sovereignty is no longer conceived as absolute autonomy but as a relational form embedded within planetary limits.
The path forward lies in what Hegel and Marx termed sublation (Aufhebung)—a dialectical process in which contradictions are overcome not through simple negation but through a higher-order synthesis that simultaneously preserves, transforms, and transcends the original terms. For climate governance, this means creating institutions and forms of subjectivity that respect the integrity of national identities while situating them within planetary frameworks that guarantee the survival of the whole. Sovereignty must be retained but redefined; development must continue but within ecological boundaries; territoriality must persist but as stewardship rather than domination. The dialectical task is thus to produce governance arrangements that honor cohesion at one layer without producing decoherence at another.
Three dimensions of this synthesis are particularly crucial. First, layered governance must be institutionalized: national, regional, and planetary institutions must interpenetrate rather than compete. Just as molecules are structured quanta composed of smaller entities, so too must governance be conceived as a quantum layering of authority, where binding planetary frameworks guide national autonomy rather than contradict it. Second, sovereignty itself must be reconstituted: states must recognize that planetary stability is the very precondition of their continued existence. Sovereignty can no longer be defined as unrestricted control over resources but must evolve into planetary responsibility, a mode of stewardship aligned with biospheric interdependence. Third, and most profoundly, humanity must cultivate planetary subjectivity—a consciousness of itself as a collective agent bound by ecological limits, capable of transcending the competitive fragmentations of nationalism and capital. This subjectivity must not remain abstract but find material expression in institutions, movements, and practices that anchor planetary coherence in everyday life.
From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, climate governance today stands on the threshold of a phase transition. Like a system approaching criticality, it wavers between two trajectories: one toward planetary coherence achieved through dialectical synthesis, and the other toward systemic collapse into ecological decoherence. The outcome is not predetermined; it will be shaped by the interplay of cohesive and decohesive forces across quantum layers of politics, economy, and culture. What is certain, however, is that the present metastable equilibrium cannot endure indefinitely. The contradictions driving it will resolve, either through a revolutionary reconstitution of governance adequate to the planetary scale or through catastrophic breakdown. The choice before humanity, therefore, is not whether to change but how: to affirm life through a planetary synthesis or to allow the decoherence of the Earth system to dictate the terms of collapse.
Climate change governance brings into sharp relief the emergent contradictions that define our epoch. At its core lies the inescapable tension between national interests and planetary necessities, between the preservation of sovereignty and the imperative of survival, and between the pursuit of endless growth and the limits imposed by ecological stability. These contradictions are not superficial obstacles that could be removed by better diplomacy, more efficient technologies, or stronger political will. Rather, when examined through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, they emerge as structural expressions of the universal interplay of cohesive and decohesive forces. Cohesion binds states, economies, and communities into recognizable forms of stability, while decohesion disrupts, destabilizes, and forces transformation. Climate governance exists precisely in the volatile space where these forces clash, overlap, and entangle across multiple layers of political and ecological reality.
The case studies explored throughout this analysis demonstrate how these contradictions manifest in practice. The Paris Agreement’s voluntarism represents a fragile cohesion that gestures toward planetary unity but dissolves into inadequacy under the weight of national sovereignty. The Amazon’s contested sovereignty illustrates how a project of national development produces planetary decoherence by destabilizing global carbon and hydrological cycles. The Arctic’s commons dilemma exposes the double-bind of governance when national and corporate logics of extraction collide with the planetary need for preservation. The Indo-Pacific’s climate injustice reveals the asymmetry of contradictions, where the developmental cohesion of some nations generates existential decoherence for others. Finally, the broader crisis of the commons, reframed through Marx, Engels, and Quantum Dialectics, reveals how the very foundations of planetary survival are undermined by the enclosure, commodification, and fragmentation of what should be humanity’s shared inheritance.
Taken together, these examples dramatize the central contradiction of our time: planetary necessity negates national fragmentation, yet sovereignty continues to resist planetary coherence. This impasse situates humanity before a decisive historical juncture. The contradictions of climate governance will not remain unresolved indefinitely; they will culminate in one of two trajectories. Either national and planetary layers will be synthesized into a higher-order governance system that reconstitutes sovereignty as stewardship within ecological limits, or the contradictions will resolve themselves catastrophically through planetary decoherence, manifesting as ecological collapse, social upheaval, and civilizational breakdown.
Climate change governance is therefore not merely a technical or policy domain, nor even a discrete field of international relations. It is the quantum dialectical crucible of civilization’s future—the site where the contradictions of modernity converge, where the survival of the species is negotiated, and where new forms of governance and subjectivity must emerge. Humanity now stands before a threshold. Whether it steps forward into planetary coherence or falters into systemic collapse will depend on its capacity to recognize contradiction not as failure but as the generative force of transformation, and to forge from this recognition a new dialectic of life, survival, and planetary responsibility.
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