Concepts of Scale

Scale as both material and discursive: A view through China’s rescaling of urban planning system for environmental governance

“…Using scale discursively in one or more of these ways helps formulate politically meaningful linkages between environmental problems and their possible solutions. It facilitates the articulation of one scale being politically more important (Padt and Arts, 2014) or more 'natural' (Cohen and Bakker, 2014) than others in organizing environmental governance.…”

“Generality of mis-fit”? The real-life difficulty of matching scales in an interconnected world

“…This variation in study cases can be seen as one reason for the extensive variation in terms of formal theories that exist in social sciences. Consequently, SES research has to become more scale-sensitive and regard scale not only as falling under “objective and universal laws” (Padt and Arts 2014 , p. 9).…”

Landscape governance : from analysing challenges to capacitating stakeholders

“…Scholars have advocated making landscape restoration more sensitive to space and scale, i.e. more specific to the biophysical, social, cultural and spatial conditions of a landscape, and taking account of the multi-scalar nature of spatial decision making (Görg, 2007;Padt et al, 2014;Reed et al, 2015;Ros-Tonen et al, 2018). Such governance of landscape restoration ultimately fits into the wider discourse on sustainable development, which proposes cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder collaboration, and restoration policy at the 'appropriate' scale: the landscape.…”

“…The research findings are in line with environmental governance literature and institutional literature which argue that centralised or decentralised hierarchical modes of governance may not suffice for solving multiple environmental problems. Instead, locally crafted arrangements may be better positioned to suit local interests and broker locally agreed spatial decisions Cash et al, 2006;Huitema et al, 2009;Padt and Arts, 2014). In theory, a shift towards more interactive modes of governance would allow for more of such bottom-up arrangements, yet in practice their influence remains small, as they often fall beyond the scope of the formal democratic decision making process, and the outcomes are considered to be not legitimate.…”

“…Throughout this research the issue of scale has been problematic. Scale is studied in various epistemologies, and is understood as the size, scope, magnitude or dimension of multiple phenomena (Padt and Arts, 2014). In chapter three I briefly described ecological scales which have a spatial and a temporal dimension, social scales which organise social life, and institutional or jurisdictional scales at which rules and decisions are shaped (Gibson et al, 2000;Cash et al, 2006;Termeer and Dewulf, 2014;van Lieshout 2014;Wiegant et al, 2020).…”