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

Abstract

This paper elaborates on the interconnectedness of scale and discourse in environmental governance. It accentuates that the emergence and subsequent reconfiguration of a particular scalar structure of environmental governance is the outcome of the discursive contest among various political actors, whose discourses acquire persuasive power through employing scale to frame how the world should be observed. In so arguing this paper distinguishes two moments of scale, as material political–environmental relations being shaped and as device shaping political–environmental relations. The connections of these two moments are illustrated by a case study based in the Pearl River Delta region of China, where scalar-implicated discourses were constructed by various tiers of the state to influence the scaling of the urban planning system, now being an important domain to perform environmental governance. With a scalar-discursive attention, this paper seeks to move towards a more holistic treatment of the obscured operational complexities of politics of scale.

Contentious space and scale politics: Planning for intercity railway in China's mega‐city regions

“…Yet, they share one common characteristic – both focus only upon a one‐sided interpretation of the discursive domain, either the material production of scale or the social practice of ‘scale talks’. Such analyses neglect the dualistic nature of scale – in the discussion of politics of scale, scale is a material entity produced socio‐politically; whereas in discourses, scale is ‘a representation trope’ that can ‘recast what is true or knowable’ (Jones, : 28; also cited in Chung and Xu, ). In a highly provocative and influential essay, MacKinnon (: 35) offered a brief taste of how we might begin to recast the conceptual substance in order to fully and richly understand scale and scalar relations.…”

“…As hinted by an NDRC researcher, ‘our policies emphasise on the need to extend the rather sparse railway network in the central and western parts of the country, but MOR is keen to expand existing lines and construct new ones in advanced coastal regions’ . Again, national scale is conveniently used as a discursive advantage to force in the decision of NDRC, which is a practice depicted by Chung and Xu ().…”

“…In common parlance, the urban, the regional, the national and the global are not disparate and isolated scales with fixed spatio‐temporal attributes. Rather, as Brown and Purcell (: 610) describe, ‘[e]ach is inseparably tied to the other’, and the particular way they are related is historically contingent, politically contested and presumptively malleable ‘subject to contestation and transformation (or rescaling)’ (Sayre, : 284; Chung and Xu, ).…”

“…In contemplating all this, I deem the emerging scholarship on state spatiality in China to be punctuated by a major inadequacy – the preoccupation with the political economic approach of existing accounts to read ‘scale’ as material (re)construction of power relations. This inadequacy is often associated with a scholarly tendency to focus more on the range of institutional arrangements introduced to enforce rescaling, but less on the discursive acts concomitantly performed to promote and legitimise it (Chung and Xu, ). For example, Xu and Wang () have thoroughly studied how the Guangdong provincial government reasserts its functional importance at the urban scale through applying a regionwide zoning system (a device for rescaling), but they have not investigated the strategic deployment of scale by the provincial government in political discourses to make this rescaling seem as natural, normal and legitimate as possible.…”

“…For example, Xu and Wang () have thoroughly studied how the Guangdong provincial government reasserts its functional importance at the urban scale through applying a regionwide zoning system (a device for rescaling), but they have not investigated the strategic deployment of scale by the provincial government in political discourses to make this rescaling seem as natural, normal and legitimate as possible. Such neglect may oversimplify the rescaling as a hegemonic pursuit, which can always and automatically be accomplished (Chung and Xu, ). It may also become a ‘perilous obsession’, one that, as government officials know only too well, conveniently prevents us from thinking through a whole host of embarrassing questions in relation to power struggles that enframe the discursive process in planning.…”