"Tiering Down"

Found the quote I was looking for regarding Emmett's comment on a previous posting:

From This Sovereign Land (Kemmis, 2001 p. 200-1):

In attempting to discern which forms are now most adaptive at the geopolitical level of life, complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman hypothesizes that the most viable structure for the new milennium will be a "federal system with partitioning into local semiautonomous regions."

What Kauffman prescribes seems in fact to be occurring. From the global scale on down, the chief organizing principle of the postindustrial age seems to be that of natural, organic landsforms rleated to on another in federal structures....new levels of organization are already tiering downm from continents to subcontinental regions to increasingly self-determining bioregions, watersheds and city-states...

Government power in this model would be apportioned according to an "ascending hierarchy," regionalist James Gardner suggests, "with regulatory authority vested in the lowest level at which it can be competently exercised."