Scale-Sensitive Governance of the Environment

Sensitivity to scales is one of the key challenges in environmental governance. Climate change, food production, energy supply, and natural resource management are examples of environmental challenges that stretch across scales and require action at multiple levels. Governance systems are typically ill-equipped for this task due to organisational and jurisdictional specialisation and short-term planning horizons. Further to this, scientific knowledge is fragmented along disciplinary lines and research traditions in academia and research institutions. State-of-the-art, Scale-Sensitive Governance of the Environment addresses these challenges by establishing the foundation for a new, trans-disciplinary research field. It brings together and reframes a variety of disciplinary approaches, using the idea of scales to create a conceptual and methodological basis for scale-sensitive governance of the environment from both a natural and social science perspective. This volume presents new visions, methods and innovative applications of thinking and decision making across scales in space and time to develop a holistic view on the subject. It is unique in providing: F analysis on how spatial, temporal, and governance scales are constructed, politically and scientifically defined, institutionalized in governance practices, and strategically used in policy discourses F details on how current environmental governance practices can be enriched by the use of theory on scale, with specific research themes to show the benefits of recognizing scales in empirical research F insightful case studies drawn from countries in the Americas, Eastern and Southern Africa, Europe, and South and Southeastern Asia, covering a wide range of environmental topics including biodiversity, climate change, commodities (tea and palm oil), cultural landscapes, energy, forestry, natural resource management, pesticides, urban development, and water management. With its comprehensive coverage of scale and scaling issues and convergence of widely different scientific approaches, this book is essential for environmental scientists, policy makers and planners, also conservation biologists and ecologists who are involved in modeling climate change impacts and sustainability. This reference will also benefit students of environmental studies, and all those who seek a response to the urgent environmental governance challenges for the decades ahead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118567128

Book preview

1

Concepts of scale

Frans Padt¹ and Bas Arts²

¹Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

²Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen UR, the Netherlands

1.1 Introduction

Climate change, food and bio-energy production, storm water management, collapsing fisheries, and the decline of biodiversity are examples of environmental challenges that stretch across scales and cut across traditional jurisdictions and scopes of scientific routines and models. Such challenges call for new interdisciplinary approaches in the interface of natural and social sciences, framed in a context of governance and decision-making by actors from the state, market and civil society. Several comprehensive books on scale have been published in geography (Brenner 2004; Sheppard and McMaster 2004; Zimmerer 2006; Entrikin 2008), urban sociology and planning (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 2010), political ecology (Neumann 2005; Paulson and Gezon 2005), environmental governance (Young 2002; Rotmans and Rothman 2003; Young et al. 2008; Adger and Jordan 2009; Winter 2011), ecology (Chapin et al. 2009; Scheffer 2009), spatial policy (Arts et al. 2009), and water management (Huntjens 2011). These books nicely illustrate the richness of the approaches and ideas in the scale debate in various distinct disciplines. At the same time, great potential exists in regard to bringing these disciplinary approaches and ideas together to solve the pressing environmental problems of these times. However, conceptual ambiguity and imprecise definitions of scale stand in the way of such an effort. This chapter seeks to bring some clarity to the scale debate. With this chapter, we aim to bridge a variety of approaches, definitions and jargon used in the various disciplines in order to provide common ground for a concept of scale as a basis for scale-sensitive governance of the environment.

The road map for this chapter is as follows. In section 1.2, the concept of scale is introduced and three meanings of scale are explained: scale as size, level, and relation. Next to the traditional spatial and temporal scales, various other scales are introduced that can help scientists and policymakers get a hold on scale-sensitive governance of the environment. In section 1.3, we elaborate on three analytical frameworks that can be used to study scale: social-ecological systems, social-ecological networks, and ‘heterarchy’, which is a combination of the previous two. Section 1.4 addresses the question of how to identify scales, bearing in mind that the scale of observation may influence observations and patterns themselves. Due to this fundamental uncertainty in identifying scales objectively, we propose to negotiate the scales of governance among a wide range of stakeholders. As stakeholders may have special interests in promoting one scale above the other, the politics of scale come into play. The politics of scale is the topic of section 1.5. The politics of scale can exacerbate or alleviate spatial injustice, as will be explained in this section.

1.2 Definitions of scale

A quick look in the dictionary reveals two basic definitions of scale. First, scale refers to the actual size or extent of phenomena. Second, it refers to a graduated range of values for measuring these phenomena (i.e. scale as a measuring rod). As large scale phenomena require different measuring rods than small scale phenomena, different levels of scale are discerned. These levels are not quantitative units on a measurement rod, but, instead, are qualitative orders (or classes) of measurement. Sayre and Vittorio (2009) explained the differences between scale as size and scale as level clearly:

Whether one is measuring weight, distance, area, volume, velocity, duration, temperature, or some other quality, one uses a scale to do so. […] Scale in this sense is a tool, arbitrary in its units, that an observer employs to derive knowledge about the world; by abstracting from qualitatively different things in a standardized way, a scale renders them comparable in quantitative terms. […] Things measured in grams and things measured in tons occupy different levels of weightiness, so to speak. […] When we observe that the weight of the earring is on a different scale from that of a train, we do not deny that quantitative reduction is possible, but rather recognize that the quantitative difference is so great as to represent, in some significant sense, a difference in kind. Things measured in a jeweler's scale will not register on a railroad scale, and things measured on a railroad scale will crush a jeweler's scale to smithereens. Scale as level presupposes, but abstracts from, scale as size (p. 20).

From this quote, it follows that scale is primarily a device by which to measure biophysical and social phenomena. Traditionally two scales are discerned: spatial and temporal. For social scientists, typical levels in the spatial scale are the human individual, household, neighbourhood, city, metropolitan area, province/state, nation-state, continent and globe (Sayre and Vittorio 2009). For natural scientists, typical levels in the spatial scale are point, field, landscape, region, and globe (Veldkamp et al. 2011). Typical levels in the temporal scale relate to rate (e.g. decomposition of plant matter or population change), duration (e.g. rain showers or the 24-hour news cycle), or frequency (e.g. hurricanes or social conflict) (Cash et al. 2006). For scale-sensitive governance of the environment, it is often not sufficient to take into account only space and time. Cash et al. (2006) made an important contribution to the scale debate by identifying specific governance scales (i.e. jurisdictional, institutional, management, knowledge, and social network scales) (Fig. 1.1). Jurisdictional scales are defined as clearly bounded and organized administrative units, such as towns, counties, states or provinces, and nations, with the links between them created by constitutional and statutory means. Institutional scale relates to rules, ranging from constitutions (e.g. international or national constitutions) to systems of laws and regulations (e.g. environmental laws and ordinances) to operational rules (e.g. building codes). Management plans have a hierarchy that runs from strategies (e.g. economic revitalization) through projects (e.g. industrial zones) and tasks (e.g. logistics). Social networks may stretch from societies and beyond (e.g. labour unions) to families and relationships (e.g. between workers). Knowledge can range in scale from universal and generally applicable knowledge (e.g. about system dynamics) to specific contextual knowledge (e.g. a particular wetland).

Figure 1.1 Schematic illustrations of different scales and levels, which are critical in understanding complex social and natural processes. (Cash et al. 2006. Reproduced with permission of Dr DW Cash.)

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By analytically discerning multiple scales, researchers can be more precise in communicating the relationships between and among scales and levels. For example, Alaska and Rhode Island in the US are on the same administrative level on the jurisdictional scale, but different in size on the spatial scale. Similarly, extreme events, such as flooding and hurricanes, can affect large areas (spatial scale) in a couple of days (temporal scale), affecting local sites in different ways because of spatial heterogeneity. Some sites (e.g. grasslands) may recover within a few years, while others (e.g. forests) may take decades to regenerate.

Of course, demarcating scales and discrete levels of scale (Fig. 1.1) are overly abstract ways of ordering ecological and social processes, which are fuzzy and fluid by their very nature. For this reason, authors have stressed that scale is, first and foremost, relational (Howitt 2003; Sayre 2009; Sayre and Vittorio 2009). For example, a national veterinary policy (jurisdictional scale) relates to policies at the higher intergovernmental level within that same scale as well as to higher trans-society dairy commodity chains in the social network scale and a lower contextual understanding of veterinary issues (knowledge scale). Another example can be found in the expansion of a city (spatial scale) that relates to activities in the management scale (e.g. city growth strategies) and to dynamics in the social network scale (e.g. increase of single households, regional urbanization trends, globalization of movement). Scale, in these examples, is truly relational: a national veterinary policy is a negotiation between local and global issues and seeing the city is also seeing the households and the world at the same time holistically.

These scales and levels are analytical tools that can be used to research the environment and the governance thereof. However, how can we make the environment a tangible object for research and governance? The answer to that question is the topic of the next section.

1.3 Scale-sensitive governance of … what?

1.3.1 Social-ecological systems

Scale and levels of scale are useful when analysing and governing natural and social processes, as explained above. To carry out such an analysis, we need to define and demarcate an analytical framework. There are three approaches that we feel can serve this goal. The first framework is the social-ecological system (SES), which is also known as the coupled human-environment system (HES) approach. A SES consists of one social and one ecological subsystem. The relationship between the two subsystems can be described as dynamic feedback loops in which societal actors influence, and are influenced by, ecological systems so that they become self-organizing. These dynamic feedback loops generate emergent behaviour that cannot be understood when ecological and social systems are studied separately (Gibson et al. 2000; Veldkamp et al. 2011).

A systems approach is typically based on a hierarchical notion of scale (the word scale is derived from the Latin word scala, which means ladder). Applied to socio-ecological systems, a hierarchical notion of scale can introduce ambiguity. Social scientists studying social-ecological systems tend to see hierarchy as an arrangement in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority (New Oxford American Dictionary 2010). In political and social sciences, the metaphor often used is ‘command and control’, which means that higher organizational levels exercise power over lower ones. Natural scientists tend to see a hierarchy as an arrangement or classification of things according to relative importance or inclusiveness (New Oxford American Dictionary 2010). Yet, despite these differences, both social and natural scientists share the same metaphor: that of the Russian Matryoshka doll where discrete scale levels are embedded inside one another (Moore 2008).

1.3.2 Social-ecological networks

Social-ecological networks represent the second framework to be used to study and govern natural and social phenomena. The social-ecological network approach emphasizes the interconnection and interdependence of biophysical and social phenomena across space (i.e. between places) (Zimmerer 2006). The scale of a network refers to the horizontal extent of these networks (the Greek word for scale is dromos, which means running or course, which, inherently, has a horizontal connotation) and not to the level. A conventional network analysis aims to identify and demarcate networks and understand the interconnections and interdependencies that hold the network together. Zimmerer (2006) for example argued that, due to globalization, spatiality is not only territorial, but also network-like. Such an organization of space implies that interventions for a particular area may lie outside of that area, further away in the socio-environmental networks. Examples of global social-ecological networks include fair trade, the Forest Steward Council (FSC) and Bees for Development. Examples of local social-ecological networks include farmer markets, urban farming and community supported agriculture. These new geographies must be taken into account when conducting governance, as is explained by the author.

A more radical approach is to see social-ecological networks as fundamentally unbounded in space and time. Kortelainen (1999) illustrated this point well when describing the Finnish forest industry utilization of lake and river systems:

Through these networks, the actors of the river are connected with a vast number and variety of actors in other locations. International paper markets, for example, link the river with forest companies, publishers and printing houses, international environmental organisations, and millions of paper consumers in different parts of the world. Decisions and behaviours of these faraway actors can potentially affect the river (p. 237, reproduced with permission of Elsevier).

This example illustrates that a river is embedded in a wider network of actors. In a similar fashion, Woods (2007) introduced the concept of ‘global countryside’ in order to describe the advanced interconnection and interdependence of localities across the world. The global countryside is a virtual space having no fixed borders, but actually shaping and transforming landscapes at the same time. The global countryside is a place where food comes from all over the world, labourers migrate easily from one place to another, and tourism and counter-urbanization are global. In the global countryside, transnational agri-food, forestry and mining corporations are constantly seeking new spaces for production. Competition between regions leads to an inflow of capital and entrepreneurs and, hence, the displacement of local businesses and the migration of residents.

This example illustrates that a landscape, like the river in the previous example, can only be understood as a part of a larger network. Bradshaw (2008) applied this idea to communities. He introduced the concept of ‘post-place communities’ that are organized as social networks, unlike local communities that are territorially organized. Social networks can extend to the global level (e.g. using the internet), whereas local communities are characterized by localized social relations. Bradshaw argued that social networks can create special, materialized places because they are a node or a hub in a network. Examples include Silicon Valley and creative cities that provide a hospitable place for people to base their international interests. In the same line of reasoning, Cerny (2009) stated that locational (dis)advantages of regions do not depend on how they are located within a national territory, but on how they are plugged into the global economy. For scale analysis, this observation means that the position a place has in larger networks and how it relates to other places should be studied.

The Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been developed in order to study such unbounded relationships (see Latour 2005 for a comprehensive explanation). ANT starts from the idea that social and ecological processes are organized along unbounded networks in space and time. ANT shows that people create these networks through social interactions as well as nature itself (e.g. water flows, wild animals move and seeds fly through the air). ANT suggests that the task of the researcher is to meticulously follow these processes and reveal the scale and nature of the socio-ecological relationships. Such an approach is obviously far removed from a systems approach. Whereas systems are hierarchical, closed (i.e. not influenced by outer influences), functionalistic (i.e. all parts of the systems serve a function in the entire system) and teleological (i.e. the system has a purpose and develops accordingly), networks are flat, open (i.e. having fuzzy boundaries, if any), holistic (i.e. the parts can only be understood by reference to the whole) and contingent (i.e. not following a predefined path).

Although the system and network approaches are fundamentally different ways to study biophysical and social processes, they are not mutually exclusive. One way to combine these two approaches is to consider networks as part of a system. For example, Janssen et al. (2006) stated that

A network perspective might be a useful complement to existing analyses because it focuses explicitly on the structure of the interactions between the components of social-ecological systems and the ways in which this structure affects the performance of the system (p. 15).

Incorporating networks into a system is surely one way to go, but, at the same time, we see a risk of losing sight of the fuzzy, holistic, and contingent nature of social-ecological networks. For this reason, we have introduced the concept of heterarchy, which we feel does justice to the explanatory power of both the system and network approaches.

1.3.3 Where systems and networks meet: Heterarchies

In many cases, natural and social phenomena cannot be explained as part of a system or a network. Most often, they are negotiated based on the intersections of vertical (scalar) and horizontal (network) relationships (Hartzog 2004; Bulkeley 2005; Allen and Cochrane 2007; Moore 2008). For example, a national veterinary policy in one country is the negotiated outcome of trans-society dairy commodity chains, contextual knowledge and intergovernmental rules (see above), as well as of negotiated veterinary policies in other countries. A city may expand not only because of its city growth strategies, but also in response to the growth of other cities to which it is connected and, on a larger scale, to trends, such as an increase of single households, regional urbanization, and globalization of movement.

Crumley (1995), an archaeologist drawing upon the earlier work of McCulloch (1945), introduced the term heterarchy to describe this constellation of relationships. We see a heterarchy as the third way to analyse natural and social phenomena (next to systems and networks as explained above). The exploration of heterarchy resulted from dissatisfaction among archaeologists with the traditional band-tribe-chiefdom-state model of socio-cultural complexity (Crumley 1995; White 1995). An example from Crumley (2005) illustrates this point:

While the Maya political system was organized vertically, the economy appears to have been shaped by environmental constraints and characterized by fluidly networked interregional exchange. As water resources, forests, and soil fertility diminished, corporate groups creatively managed food production. Despite the success of such community structures in the countryside, the huge centres of population were apparently ignorant of the corporate role in the conservation of environmental resources. Ultimately, an uninformed attempt at hierarchical management of resources, combined with the insensitivity of urban elites to the fragility of the environment and to the importance of the rural corporate infrastructure, may have crashed the system (emphasis original) (p. 47).

Crumley, thus, demonstrated how a combined scalar and network perspective provides a rich explanation of social and ecological processes.

Leitner (2004) provided a good example of a heterarchy in spatial planning when explaining the transnational networks between cities and regions in Europe, which cannot be seen as separate from the scalar hierarchies of the European Commission.

The European Commission is actively engaged in constructing transnational interurban networks to enhance its own power, authority, and legitimacy relative to the national scales, and member states also contest such scalar reconfigurations. […] Transnational networks present an opportunity for cities and regions to strengthen their power and authority vis-á-vis the national government and the European Commission (p. 250).

These examples make it clear that heterarchies have no sovereign authority, a single hierarchical control point or fixed territorial boundaries. In the real world, heterarchies are much more common than pure hierarchies or pure networks. Examples include partnerships in law or accountancy firms, strategic alliances between businesses, the trias politica (i.e. a state model based on the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial branches), large organizations with business units, investment groups with individual fund managers, and universities and research groups with research projects led by principal investigators (Fairtlough 2005). We think that the heterarchy concept can be a useful way to unravel complex social-ecological relationships in the real world. The concept encourages the researcher to not project a priori system or network thinking on ecological and social processes in research and governance, but to meticulously follow social-ecological relationships in an empirical manner.

Now that we have identified a multitude of scales and analytical frameworks, it might be tempting to say that scale-sensitive governance is nothing more than matching different scales and levels in a social-ecological system, network or heterarchy. The difficulty with such thinking, however, is that scales cannot be identified objectively. This fundamental uncertainty in scale research will be discussed in the next section. In the next section, we will also discuss different ways to cope with this uncertainty.

1.4 Scale as a reality … or not?

1.4.1 The two ‘moments’ of scale

In section 1.2 we touched upon the dual meaning of scale: scale as a measure for the actual size of phenomena (independent of observers) and as a measurement rod (used by observers). Sayre (2009) referred to this duality as the ontological and epistemological moments of scale. The ontological moment explains that ecological and social processes have a certain scale size and actually take place at a certain level. Scale then is an objective characteristic of complex natural and social interactions, often referred to as an operational scale. The ontological moment describes the real scale of, for example, groundwater systems, jet streams, and – when the human factor comes into play –irrigation systems (reflecting natural hydrological systems), metropolitan areas (reflecting commuter behaviour), and the Silk Route between Asia and Europe during the Han Dynasty (reflecting economic dynamics). The epistemological moment explains that it is the scale itself that structures observations and, hence, the description of social and ecological phenomena. This scale is often called the observational scale. Scale is the lens through which reality is observed (Meadowcraft 2002; Van Lieshout et al. 2011) or an epistemological ordering frame (Marston et al. 2005). According to Easterling and Polsky (2004),

Scale is a human construct that locates an observer/modeller relative to a set of objects distributed in space, time, and magnitude. It explains nothing in and of itself, but its perspective may influence the discovery of pattern and process (p. 66).

In a similar manner, Sayre and Vittorio (2009) stated:

One cannot posit a priori the correct observational scale for a given process; rather, one must ascertain this empirically, bearing in mind that patterns may be artifacts of one's observational scale (emphasis original) (p. 24).

Geohydrologists can only map regional groundwater systems when they do field work at this scale and meteorologists could only learn about jet streams by observing and measuring atmospheric processes at the continental scale. Agricultural engineers devise irrigation systems at the scale that they think they can optimize the water system. Statisticians take the metropolitan scale as the appropriate scale for measuring commuting behaviour, and traders during the Han Dynasty enlarged their world to the intercontinental scale because they saw opportunities for trade at that scale. The description of social and ecological processes, thus, depends upon the scale at which these processes are conceptualized. More precisely, the scale of observation (Easterling and Polsky 2004; Chapin et al. 2009; Veldkamp et al. 2011), and the scale of data collection and data representation (Turnhout and Boonman-Berson 2011) define how researchers conceptualize social and ecological processes.

To date, much of the previous social-ecological research has focused on the ontological moment of scale: scales are viewed as a reality that can be known and modelled true-to-nature with objective and universal laws. The epistemological moment of scale has received much less attention. This omission can easily be corrected if a researcher of social and ecological processes is clear and transparent about the scale of observation, observation techniques, and other epistemological choices when claiming knowledge (Buizer et al. 2011). Such scrutiny would not only be a great gain for social-ecological research, but also for developing recommendations for scale-sensitive governance in related systems and networks that rely on this research.

1.4.2 The social construction of scale

If, as explained above, the epistemological moment of scale resembles a measuring rod, the assumption is that once the researcher has decided which measuring rod to use (i.e. what level of scale) s/he can measure and analyse social and ecological processes. However, there is more at play in that it is difficult for the researcher to determine which rod is the correct rod. If the observations, analyses and conclusions depend upon the scale lens, then how can one ever acquire absolute and certain knowledge about natural and social processes? For a reflection on this question, we can learn from the social constructivist tradition, which assumes that reality can neither be directly assessed nor objectively and universally known. A social-constructivist view on scale implies that the scale of a system or network can never be a model of reality, but instead is always a social construction. Such a view on scale can be a powerful contribution to a scale analysis as we will see, while, at the same time, a source of confusion and misunderstanding between those who study the world as an objective reality (i.e. scales as they are) and those who study the world as a subjective reality (i.e. scales as a social construct). In the remainder of this section, we will explore how these two contrasting views, and concomitantly the two moments of scale, can be bridged and utilized in scale research.

Manson (2008) (see Fig. 1.2) developed an epistemological scale continuum that ‘arrays scale perspectives from the realist contention that there are natural scales independent of observers through to the constructionist view that scale is subjective and socially mediated’ (p. 776). Here, we can recognize the two moments of scale, which are now bridged as a continuum. Manson states that no single definition of scale exists because the environmental scale debate is informed by so many disciplines (see above). After explaining the different schools of thought in detail, Manson concludes that:

researchers should actively consider the range of scale perspectives, no matter how seemingly inapplicable. Scale perspectives along the continuum are scientifically valid by virtue of being successfully used by significant numbers of researchers. Moreover, each school of thought offers distinct advantages and challenges in dealing with any given scale problem and, by extension, there are often multiple entry points into any given complex human–environment system (p. 785, reproduced with permission of Elsevier).

Figure 1.2 Epistemological scale continuum. (Manson 2008. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.)

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Manson goes on to state that ‘movement along the continuum from realism to constructionism seems more necessary as one goes from physical and biological systems through ecological and human-environment systems to the social and policy domains’ (p. 786). In a practical sense, Manson recommends that interdisciplinary research teams include scientists comfortable with differing epistemological views. Manson's approach seems to echo John Dewey's critical pragmatism in that scientific knowledge is important because it is useful and not necessarily because it is ontologically true.

Buizer et al. (2011) presented a similar way of bridging the two moments of scale. In their paper, the authors analysed recent developments in the scaling and governance literature and observed that in both fields there was increasing appreciation that not only government and scientists, but a whole range of other actors (including lay experts), have valid knowledge claims that are relevant and useful for scale-sensitive governance of the environment. The authors recommended that a multitude of actors start

a social learning process in order to identify the levels, scales, and governance modes that they find relevant. […] These may have a global emphasis for some, for others a local, or a mix. Thus, scales, levels, and governance practices now have to become scientifically and socially deliberated phenomena

(Buizer et al., p. 11).

In this approach, we can recognize the epistemological moment of scale, now actively produced by a multitude of actors. The authors stress though that they do not avoid questions about ontology because any knowledge claim is always ‘dialectically related to nature's materiality’ (Buizer et al., p. 1). Brenner (2001) also emphasized that the biophysical and social world provides limits to the social-constructivist interpretation of scale.

Both proposals encourage a reflexive, collaborative and pragmatic way by which to bridge ontological and epistemological issues in scale research. Game theory scale can similarly be understood as a coordination game where stakeholders can get mutual gains by making mutually consistent decisions (Scharpf 1997; Goyal 2007). The social construction of scale is not just an academic issue because, once scales are negotiated, they can become social and ecological realities through the implementation of projects and policies. The strong point of these approaches is that they remove the static view of scales by acknowledging that scales are of social construction and, thus, malleable through social action. In political geography and political ecology, this consequence is taken even further. If scales are malleable, then they can also be an object of political manipulation. Here we enter the field of the politics of scale, which is the subject of the next section.

1.5 The politics of scale

As scales are a social construction, albeit in interaction with nature's materiality, they can be used strategically as political devices (Smith 1984; Swyngedouw 2004). Rangan and Kull (2009) clarified this point using a political-ecological approach. They also added a third moment of scale, that of interpretation, to the ontological and epistemological moments (see above). According to the authors, the interpretative moment ‘plays a crucial role in the production of scale because it provides the means by which spatiotemporal difference and change is articulated, challenged or defended’ (Rangan and Kull, p. 35). The interpretative scale translates, bridges and transcends the ontological and epistemological moment of scale to become a generalized, simplified and abstract concept, decoupled from its specific context. Phrases such as ‘the global city’, ‘compact city’, ‘consumption landscape’ and ‘brainport’ are examples of scalar narratives linked to political projects. The general nature of the interpretative moment of scale differs from the other two moments of scales, which are always linked to a particular locality.

Rangan and Kull (2009) explained how the interpretative moment of scale is produced by telling scalar narratives. A scalar narrative serves as a ‘device for political persuasion in the public realm, and plays a much larger role than rationality in the politics of governance’ (Rangan and Kull 2009, p. 40). Through these narratives, an interpretative scale is produced, enabling political actors to exercise power or oppose authority in a way that appeals ‘to the emotions and sensibilities of the populace through the rhetorical shield of rationality and objectivity’ (Rangan and Kull 2009, p. 40).

Gonzáles (2006) explained how policymakers in Bilbao, Spain used several narratives about the rescaling of the economy to frame and justify an entrepreneurial and competitive urban policy in a European context. These policymakers presented urban and regional policies, aided by the scalar narratives, as univocal and self-explanatory and the only way of creating prosperity for the city and its region. The scalar narratives thus acted as cognitive shortcuts and limited the range of possibilities available. Scalar narratives typically make one scale more important politically than other scales and, thus, a political reality because these scales are perpetually reproduced and institutionalized in practices (Engel-Di Mauro 2009; Garmestani et al. 2009).

Another example, provided by Padt and Westerink (2012), focused on a large-scale green belt near The Hague in the Netherlands. This green belt has been successful for decades because The Hague has been using it as a marketing concept to attract international businesses and organizations and prohibit development. The adverse effect, however, is that new houses can only be built within the city, which reduces the available space for city parks, allotment gardens and other small-scale urban green space. Low-income and ethnic groups in particular who like to use these places are thus deprived of their greens.

Both of the above examples illustrate how scale can include or exclude humans (and non-humans) and who has a say in future developments. Scalar narratives can, thus, create or sustain spatial injustice. This observation brings us to our next topic of spatial justice.

Soja, in his book Seeking Spatial Justice (2010), stated that ‘[s]pace and time are the most fundamental and encompassing qualities of the physical and social worlds in which we live’ (p. 15) and ‘[t]here is no a priori reason to make one more important than the other’ (p. 16). Yet, Soja continues, time and history take precedence in academic theory building and public consciousness in regard to explaining phenomena in the world. The previous examples can be used here to illustrate this point: irrigation systems, urban agglomeration, and the Silk Route are typically explained by their history, whereby the spatial configuration is taken for granted. This emphasis of temporal over spatial scale is an ‘intellectual discrimination’ (Soja 2010, p. 16) according to Soja because space is a ‘complex social product, a collectively created and purposeful configuration […] constructed out of physical and natural spatial forms’ (pp. 18–19). This is where politics comes in. ‘Space is not an empty void. It is always filled with politics, ideology, and other voices shaping our lives and challenging us to engage in struggles over geography’ (Soja 2010, p. 19).

Using the previous examples, one can suspect that irrigation systems, urban agglomeration, and the Silk Route result from struggles over geography to the benefit of the affluent. Thus, we come back to the scalar narratives and spatial injustices that they may create or sustain. How do these ideas apply to scales and our ambition to improve scale-sensitive governance of the environment? Again, we can look to Soja on this topic: ‘Since we construct our multiscalar geographies, or they are constructed for us by more powerful others, it follows that we can act to change or reconfigure them to increase the positive or decrease the negative effects’ (Soja 2010, p. 19).

As a conclusion for now, we can say that it is in the political realm and through political action that ontological and epistemological issues can be bridged and even transcended because it is here that the scales that count in decision-making and planning strategies are determined. Scales are, thus, to a large extent, politically created (see also Kurtz 2003).

In this brief introduction to scale, we have demonstrated that scale is a much richer concept than simply ranking natural and social phenomena ‘from Small to XXL’ (Latour 2005, p. 31). Scale is actively created in scientific, social and political practices and can, thus, become a ‘hand tool’ by which to actively govern social and natural processes in systems, networks and heterarchies. As we have seen in this chapter, there are many scales, epistemological stances, and politics involved in the scale debate. As such, it does not make sense to favour a priori one scale or level above another. In the real world, different scale frames coexist, each having pros and cons, and a critical reflection upon these issues is a first important step in real-world scale-sensitive governance of the environment.

1.6 Acknowledgements

This paper evolved out of discussions with colleagues and Ph.D. students at Wageningen University and Research centre who were involved in the Scaling and Governance Program. We are grateful for the discussions because they helped us to improve earlier versions of the manuscript. We would like to thank Paul Opdam, Katrien Termeer, and Nico Polman for their constructive and detailed comments on the final drafts.

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2

Incorporating multiple ecological scales into the governance of landscape services

Paul Opdam

Land Use Planning Group and Alterra Nature and Society Group, Wageningen UR, the Netherlands

2.1 Introduction

For centuries, communities all over the world have adapted the land on which they live in response to their evolving demands and natural changes in their environment. They amended the natural system to grow food, establish places to live and created defences against floods. Diamond (2005) explains how such communities have governed their environments. Some achieved sustainable conditions, while others failed to do so.

The communities that Diamond explored had a close relationship with their local landscape. In modern times, this place-based relationship between human and biophysical systems has weakened because modern technology allows us to improve the production capacity of the land (replacing natural regulation with technological regulation), organize world-wide trading (disconnecting the local supply and demand connection) and expand cities. Modern Dutch farmers, for example, respond to world food prices and European subsidies rather than to local markets. Citizens travel by cars to enjoy the benefits of natural sites far from where they live. However, spending behaviour and landscape type have still been found to be correlated (Dissart and Vollet 2011). This observation suggests that a landscape can still be considered a social-economic unit, which has many relationships with processes at higher spatial scale levels.

The modernization of land use has affected the value that many humans attribute to their natural environment. This impact led and is still leading to public pressure on governments to conserve the quality of the environment and, subsequently, create environmental legislation and programmes to protect specific areas. This process is still taking place in developing countries. However, government-led protective policies also cause tensions between regulations and activities undertaken by entrepreneurs and farmers, who believe that spatial policy rules frustrate their business opportunities. At present, many national governments in developed countries are stepping back, leaving environmental planning to local-level jurisdictions and institutions. Hence, government-led planning tends to be replaced by community-based environmental planning (see Lane and McDonald 2005). There are many supposed benefits of this decentralization, including the use of local knowledge, a better match with local contexts and the recruitment of local stakeholders (Lane and McDonald 2005). Although little proof exists for most of these claims, evidence is growing that the quality of environmental decisions is being improved due to stakeholder participation (Reed 2008). Significant evidence for this relationship, provided by Persha et al. (2012), has shown that the environmental quality of forests in various parts of the world has benefited from community-based planning. In addition, Somanathan et al. (2009) concluded that village council forest management in the central Himalayas of India was cheaper per unit area, and just as good as state-led management.

While decentralizing governmental power to the local community level may improve policy implementation, it also introduces new problems (Lane and McDonald 2005) with respect to governing multiple-scale environmental systems. The biodiversity at the local scale level (the site), such as a garden or farm, depends on processes at higher levels on the spatial scale, called here the local landscape and wider region. At the local landscape level, the relative amount and spatial configuration of semi-natural elements (‘the green or blue infrastructure’) determine the number of plants, birds or insect species that can persist (Billeter et al. 2008; Oliver et al. 2010). At the level of the region, the size and distribution of the natural ecosystem interact with climatic variability to determine the regional densities of these species (Opdam and Wascher 2004). Therefore, environmental management needs to be developed along a hierarchy of governance scales: the individual land owner level, local community level (where farms, streams, gardens and amenity land constitute a wider mosaic of crop fields and semi-natural elements) and regional level (where cultural landscapes alternate with more natural landscapes). Similar conclusions have been drawn for urban landscapes (Snep and Opdam 2010). The multiple scale levels of ecological processes also imply that realistic goals for biodiversity conservation have to be tuned into the conditions that determine biodiversity in the wider region (Opdam et al. 2008).

As