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.

Auteur
Frans Padt is Senior Lecturer of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education and Landscape Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Sciences of the Environment from Radboud University Nijmegen. Paul Opdam is Professor at Wageningen University and Alterra Research Institute in Wageningen. He has a background in landscape ecology and specializes in collaborative landscape planning with ecosystem services in social-ecological networks.

Nico Polman is Senior Researcher at the Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI Wageningen UR) in The Hague. He obtained his Ph.D. degree on the thesis titled Institutional Economics Analysis of Contractual Arrangements Addressing Wildlife and Landscape Management on Dutch Farms in 2002.

Catrien Termeer is Professor of Public Administration and Policy at Wageningen University. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Administration from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Contenu

List of Contributors x

Foreword xiii

Preface xv

List of Abbreviations xx

1 Concepts of scale 1
Frans Padt and Bas Arts

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Definitions of scale 2

1.3 Scale-sensitive governance of . . . what? 4

1.4 Scale as a reality . . . or not? 8

1.5 The politics of scale 11

1.6 Acknowledgements 13

2 Incorporating multiple ecological scales into the governance of landscape services 17
Paul Opdam

2.1 Introduction 17

2.2 The social-ecological system at the local scale 19

2.3 Ecological scales and local social-ecological systems 22

2.4 Incorporating the ecological scale hierarchy into social-ecological system decision-making 25

2.5 Discussion and conclusions 30

2.6 Acknowledgements 33

3 Scale-sensitivity as a governance capability: Observing, acting and enabling 38
Catrien Termeer and Art Dewulf

3.1 Introduction 38

3.2 Scales in monocentric governance 39

3.3 Scales in multilevel governance 42

3.4 Scales in adaptive governance 44

3.5 The contours of scale-sensitivity as a governance capability 47

3.6 Conclusion 51

4 Knowledge of competing claims on natural resources: Toward institutional design and integrative negotiations 56
Nico Polman, Arianne de Blaeij and Maja Slingerland

4.1 Introduction 56

4.2 Competing claims approach on natural resources 57

4.3 Types of knowledge in competing claims approaches 61

4.4 Distributive approaches toward competing claims negotiations 65

4.5 Integrative approaches to negotiations on competing claims 66

4.6 Conclusions 69

4.7 Acknowledgements 70

5 The relevance of scale to water governance: An example from Loweswater, UK 73
Lisa Norton, Stephen Maberly, Claire Waterton, Nigel Watson and Judith Tsouvalis

5.1 Introduction 73

5.2 Loweswater 74

5.3 The Loweswater Care Project (LCP) 79

5.4 The importance of scale at Loweswater 82

5.5 Conclusions 85

6 Multiple-level governance is needed in the social-ecological system of alpine cultural landscapes 90
Rocco Scolozzi, Ian D Soane and Alessandro Gretter

6.1 Introduction 90

6.2 The concepts of SES, resilience and panarchy in the context of a cultural landscape 92

6.3 A mixed method approach 93

6.4 The cultural landscape of the Ledro Valley: Internal dynamics leading to unplanned futures 94

6.5 Discussion and conclusion 101

6.6 Acknowledgements 103

7 Beyond localism: The spatial scale and scaling in energy transitions 106
Philipp Spath and Harald Rohracher

7.1 Introduction 106

7.2 Creating space for the spatial scale and scaling in conceptualizations of sustainability transitions 107

7.3 The governance of sustainability transitions and its spatial dimensions: Two case studies reconsidered 110

7.4 Learning from the cases: Can place-bound particularities and scaling influence sustainability transitions? 115

7.5 Conclusions and outlook 118

7.6 Acknowledgements 119

8 Tracing drivers of global environmental change along the governance scale: Methodological challenges and possibilities 122
Sylvia I Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen

8.1 What makes environmental issues global? 122

8.2 Methodological challenges in a multilevel analysis 124

8.3 Multilevel analysis of drivers for pesticide problems 127

8.4 Multilevel drivers for the pesticide problem 131

8.5 Multilevel drivers for multiple problems 134

8.6 Concluding reflections on the multilevel analysis of drivers 135

9 'Glocal' politics of scale on environmental issues: Climate change, water and forests 140
Joyeeta Gupta 9.1...