Politics and scale: some implications for environmental governance

Abstract

This essay explores themes related to differences of scale and the challenge of environmental governance. It argues that scale issues are always important in politics, but that the density of physical and social scales implicated in the constitution and resolution of environmental problems is particularly notable. It discusses recent changes in governmental approaches to managing environmental burdens in the developed countries, and considers the implications of scale-complexities for the future of environmental governance.

Introduction

It is now relatively common for analysts to emphasise the variable and cross-cutting temporal and spatial scales associated with environmental problems, and to note the difficulties these present for political institutions charged with managing environmental burdens (Dryzek, 1987, Lafferty and Meadowcroft, 1996). There is widespread criticism of the ‘short-termism’ built into contemporary politics—that electorates are pre-occupied with immediate issues (such as the economy, crime or health care), while politicians rarely think beyond the next election. And there are obvious spatial disjunctures: environmental problems do not respect political boundaries, instead they cut across established jurisdictions or link discontiguous regions. Critics complain that governments have trouble responding at the relevant spatial scales, and some have called for a radical redrafting of political boundaries to coincide more closely with ecological realities (Sale, 1980, Dobson, 1995).

Scale crops up in environmental politics in other ways. There is widespread concern that ‘the scale’ of the political response to environmental dilemmas is inadequate (too small or too slow), particularly in relation to ‘third generation’ challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss. Then there is the idea of natural limits, which has exercised such a profound influence on the ecological imagination since the early 1970s (Meadows et al., 1974, Daly, 1977). ‘Limits’ and ‘scale’ are, after all, closely interconnected. A limit is a boundary beyond which certain forces, processes, or rules no longer apply. In other words, it is a boundary beyond which scale matters: for what held true within the limit can no longer be relied upon to hold true once the threshold is crossed. In political terms the worry is the apparent inability of existing governance institutions to restrict social and economic behaviour within the frontiers of ecological sustainability.

This essay will explore themes related to scale and environmental governance under three headings: scale and politics; scale and environmental problems; and scale and environmental governance.