The Emergence of Multilateral Planetary Governance: Tracing the Biodiversity and Climate Issue-Linkages in the United Nations

The conception of our planetary ecosystem as single object of governance has been progressively salient in multilateral governance. A key aspect of that emergence is the notion of the link between aspects of global governance which were previously seen as segmented and got to be seen as indissociable. In particular, the domains of biodiversity conservation, aimed at avoiding degradation of natural ecosystem and species extinction, and the climate change, oriented towards with anthropogenic impacts over atmospheric processes, have increasingly been tangled around the so-called climate-biodiversity-society nexus. While we know how the epistemic communities connected to both issue areas were crucial in foregrounding this nexus to policy makers, we know less about how that linkage knitted in the intergovernmental process itself. This is the focus of this article. We seek to understand the process through which this nexus has been translated to (and disputed in) the UN system by looking at semantic networks across resolutions throughout time. Through text and network analyses of all 27 thousand resolutions adopted by the UN from 1946 to 2022, the study traces the formation of planetary governance as a boundary-spanning domain, maps out the cross-fertilization between biodiversity, climate, and their adjacent topics, and answers questions such as: when did each issue appear in UN resolutions? At which point and to what degree did the two merge? Were there previous unsuccessful attempts? Has the emergence of the nexus reshuffled some concepts to the core and others to the periphery? This inquiry into the conceptual transformations since 1946 is complemented with an actor-level analysis of resolution co-sponsorship networks that reveals the coalitions disputing and driving this process.