Willy nilly, I have stumbled into a Glossary of Planetarity, with Metabolism providing a master key to reinterpreting some of the basic categories of social life. So far, I have covered:
Metabolic Stack
Metabolic Wars
Metabolic Sovereignty
The AI Bubble, but really, the Interverse
I also had a standalone series on Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering that serves as an introduction to the glossary. This week, I want to introduce the idea of Development with Metabolic Characteristics, where Development in this context is in the same family as Economic Development or Developing Countries. Let me start with a provocation:
In 2025, every nation is a developing nation
Once upon a time, “development” divided the world into those who had it and those who didn’t. Developed nations are/were wealthy, industrial, modern, and developing ones are poor, agrarian, aspirational. Development was a one-way street: the periphery would catch up with the core. Factories, infrastructure, and education would close the gap; history would converge.
End of History. QED.
That story no longer holds. In 2025, the French revolution is in the rearview mirror while the planet is looming on the horizon. In the condition of Planetarity, every country is once again a developing country - not in the sense of being poor or backward, but in the sense of being unfinished, adaptive, and metabolically entangled. No society today possesses a stable model of prosperity within planetary limits. Every society is learning, under pressure, how to reorganize its flows of energy, matter, and meaning so that life can go on.
That is why we need a new kind of development thinking - neither modernization nor post-development, but metabolic development: the study and practice of how societies transform within the ecological and informational constraints of the planet.
1. The End of the Development Divide
For most of the twentieth century, development was a geopolitical project. Rich nations exported capital, poor nations imported expertise, and success was measured by GDP per capita. The developmental state promised take-off through industrialization; the global market promised convergence through trade.
Today, the wealthy world faces infrastructural decay, carbon lock-in, and social fatigue. The poorer world faces heat, displacement, and resource stress. Both are bound by the same planetary metabolism: the finite capacity of the Earth to absorb, renew, and sustain. The new divide is not only between North and South (though that isn’t going away), but also between metabolic literacy and metabolic blindness, between those who can reorganize their flows and those trapped in inherited infrastructures.
2. Growth Under Planetary Conditions
To think metabolically is to recognize that economies are not factories joined by trade - boxes and lines in a systems diagram; they are living systems exchanging with the biosphere.
Every act of development is thus a metabolic act: reorganizing how a society eats, moves, builds, and computes. Development policy, reimagined, is the art of rewiring metabolism—redirecting energy and information so that human flourishing aligns with planetary regeneration. In that sense, the development challenge has come full circle. The 1950s dreamed of escaping scarcity; the 2020s must dream of escaping overshoot.
Metabolic development begins with a hard truth: that economic growth is a terrible model of growth, which is much better conceptualized as a metabolic rather than economic process. Growth and Development come with a heavy biological hand: as properties of living systems that help them evolve, adapt, and regenerate. The question is not whether we grow, but how we grow—what grows, where, and at what energetic and ecological cost.
Further, biologizing growth will also wean us away from the linear GDP growth indices we have become used to. Growth has room for Domestic Product, Domestic Happiness and much more.
Planetary development is about qualitative growth: the expansion of complexity, knowledge, and capability within finite energy budgets. A solar panel, an algorithm, a mangrove forest—all are growth processes of different kinds, linked by energy and information flows. To grow well under planetary conditions is to maintain the circulatory integrity of the Earth system, to ensure that the human metabolism amplifies rather than undermines the larger metabolism that hosts it. In 2025, every nation faces the same paradoxical task:
To decarbonize while electrifying.
To digitize while democratizing.
To globalize while localizing resilience.
To grow while regenerating.
The United States and China wrestle with energy transition and data governance; India and Nigeria grapple with urban heat and agricultural stress; Europe experiments with circular economies while importing materials from elsewhere. Each is a development laboratory testing new metabolic configurations under the same planetary constraints.
Thus, “developing” no longer means “catching up”; it means learning to adapt. The hierarchy has collapsed into a shared predicament: how to sustain complexity without exhausting the substrate that supports it.
3. Hirschman and Sen
Every social metabolism runs on three interlocking pillars:
Energy – the physical throughput that powers transformation.
Information – the patterns and feedbacks that coordinate energy use.
Organization – the institutions, values, and technologies that bind them together.
Twentieth-century development emphasized energy (mainly fossil) and organization via state and market but ignored information, the feedback systems that inform us about nonlinearity and complexity and warn us when flows become unsustainable. Only through intelligent sensing can we manage a finite metabolism wisely. Metabolic development, therefore, is development as learning—the construction of societies that can read, model, and correct their own energetic and ecological footprints in real time.
Easier said than done.
Every transition begins in stress: blackouts, shortages, migrations, protests. The aim is not to eliminate disruption but to metabolize it into innovation and coordination. Here, we need to channel Albert Hirschman; his mid-century insight that development advances through disequilibria, linkages, and creative tension feels newly prophetic. What he called “unbalanced growth” we now recognize as metabolic stress: localized perturbations that trigger systemic learning. The subtitle of this essay is The Strategy of Metabolic Development, a homage to Hirschman’s masterpiece “The Strategy of Economic Development.” I hope to reimagine his ideas for a world of energy grids, data centers, and ecological feedbacks.
From Hirschman to another hero: Amartya Sen.
If Hirschman gives metabolic development its dynamics, Amartya Sen gives it its ethics. Freedom, in the metabolic view, is not an abstraction but a function of access to energy and information - the conditions of possibility of capability. I want to build upon Sen’s Development as Freedom and ask: what metabolic substrate do we need to make that Freedom possible? How can we design societies in which energy and information circulate in ways that sustain freedom for humans and non-humans alike?
4. Institutions for a Living Economy
Metabolic development demands new architectures of coordination:
Energy commons that distribute generation and ownership.
Data cooperatives that treat information as a public utility.
Circular economies that close material loops.
Ecological states that measure success by restoration rather than extraction.
To be sure, these are utopias in comparison to our lived realities but they are also necessities if we are to survive the condition of planetarity. The old dichotomy between state and market dissolves into a more fluid topology of governance as metabolism - networks of feedback and reciprocity linking households, ecosystems, and algorithms.
Policy, in this light, becomes metabolic design: structuring flows so that feedback sustains, rather than erodes, vitality.
The Anthropocene’s core design challenge is to make that learning conscious. It requires humility (to recognize limits), intelligence (to sense patterns), and imagination (to build new pathways). No country has mastered it; the distinction between rich and poor gives way to the distinction between responsive and rigid.
Those who receive tutelage from the planet will thrive.
The strategy of metabolic development is the strategy of:
sensing imbalance,
reallocating flows,
evolving new structures that maintain coherence through change.
It is neither laissez-faire nor command-and-control but a disciplined responsiveness - a dance between design and emergence. Such strategy requires not only institutions but philosophy: a renewed understanding of what it means to grow, to learn, to act. It recognizes that human metabolism is now planetary in scale and must therefore be planetary in responsibility.
5. Conclusion: The Developing Planet
When future historians look back at the 2025, may they see the decade when the world rediscovered development as a permanent condition of life on a finite planet. All nations are developing nations because the planet itself is in development - reorganizing its energy flows, recalibrating its climates, renegotiating the terms of coexistence.
Hirschman reminds us that imbalance is opportunity. Sen reminds us that capability is metabolism. Together they will help us sketch a planetary art of thriving within limits. That’s the hope anyway!
Who is the appropriate agent of Planetarity? We may need to make it the Planet itself -- to account for the magnitude and nature of the effects. We know of a couple of ways in which Gaia metabolizes and acts: powered by the nuclear fission in her internal mantle and core, driving her tectonics and her volcanoes, or powered by her nearby fusion reactor, the sun, driving her climate and biological processes. We are part of the latter, adding in some nuclear and geothermal power to the first and some fossil fuel burning and wind and solar power to the second. Life is Gaia's skin, her organ of consciousness; it is how she knows herself and relates to the external world. Plants trap solar energy through photosynthesis and turn it into chemical energy, which may be used the next day or a million years later. A planetary culture means at some level an understanding that we are subsystems of Gaia, surviving at our particular level only because of all the other subsystems above and below us.