Metabolic Crises, or the Political Making of Critical Zone Governance

The Critical Zone (CZ) refers to the thin layer at the Earth surface, a habitable space in which life maintains the conditions of its perpetuation. A CZ perspective acknowledges the unicity of geosphere, biosphere and ‘sociosphere’, highlighting the biogeochemical bounds between ‘natural’ and anthropic environments. Based on these assumptions, 'Critical Zonists' strive at understanding these interdependencies, and mapping the vulnerabilities associated.

This manuscript argues that the CZ concept deserves some further attention from social scientists under the 'New Climate Regime', which considers climate change as the archetype manifestation of human agency on biogeochemical cycles, as well as their constraining properties on life's conditions. CZ thinking is indeed highly political. While it does not only highlight the regulatory characteristics of biogeochemical cycles, it also acknowledges the threat induced by their disturbances: considering habitability as a determinant of sovereignty and security, hence constituting new risks for communities.

This contribution strives to define and explain the conditions for the emergence of Critical Zone Governance (CZG), as the inclusion of the biogeochemical cycle constraints in decision-making processes. The CZ has no willpower as such, and the CZG emergence is not a given: I sustain that the making of CZG is a process, the outcome of collective actions by stakeholders involved in governance structures, who rearticulated the longer-term biogeochemical and the shorter-term socio-political timeframes.

The case of metabolic crises responses and its influences over land planning policies in the Netherlands is reviewed, mobilising qualitative methods. If metabolic crises refer to the increasing tensions weighting over CZ cycle equilibriums, these become matter for policymaking as the outcome of collective actions led by diverse sets of actors involved in governance processes. I compare and provide explanations on how the housing, nitrogen, energy, and raw material crises successively turned to weight on usage conflicts and planning strategies.