GAIA stands for вЂњGlocal Agency in AnthropoceneвЂќ, and describes a project for a novel institutional framework to be set up with the objective of tackling humanityвЂ™s most urgent problems and glocally governing and sustainably developing human affairs in the future. We are writing at the end of the year 2048, and marking a period of efforts towards the establishment of a new and comprehensive global governance mechanism, known, for short, as вЂњGAIA 2048вЂќ. Why do we remember the past and not the future? Footnote 1 Thus, this chapter predicts that the foremost necessity for law in the future is to build on novel and enhanced modes of human cognition to deal better with complexity and rapid change. Both change and complexity increase the relevance of cognition, as laws and policies adopted in one area are more likely to affect their success or failure and that of the global governance system as a whole. The need for cognitive change is driven by changes in the environment, and by the challenges resulting from a perceived acceleration of the pace of change and the unprecedented levels of technological complexity. This chapter marks both a legally and a scientifically fictitious account of the years from 2020 until 2048, from a dystopian and a utopian perspective, with the aim of highlighting the importance of cognition for legal and institutional change.

GAIA is designed as the first truly integrated global institution with a universal character with the aim to tackle the complex and multiversal governance challenges of humanity and the planet as a whole.

To assess a future scenario of the world without a WTO, the present chapter projects the reader into the distant future of the year 2048 by which time the global community is aiming to establish GAIA, the so-called вЂњGlocal Agency in AnthropoceneвЂќ.

Gaia project rules pdf