A new form of banking aims to upgrade global governance by recognizing and governing the “Global Commons” through variable transaction fees and democratic processes. The effort could help clean oceans, resettle refugees, protect tropical forests, and address many other transnational issues. Movement allies are needed to drive demand, banking partners are needed to facilitate adoption, and high integrity leaders are needed to legitimize the process. The opportunity is huge and the needs are urgent.
As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, Americans are reflecting on one of history's most ambitious experiments in governance. The founders understood that the challenges facing the thirteen colonies could not be addressed by thirteen separate governments acting alone. Their answer was to create new institutions capable of managing shared interests while balancing competing claims of power and representation.
Two hundred and fifty years later, humanity faces a similar challenge at a different scale. Climate change, biodiversity loss, financial instability, migration, and artificial intelligence increasingly transcend national borders, yet the institutions designed to govern these issues remain fragmented and underpowered.
This is an important time to revisit the idea of the “Global Commons” - the shared systems that no single nation can govern alone. They include natural systems of the planet, like the atmosphere, the ocean and the global water cycle. More recently, the Global Commons has expanded to include man-made creations like the scientific knowledge base, parts of the modern financial system, cyberspace, and much more.
It’s no secret that these commons are at risk. In 2024, scientists reported that humanity has now breached seven of nine “planetary boundaries,” such as biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. We are nearing a breaking point.
Yet the challenge is not only environmental – it is fundamentally one of governance. Our systems routinely separate responsibility from consequence: those who contribute least often bear the greatest costs, while many of the institutions, markets, and economic systems that place the greatest strain on the Global Commons remain insufficiently accountable for those harms.
Building stronger governance for the Global Commons is therefore not simply about protecting shared natural systems. It is about creating governance mechanisms that better align power, responsibility, and accountability, thereby holding institutions and markets more fully accountable while ensuring that those most affected have a greater voice in shaping the rules that govern them.
Who can help?
Beyond international institutions?
In 1997, when Ted Turner pledged $1 billion to support the United Nations, it was the largest gift of a living donor in history. Turner recognized that global problems had outgrown the capacity of nation states acting alone. Turner’s gift helped create the United Nations Foundation, a leading experiment in philanthropic support for multilateral governance.
Turner’s gift was a sign of the times. For a long time, the obvious answer to questions of global governance was international institutions. Since the end of World War II, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and regional organizations have served as the primary vehicles for global governance.
But the assumptions of an earlier era are no longer holding. The UN is an international treaty-based organization, not a world government or comprehensive world law. That is becoming increasingly apparent as it struggles to respond effectively to growing geopolitical crises, and attempts at reform remain stalled.
If current efforts to create enforceable world law remain limited, can a new paradigm help govern the planetary systems upon which civilization depends?
A growing body of scholarship from the Global Governance Philanthropy Network (GGPN), and its partners, proposes legal recognition and governance of the Global Commons through consumer choice and the financial system – as a new layer of non-state, transnational governance.
How new governance emerges
As the founder of CNN and a pioneer of the 24 hour news cycle, Ted Turner understood something more than most: global governance ultimately depends on whether humanity begins to perceive itself as sharing a common fate.
There is historical precedent of non-state actors developing systems that evolve into international laws and norms. The International Commission of Jurists helped advance the modern human rights framework. Labor movements helped shape standards codified by the International Labor Organization. Environmental advocates, scientists and corporate leaders helped catalyze the Montreal Protocol to govern ozone depletion. Consumers coordinated globally to boycott unethical banks, and drove regimes like apartheid South Africa toward democratic transition as a result..
Now a similar evolution may be possible for the Global Commons.
As proponents of global governance innovation and philanthropy and Advisors of the GGPN, the authors of this article seek to close the gap between global problems and solutions as well as between decision-making power and those with the least influence. Spinoff efforts of the GGPN include the Global Commons Fund (GCF) to match donors with projects; the recently published White Paper on the Global Commons and Philanthropy; and the Global Commons Commission, which makes policy recommendations and develops governance frameworks for the financial services industry to support responsible management of the global commons.
For direct integration with the financial system, GCF formed a partnership with Redemption Bank (co-founded by Dr. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.), to promote Global Commons Bank Cards. Each new account holder becomes a “citizen” in an emerging system of global commons governance, and is invited to participate via the GlobalCommons.net website.
The goal is to enroll as many banks and consumers as possible in a coordinated effort to scale variable transaction fees and govern the global commons through democratic processes that are still in development.
If consumers act, a new generation of banking and financial products could legally recognize the Global Commons as a functional jurisdiction and help govern it through variable financial transaction fees. Higher fees for severe carbon emissions, ocean pollution, or other harms to planetary systems, could fund Global Commons protection and restoration, as well as other international issues. Regenerative commerce that restores nature, and strengthens the commons, could receive lower fees as an incentive.
In effect, the financial system could begin internalizing harms that are currently externalized. And fee variability could function as a system of checks and balances to govern Global Commons policies. The focus could be restricted to trans-national issues to bypass concerns of national sovereignty.
Building governance through finance
The idea of a banking system that makes the “bad guys” pay more is not new.
James Tobin proposed small levies on currency transactions to curb destabilizing speculation. Companies such as Stripe Climate demonstrate that payment systems can embed climate contributions directly into transactions. Airline solidarity levies finance global health initiatives and pandemic prevention. ISO 18245 merchant codes govern credit card interchange fees to pay for the higher risks of chargebacks and fraud in online gambling, adult content and related industries. The broader financial industry prices risk continuously through compliance, underwriting, and anti-money-laundering systems.
The innovation proposed is to extend this logic to global governance itself.
In the 1990s, Turner saw that communications technologies were shrinking the psychological distance between nations. Today, financial technologies provide the opportunity to do something similar for governance.
Multiple international surveys show that most people prefer international cooperation on global issues over geopolitical confrontation. Consumers who choose “Global Commons compliant financial products” could form a new layer of world-wide governance, through democratic feedback systems, and collective pressure. In this way, consumers can help shift global governance influence away from hegemonic states and toward NGOs and global civil society.
A pair of articles from the Global Commons Commission elaborate on possible scenarios. One considers options such as direct democracy and mass consultations with AI to set global policy. Another outlines legal theories for a Global Commons jurisdiction. Both articles emphasize the value of citizen level consent and argue that only democratic processes can legitimize the process, with equally distributed voting power, independent from financial power.
Such frameworks could help address climate change, refugee resettlement, financial offshoring, and many other issues of the Global Commons. Moreover, these frameworks also simplify a growing challenge for banks themselves because fragmented climate and sustainability compliance systems are becoming increasingly expensive and complex. A unified “Global Commons compliance” framework could reduce costs through standardized, market-based mechanisms.
The revenue potential is enormous. One estimate suggests that Global Commons-linked financial mechanisms in the United States alone could generate more than $65 billion annually, while protecting critical ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest, which may require only a fraction of that amount for conservation.
Ted Turner understood that humanity’s shared systems require shared stewardship. His generation of philanthropic peers helped strengthen our institutions of international cooperation. The next generation may be called to do something even more ambitious: help build the governance infrastructure needed for an increasingly interconnected planet. . A number of philanthropists are already trying. If they demand Global Commons-compliant banking products, they could push their dollars even further
Whether through governments, markets, civil society, or new forms of collective action, the institutions and the policies that will govern the Global Commons have yet to be fully written.
Philanthropy has a rare opportunity - not simply to respond to global challenges, but to help shape the rules, incentives, and institutions that determine how humanity responds to them for generations to come.
That conversation should begin now.
About the Authors
Jonah Wittkamper leads the Global Governance Philanthropy Network. Kate Landon is an advisor to the Network, and also works to mobilize leadership and financing for the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement through her role as Executive Director of the Ban Ki-moon Foundation.
More about these ideas can be found in the White Paper on the Global Commons and Philanthropy, and the studies of the Global Commons Commission.
