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Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralization of power can arise horizontally, through parallel communities, each with local administration, and vertically, through multiple hierarchies of overlapping jurisdiction. Drawing from literature on federalism and polycentricity in analogous offline institutions, we scrutinize the landscape of existing platforms through the lens of multi-level governance. Our analysis describes how online platforms incorporate varying forms and degrees of decentralized governance. In particular, we propose a framework that characterizes the general design space and the various ways that middle levels of governance vary in how they can interact with a centralized governance system above and end users below. This focus provides a starting point for new lines of inquiry between platform- and community-governance scholarship. By engaging themes of decentralization, hierarchy, power, and responsibility, while discussing concrete examples, we connect designers and theorists of online spaces.
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This content will become publicly available on May 28, 2026
Introducing Jurisdiction
We argue for bringing jurisdiction more centrally into geographic and political ecology scholarship. Jurisdiction shapes life in profound and often hidden ways and as a concept helps make sense of the relationship among space, power, law, and governance. Drawing from the scholarly literature and empirical examples, we present an understanding of jurisdiction as the defined space of (legal) governance and the (legal) power to make decisions over this space and the lives, objects, and events within it. Building from this, we show how jurisdiction both unites and is distinct from the core geographic and legal concepts of territory, sovereignty, and borders that are used to unpack intersections of space and power. Jurisdiction, moreover, allows us to attend to consequential spatial dynamics these core concepts cannot fully explain. To further elaborate what exactly jurisdiction is, we identify specific jurisdictional concepts (e.g., overlap, adjacency, and fragmentation) that underscore its consequential yet underappreciated features and show how these merge around jurisdiction’s spatiality, compatibility with other jurisdictions, temporality or changeability, and application. We ground these concepts in examples spanning land and sea to show the ubiquity of jurisdiction and how it carves up, creates, and codifies spaces. Within these spaces, we show how jurisdiction inaugurates life before the law and then governs this life, its well-being, and its death, whether human or more than human.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2419014
- PAR ID:
- 10625469
- Publisher / Repository:
- Annals of the American Association of Geographers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annals of the American Association of Geographers
- Volume:
- 115
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2469-4452
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1005 to 1028
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- environmental governance legal geography more-than-human/animal geographies political ecology political geography
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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