Scalar Politics and Local Sustainability: Rethinking Governance and Justice in an Era of Political and Environmental Change

Abstract

Abstract. The local was institutionalised as a key scale for environmental action at the Earth Summit, and remains salient in discourse, policy, and action. However, given both real changes and geographical insights into the politics of scale in the past twenty years, we suggest it is time to (re)consider this focus. We assess local sustainability through the lens of scalar politics, arguing for the need to consider what challenges particular scale frames foreground and which they silence. We focus on three changes which have occurred in the last twenty years-the growing salience of the Global South, shifts from environmentalism to sustainability, and new governance patterns-and reflect on the significance of these changes for local sustainability. We suggest the local frame occludes questions of international responsibility and justice, and that the changes since Rio require that we reconsider the scalar frame of local sustainability. We conclude by questioning who benefits from the local frame, and when, where, and for whom a focus on local sustainability may be relevant and ethical.

Organising for Co-Production: Local Interaction Platforms for Urban Sustainability

“…Local contextualisation may run the risk of global disconnection, as if cities were bounded objects out of time and space. Lawhon and Patel (2013) caution that a consequence of the devolution to the local and its resulting dislocation is the occlusion of questions of global responsibility and justice. The experimental and contextual turn cannot isolate from multiscale and interconnected space and need for generalizable as well as particular knowledge.…”

A diagnostic framework for biodiversity conservation institutions

“…Hobbs 2008; Wu 2013) and governance (e.g. (Termeer et al 2010; Lawhon andPatel 2013) literatures. How scale is framed in biodiversity governance thus merits focused attention.…”

Governing Sustainability: Rio+20 and the Road beyond

“…Their many roles in multiscale governance are also recognized in The Future We Want (Linnér and Selin, 2013). The framing of sustainability issues as either 'global' or 'local', however, is not simply a straightforward matter of matching the scale of any particular sustainability challenge with an appropriate institution, but rather a matter of politics in which issues become attached to particular scales-for example, that land-use planning is seen as a local matter while climate change is viewed as a global issuewhich structures the sorts of responses that are imagined and the kinds of actors who are seen as legitimately involved in decision-making processes (Bulkeley, 2005;Lawhon and Patel, 2013;Whitehead, 2006). Lawhon and Patel (2013) draw attention to this politics of scale in their paper.…”

“…The collection opens with a comprehensive review of the historical antecedents of the UNCSD (Linnér and Selin, 2013), followed by papers discussing sustainable development issues from the perspectives of the industrialized (Meadowcroft, 2013) and the developing (Perkins, 2013) worlds, respectively. The subsequent papers examine a number of thematic issues critical to the sustainable development agenda, including the green economy (Bina, 2013), local responses (Lawhon and Patel, 2013), innovation (Ely et al, 2013), and consumption (Hobson, 2013). The theme issue closes with a paper reflecting on contemporary challenges and the future of sustainable development governance (Biermann, 2013).…”