Earth in Pieces: Ecosystems and World Order

By Elana Wilson Rowe

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

As the full weight of planetary change comes to bear on international relations, states--and other political actors--are increasingly claiming the right to speak on behalf of the world's large-scale ecosystems. What are the broader consequences of such efforts to order world politics in "ecosystemic" pieces? This question has become pressing as we look increasingly to the subglobal level--and to nature itself--to help address the challenges of planetary change. Earth in Pieces offers an innovative, comparative exploration of the political consequences of cooperative efforts organized around large-scale ecosystems and presents a conceptual framework for examining how world order is shaped through ecosystem governance.

Earth in Pieces identifies and examines a significant set of cases in which multi-issue, transnational cooperation is anchored in-and justified by-shared, border-crossing ecosystems. Although such cooperative arrangements have been studied for their environmental outcomes (or lack thereof), the broader political consequences of organizing cooperation around adjacent ecosystems have been largely overlooked. In this book, Wilson Rowe develops a novel research agenda on "ecosystemic politics," designed to foreground the ordering effects and shifting power relations that are facilitated by governing from ecosystems. The globally significant Amazon, Arctic, and Caspian Sea ecosystems and their governance are explored in depth as key cases. Drawing upon and comparing these findings, the book reflects on both the promise and the pitfalls of seeking to govern planetary change through ecosystem-anchored cooperation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0197860818
• ISBN13: 9780197860816
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 256 Pages