Progress in Human Geography 33(3) (2009) pp.

398406

Political ecology: theorizing scale

Roderick P . Neumann*
Department of International Relations, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Key words: ecological scale, geographic theory, politics of scale, power relations, socionature.

I Introduction More than two decades have passed since Blaikie and Brookeld endeavored to develop a methodology and basis for theory construction for political ecology (1987: xxi). As recent surveys demonstrate, the field has since expanded rapidly to become a key framework in geography for studying humanenvironment relations (eg, Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003a; Robbins, 2004; Neumann, 2005). Given the passage of time and production of a large and growing canon this seems an appropriate moment to assess the progress of theory construction. To the extent that political ecology is discipline based, there exists a productive tension (Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003b: 2) between the field and its home discipline that can be explored for potential theoretical advancement. Key theoretical concepts in human geography such as place, region, and scale have long been integral to political ecologists analyses of human-environment relations. While political ecology developed and expanded, human geographers have been debating and substantially retheorizing such key concepts. To what degree does new work in political

ecology reflect, challenge, or incorporate theoretical innovations in human geography? How have debates on key concepts within human geography shaped the research agenda of political ecology? Conversely, what contributions is new political ecology work making to theory in human geography? In this essay I address these questions by examining recent work on scale. Elaborating their idea of political ecology, Blaikie and Brookfied wrote that the complexity of human-environment interactions demands an approach that encompasses the contribution of different geographical scales and hierarchies of socioeconomic organizations (eg, person, household, village, region, state, world) (1987: 17). Zimmerer and Bassett more recently stressed the centrality of geographical scale to political ecological analysis (2003b: 3). More broadly in human geography, Smith suggests that scale will be of mounting theoretical and practical relevance (2000: 727). Smith has been instrumental in establishing what has become an extensive literature theorizing the politics of scale (eg, Smith, 1992; 1993; Cox, 1998; Swyngedouw, 1997; 2004; Marston, 2000).

*Email: neumannr@u.edu 2009 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309132508096353

Roderick P . Neumann: Political ecology 399 The roots of this version of scale theorization scale as socially constructed, historically contingent, and politically contested are found in a Marxist-influenced politicaleconomic geography with a signicant debt to Henri Lefebvre (1991). There have been many reviews of the scale debate in human geography and there is no need to replicate them here (eg, Marston, 2000; Smith, 2000; Brenner, 2001; Howitt, 2003; Sheppard and McMaster, 2004). Rather, I examine the debate late in the conversation, beginning with Marston et al.s provocative call to expurgate scale from the geographic vocabulary (2005: 422). My purpose is not to engage in the scale debate per se, but to establish a theoretical starting point from which to explore the questions I have posed. In making their case Marston et al. extensively critique the way geographers have conceptualized scale. First, they nd that there is confusion surrounding the meaning of scale as size and scale as level a vertically imagined nested spatial hierarchy (2005: 420). Second, disentangling scalar hierarchies from the micro/macro binary and associated binaries, particularly global/local, is difficult, which results in the global being assigned causal force while localities are stripped of agency. Third, they suggest that an assumed hierarchy of scale has produced a body of empirical research focused on a small number of presupposed levels; the body, neighborhood, nation, region, etc. They conclude that adding horizontally oriented network approaches cannot overcome the foundational weaknesses of hierarchical scale (Marston et al., 2005: 417). As an alternative to scale, they suggest at ontologies constructed around the concept of site as an emergent property of its interacting human and non-human inhabitants (Marston et al., 2005: 422, 425). With few exceptions, published reactions have been negative, though in most cases sympathetic to parts of their argument (Collinge, 2006; Hoee, 2006; Jonas, 2006; Leitner and Miller, 2007; Moore, 2008; Sayre, 2008; cf. Escobar, 2007). The least sympathetic suggest that Marston et al. misrepresent scale theorists positions, confuse epistemology with ontology, and offer an inadequate alternative founded on its own false dualism (ie, site versus scale) (Jonas, 2006; Hoee, 2006; Leitner and Miller, 2007; Sayre, 2008). Regarding misrepresentations of scholarship, Leitner and Miller point out that Marston et al.s critique conates hierarchical with vertical scale [and] ignores virtually all accounts of agency in the scale literature (2007: 116). Hierarchy, they and Jonas (2006) argue, is a form of verticality, which allows for flows in either direction. These essays collectively make two points relevant to the conceptualization of scale in political ecology. First, scale research is principally epistemological, not ontological. That is, the focus for research on scale should be the scalar practices of social actors, not scale itself as an analytical category (Moore, 2008: 212). Second, attention to power asymmetries is critical for understanding networked relations within and between scales. As will be discussed in the following two sections, questions of scalar practices and power relations are critical in what I label a political ecology of scale.1 II Theorizing scale: contributions from political ecology In this section I examine recent efforts in political ecology (and human-environment research more generally) to theoretically engage with and advance the scale debate in geography (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003; Brown and Purcell, 2005; McCarthy, 2005; Sayre, 2005; 2008; Manson, 2008). Most of these stress the need in scale theorization for closer attention to the environment environmental politics, nonhuman actors, and biophysical processes. Brown and Purcells piece stands out from this group in its engagement with scale theorization as a means of critiquing political ecology. Theirs may be read as a cautionary tale on the dangers of overgeneralization

400 Progress in Human Geography 33(3) and false syllogisms. Noting that citations of the politics of scale literature are rarely found (2005: 611) in political ecology, they argue that scale is therefore undertheorized, leading political ecologists to assume that the local scale has certain inherent qualities (eg, more socially just, environmentally sustainable). Although it is demonstrable that the politics of scale literature was, until recently, rarely cited, it does not follow that most political ecologists a priori grant the local scale inherent qualities. Indeed, political ecologists have extensively critiqued the idea of the local (for a review, see Neumann, 2005: 8592). Nor does it follow that political ecology lacks a careful theoretical analysis of scale (Brown and Purcell, 2005: 620). Blaikie (1985) and Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) were explicitly engaged in thinking about the role of scale in dening and explaining environmental problems. As the passage cited previously shows, they distinguished between geographic scales (spatial extent) and hierarchies of socioeconomic organizations (levels), anticipating and avoiding the conceptual confusion identied by Marston et al. (2005). Turner (1999) tackled another problem identied by Marston et al. that conceptualizing scalar hierarchies tends to strip localities of agency. According to Turner, there is a tendency in analyses of global and regional land-use change to exclude social changes that are viewed as being only locally specific (1999: 192). Turner argues against an inherent spatialscaling law of society and the dichotomization and reication of local and regional perspectives and for a theorization of environmental change that recognizes causality owing in multiple directions among scales that are constructed and contingent (1999: 192). There may not have been an engagement specifically with the politics of scale literature, but some political ecologists were aware of and working through some of the same theoretical concerns. One could argue, as do several of the authors reviewed here, that an improved dialog between scale theorists and political ecologists could be mutually benecial.2 Three recent essays (Sayre, 2005; Sayre, 2008; Manson, 2008) make explicit efforts to advance the scale debate by drawing from the analytics and concepts of ecology and identifying a conceptualization of scale that is interdisciplinary and comprehensible across elds. Sayre argues that ecology can help resolve the scale question in human geography, supporting this claim through an examination of the distinctions between grain and extent and between scale and level made in ecological theory (2005: 278). Scale, he argues, is inherent in all observation and the choice of the scale of observation is both methodologically and epistemologically signicant. This he calls the epistemological moment of scale (2005: 28081). Some patterns and processes are observable only at certain scales and thus might be said to produce their own natural scale. Scale is thus internally related to ecological processes and interaction (2005: 282, italics in the original). This is what he calls the ontological moment of scale (2005: 280). Ecologists think of scale in terms of grain and extent, the former referring to the smallest observable datum point (ie, temporal and spatial resolution) and the latter referring to study size and duration. In summary, ecologists use scale in both its epistemological moment as the grain and extent of observation suited to apprehending particular processes and its ontological moment as a characteristic of objective relations among processes or among observable levels of organization produced by processes (2005: 283). Sayre uses these ideas from ecology to critique the concept of scale in human geography. He suggests that much of the debate on scale can be traced to the conation of its meaning as size, level, and relation (Sayre, 2008). Specically, he argues that human geographers often conate and confuse level and scale (as size) and consequently

Roderick P . Neumann: Political ecology 401 confuse epistemological moments with ontological moments households (see Marston, 2000) and cities (see Smith, 1984) are levels of social organization, not scales per se and choices to study households or cities are epistemological moments. Further, the concept of jumping scales whereby political claims and power established at one geographical scale can be expanded to another (Smith, 2000: 726; see also Smith, 1993) is in actuality level jumping. What is jumped, then, is not scales but levels, with the result that a process is rescaled. For the strategy to succeed, there must be some scaling effect a change in the outcome of the process brought about by shifting scale (Sayre, 2005: 285, italics in the original). In both ecology and human geography, then, scale is produced. Building on this shared conceptualization and using the distinctions developed in ecology opens a path toward theorizing and studying simultaneously natural and social phenomenon. Manson (2008) makes many of the same points as Sayre, distinguishing between resolution (grain) and extent and between scale and level (which Manson calls the scale of observation) and stressing the production of scale through interacting processes. He understands the production of scale in ecology through the concept of emergent hierarchies, emergent referring to processes of self organization or selforganized criticality (2008: 781). Thus, similar to Sayre, Manson notes the potential for a shared conceptualization of scale in ecology and human geography, specically for research on human-environment interactions. Emergent hierarchies and their attendant scale levels manifest the instabilities, emergence, supervenience, shifting equilibria, unpredictability, and path dependence on which many features of [social] network and constructionist scales are predicated (2008: 784). Manson departs signicantly from Sayre, however, in his analysis of the points of divergence in conceptualizing scale in social versus biophysical systems. Sayre traces conceptual problems of scale to disciplinary distinctions (ecology versus social science) whereas Manson traces them to deeper philosophical differences (realism versus constructivism) within ecology. Thus for Manson there are ecological/biological theories of scale existing along an epistemological scale continuum ranging from realism to constructivism (2008: 777). At one end of the continuum is an ontological position that recognizes a shared reality and the related epistemological claim that it is objectively observable. At the other is an ontological position that also recognizes a reality, but differs epistemologically in the conviction that there is no universal objective stance and observations are always mediated, situated, and contingent. Through this argumentation he quickly rejects any notion of a single theory of scale, suggesting that movement along the continuum from realism to constructionism seems more necessary as one goes from physical and biological systems through ecological and human environment systems to the social and policy domains (2008: 786). While the epistemological continuum is useful for thinking about scale in human-environment research, it maintains a stark nature-society dualism of physical and biological systems on one end and social systems on the other. Moreover, many of the epistemological differences between social and biophysical sciences are left unresolved and little guidance is offered for choosing among the positions on the continuum when dealing with specic kinds of problems. McCarthy (2005), in contrast to Manson, stresses the importance of understanding the production of social scales as inseparable from the production of nature. Taking a different tack from Sayre and Manson, he argues that the politics of scale as conceived by human geographers is limited by its lack of attention to the environmental conditions and the politics surrounding them. He suggests the source of this limitation is found

402 Progress in Human Geography 33(3) in the ontological distinction of the social and the natural. Even scale theorizations that stress attention to reproduction and consumption (eg, Marston, 2000) ignore the fact that the provision, reproduction, and reconguration of particular environmental relations is necessary to every moment of capitalist production, social reproduction, and consumption (McCarthy, 2005: 736). Like Sayre and Manson, McCarthy seeks to advance scale theory by stressing biophysical processes, though not by borrowing from ecological concepts of scale. Rather, he uses the case of environmental movements to critique the theoretical framings of scale in human geography, arguing that, along with the national states, labor unions, political parties, and capitals that are stressed in scale theory, biophysical processes and environmental movements and associated NGOs also participate in scale construction. His case is built around an analysis of two amicus briefs that two environmental NGOs submitted to a NAFTA tribunal on Californias environmental regulations. Specifically, he uses the case to challenge Brenners (2001) suggestion that politics conned to a phenomenon within a single, given scale are not really about scale, while political struggles over relationships among multiple scales are truly about scale. His empirical analysis shows NGOs construct, draw on, and redene scales in complex and even contradictory ways, simultaneously defending existing scales, using established scales as platforms, reconguring relations within scales, constructing new scales, redefining relationships among scales, and jumping scales. His study suggests that scale theory cannot treat the production of social scales as separate from the production of nature and that politics within or about established scales are often very much about politics among scales (McCarthy, 2005: 750, italics in the original). Finally, Swyngedouw has played a unique role as a bridging figure between scale theorists and political ecologists. Like McCarthy, he emphasizes in his scalar work the co-production of nature and society, in his phrasing the unity of socionature as a process (2003: 96). One of his most developed expositions on scale in political ecology can be found in his essay introducing a special issue of Antipode , co-authored with Heynen (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). The focus of this essay is on theorizing the urban form of social organization as an expression of the complex intermingling of the social and the natural, what the authors call the socioecological footprint of the city (2003: 899). They argue for an urban political ecology that welds together [social and ecological] processes operating at a variety of nested and articulated geographical scales (2003: 904). Their concept of scale builds on political-economic theorizations of scale, but also on the literatures of the social production of nature and of networks and assemblages, which they view as compatible and overlapping. Politically and theoretically, their focus is not on any particular scale, but on the dynamics of scale production, or the way that socioecological processes give rise to scalar forms of organization such as states, local governments, interstate arrangements and the like and to a nested set of related and interacting socioecological spatial scales. This is an ambitious theoretical challenge, but one which is central to a political ecology of scale. III The concept of scale in recent political-ecology work In this section I explore the way that scale has been conceptually rened and retheorized in recent political-ecology research. The 2000s have witnessed the blossoming of an explicit and sustained engagement among political ecologists with advances in scale theory. Zimmerer has been a prominent and early participant in this new work, beginning with his study of rescaling irrigation in the Andes (Zimmerer, 2000). He has continued his interest in linking political ecology and the politics of scale in two edited volumes

Roderick P . Neumann: Political ecology 403 that sought a more creative consideration of geographic scale in political ecology (Zimmerer and Basset, 2003b: 1) and highlighted the political nature of scientific models used for the scaling of environmental resource systems (Zimmerer, 2006a: 16). Many other political ecologists have been involved in this project of creating a dialogue between political ecological studies and recent work in geography that has sought to theorise scale as a social process (Boyle, 2002: 173; eg, Natter and Zierhofer, 2002; Sneddon, 2003; Heynen, 2003; Molle, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2007). Collectively this work has expanded the focus of the politics of scale to include environmental management practices and in the process helped to advance the theorization of scale. Three themes emerge from this dialogic research agenda which I will call a political ecology of scale that suggest a richer theorization of scale: (1) the interactions of power, agency, and scale; (2) socioecological processes and scaling; and (3) scaled networks. These are rarely considered in isolation in this literature, but I do so here for heuristic reasons. Because of the dominant interest in access and control over environmental resources, space, and land, one could argue, Power relations are at the heart of the political ecology framework (Tan-Mullins, 2007: 348). Much of the new political ecology of scale work pursuing questions of power relations gives particular attention to the national state. Specically, there is a strong interest in the scalar politics of the state in struggles over the control of resources and the environment more broadly (Sneddon, 2002; 2003; Boyle, 2002; Molle, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2007). Here the analysis is directed toward the states ability to junk, rejig, recalibrate, modify, and transform the existing scale division in order to strengthen or consolidate its authority (Boyle, 2002: 191). This work includes an interest in the agency of non-state actors, both in scale construction and in the possibilities for and constraints on resistance produced by the states scalar politics (eg, Sneddon et al., 2002; Boyle, 2002). In addition, there is a suggestion of the importance of investigating power relations in scale construction through the interactions of the politics of scale with the politics of science (Swyngedouw, 2003; Turner, 2006). A second feature of the political ecology of scale research is the centrality and inseparability of biophysical processes in the social construction of scale. Apropos of McCarthys (2005) comments, political ecologists insistence on the co-production of nature and society offers a particular theoretical take on the politics of scale. In Zimmerers words, Geographical political ecology focuses on socio-natural scaling which occurs in the fusing of biogeographical processes with broadly social ones (2000: 153). In some work this means giving attention to the role of ecological or biophysical scaling in shaping political-economic dynamics (Zimmerer, 2000; Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003b; Turner, 2006), while in other work borrowing from Bruno Latour and actor-network theory the emphasis is on hybridity, fusion, and the mutual reconstitution of nature and society (Natter and Zierhofer, 2002; Sneddon et al ., 2002; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). Political ecologists have coined a variety of terms to try to capture the dialectical character of social and ecological change in scale production, including socioecological, socioenvironmental, socionatural (Zimmerer, 2000; Sneddon et al., 2002: 672; Heynen, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2003; 2007). These terms are meant to incorporate the social and ecological, material and symbolic, and spatial and temporal dynamics that collectively constitute the analytical focus of the political ecology of scale research. Underlying these semantic efforts is the theoretical proposition, in Swyngedouws succinct wording, that the production of nature is an integral part of a process of producing scale (2007: 10).

404 Progress in Human Geography 33(3) Finally, political ecology of scale research highlights the relational and networked quality of the spatial congurations of socioenvironmental dynamics. This work highlights the way networks of actors (human and non-human) transcend single spatial scales to produce new relational socioenvironmental spatialities (Natter and Zierhofer, 2002; Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003b; Sneddon, 2003; 2006; Swyngedouw, 2007). At the same time, these relational scalar networks articulate with produced territorial or geographical configurations that also exhibit scalar dimensions (Swyngedouw, 2007: 11). For example, Sneddons study of an interbasin water project in Thailand demonstrates how the states network construction simultaneously destabilizes notions of xed spatial scales while weaving together human and non-human actors in different times and spaces, in the process producing an array of scales subject to varying interpretations (Sneddon, 2003: 2246). Such an approach also has been insightful for understanding the politics of scale in environmental social movements and rural livelihood strategies. For example, Zimmerers (2006b) research on seed exchange networks in the Andes Mountains demonstrates how rural livelihoods and biodiversity are sustained through networked socioenvironmental relations operating across scales. IV Conclusion Political ecologists have integrated the politics of scale into the fields traditional interest in multiscalar spatiotemporal methodology to produce a political ecology of scale. This approach incorporates the key precepts of the politics of scale scale as socially constructed, relational, contingent, and contested into an existing framework that highlights power relations and a dialectical approach toward nature-society relations. It also confronts directly three of the key problems in the politics of scale literature that Marston et al. (2005) identified; the confusion of scale and level, the local/ global binary, and the presupposition of xed levels. A political ecology of scale brings a specic set of analytics to these problems, starting from a foundation of Marxist political economy while incorporating more recent theorizations of power, networks of human and non-human actors, and the incorporation of biophysical processes what Sneddon (2003: 2245) calls a symmetrical approach to the social and ecological production of scale. To return to the three questions I posed at the beginning, it is clear that political ecologists are increasingly incorporating the theoretical insights of the politics of scale. This engagement has produced a distinctive research agenda, the political ecology of scale. In the process, this new work is making important contributions to the theorization of scale in human geography more generally. Nevertheless, problems associated with the conceptualization of scale in political ecology remain. Political ecology is an expansive field and only a narrow subset explicitly wrestles with scale theorization. There persists a widespread tendency to take for granted its meaning, to use it to mean very different things (eg, large-scale meaning capital intensive, spatially extensive, or national) and to unreflectively engage Blaikies (1985) chain of explanation to situate the local in wider processes (eg, Walker, 2003; Walker and Fortmann, 2003; Robbins and Sharp, 2003; Dove and Hudayana, 2008). These problems are partly traceable to the widespread colloquial use of scale scale as simple descriptor, rather than as a concept in much academic writing (Sayre, 2008). There is also a continuing problem with the conation of terminology and concepts, so that even in the political ecology of scale literature, scale, level, site, network, and assemblage are not clearly distinguished (eg, Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003; Zimmerer, 2006b). Echoing Castrees recent review of studies of neoliberalism and nature, political ecology of scale work can be meaningfully compared

Roderick P . Neumann: Political ecology 405 only if there is real clarity and consistency in the deployment of key concepts (Castree, 2008: 135). A political ecology of scale that is rigorous and concise in its conceptualizations and use of terminology and clear in its epistemological and methodological choices can avoid the pitfalls of previous work on the politics of scale while greatly advancing both political-ecological research and scale theorization. Acknowledgements In crafting this essay I benefited greatly from the advice and encouragement of several readers including Nathan Sayre, Gail Hollander, and the Land Lab group in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, especially Nancy Peluso, Catherine Corson, Jason Morris-Jung, Stefania Barca, Marco Armiero, Johannes Stahl, and Jessica Lage. Notes
1. In using this term I am building on and expanding Natter and Zierhofers (2002: 226) idea to include non-human actors in theorizing a politics of scale. I use the term scale theorists to refer to critical human geographers who have sought to conceptualize scale within broader social theoretical and philosophical traditions. I have identied scale theorists based on their participation in the many reviews and published debates around the politics of scale. I identied political ecologists as scholars who either publicly express an expertise in political ecology or use political ecology in the title or list of key words in the publication cited. Castree, N. 2008: Neoliberalizing nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and Planning A 40, 13152. Collinge, C. 2006: Flat ontology and the deconstruction of scale: a response to Marston, Jones and Woodward. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31, 24451. Cox, K. 1998: Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or looking for local politics. Political Geography 17, 123. Dove, M. and Hudayana, B. 2008: The view from the volcano: an appreciation of the work of Piers Blaikie. Geoforum, in press. Escobar, A. 2007: The ontological turn in social theory. A commentary on Human Geography without scale by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones III and Keith Woodward. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 32, 10611. Heynen, N. 2003: The scalar production of injustice within the urban forest. Antipode (Special Issue) 35, 98098. Hoefle, S.W. 2006: Eliminating scale and killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31, 23843. Howitt, R. 2003: Scale. In Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. and Toal, G., editors, A companion to political geography, Oxford: Blackwell, 13857. Jonas, A.E.G. 2006: Pro scale: further reflections on the scale debate in human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31, 399406. Lefebvre, H. 1991: The social production of space . Oxford: Blackwell. Leitner, H. and Miller, B. 2007: Scale and the limitations of ontological debate: a commentary on Marston, Jones and Woodward. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 32, 11625. Manson, S. 2008: Does scale exist? An epistemological scale continuum for complex human-environment systems. Geoforum 39, 77688. Marston, S.A. 2000: The social construction of scale. Progress in Human Geography 24, 21942. Marston, S.A., Jones, J.P. and Woodward, K. 2005: Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 30, 41632. McCarthy, J. 2005: Scale, sovereignty, and strategy in environmental governance. Antipode 37, 73153. Molle, F. 2007: Scale and power in river basin management: the Chao Phraya River in Thailand. The Geographical Journal 173, 35873. Moore, A. 2008: Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice. Progress in Human Geography 32, 20325. Natter, W. and Zierhofer, W. 2002: Political ecology, territoriality and scale. GeoJournal 58, 22531. Neumann, R. 2005: Making political ecology. London: Hodder Arnold.

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