The Politics of Scale, Position, and Place in the Governance of Water Resources in the Mekong Region

By L. Lebel, P. Garden, M. Imamura. 2005

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The appropriate scales for science, management, and decision making cannot be unambiguously derived from physical characteristics of water resources. Scales are a joint product of social and biophysical processes. The politics-of-scale metaphor has been helpful in drawing attention to the ways in which scale choices are constrained overtly by politics, and more subtly by choices of technologies, institutional designs, and measurements. In doing so, however, the scale metaphor has been stretched to cover a lot of different spatial relationships. In this paper, we argue that there are benefits to understanding —and actions to distinguish—issues of scale from those of place and position. We illustrate our arguments with examples from the governance of water resources in the Mekong region, where key scientific information is often limited to a few sources. Acknowledging how actors' interests fit along various spatial, temporal, jurisdictional, and other social scales helps make the case for innovative and more inclusive means for bringing multi-level interests to a common forum. Deliberation can provide a check on the extent of shared understanding and key uncertainties.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11b560f021a75cbdd7b5a6358461fe3f317c7a73

How researchers see this paper

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In Political Science and International Relations

1. Joyeeta Gupta
2. S. Brouwer
3. K. Brown
4. Bas Arts
5. Frank Biermann
6. Michel E. Etienne
7. E. Corbera

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Joyeeta Gupta
2. H. Osbahr
3. S. Brouwer
4. K. Brown
5. Katie Dietrich
6. Bas Arts
7. Frank Biermann
8. P. Tschakert

Citations in the corpus

• Towards Adaptive Management: Examining the Strategies of Policy Entrepreneurs in Dutch Water Management (2011, background): “In this regard, it is interesting to note that, in the literature on adaptive comanagement and resilience, the importance of building trust actually is recognized (Olsson et al. 2004, Lebel et al. 2005, Hahn et al. 2006, Berkes 2009).”
• Governance, scale and the environment: the importance of recognizing knowledge claims in transdisciplinary arenas (2011, background): “Instead they emphasize how scales are part of the socio-political processes, including science, in which they are constructed, reproduced or altered over time (Brenner 2001, Bulkeley 2005, Lebel et al. 2005).”
• Impacts of climate variability and change on fishery-based livelihoods (2010, background): “[127] hypothesize that the ability to detect thresholds in a timely manner, and the capacity to build knowledge about ecological processes into institutions should improve the fit between rules and ecosystems, and allow societies to take measures to prevent ecosystems from crossing thresholds.”
• Anticipatory Learning for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience (2010, background): “Loop learning in practice: learning spaces and power Numerous practical applications of loop learning processes exist that build upon resilience theory and AR/AL, with prominent examples in the field of adaptive (co-) management (e.g., Olsson et al. 2004, Lebel et al. 2005, Armitage et al. 2007).”
• Companion Modelling: A Participatory Approach to Support Sustainable Development (2010, background): “the choice of scale is thus an inclusionary or exclusionary instrument of power that modifies the means of access to resources and decisions (Lebel et al. 2006).”
• Access and allocation in earth system governance: water and climate change compared (2010, background): “This is where the study of actors and how they promote specific discourses at different levels of governance and spatial locations is needed (Lebel et al. 2005; Dore and Lebel 2010a).”
• Institutional dimensions of Payments for Ecosystem Services: An analysis of Mexico's carbon forestry programme (2009, background): “…take on scale argues that institutions for environmental change are framed differently according to the scale at which these are defined, which impacts upon problem definition, the nature of the arrangements, the actors involved, and the distribution of political power (Lebel et al., 2005).”
• Effective livelihood adaptation to climate change disturbance: Scale dimensions of practice in Mozambique (2008, background): “This paper builds upon studies of environmental governance in geography that find complex cross-scale engagements and diverse institutions to be essential in tackling environmental problems such as climate change, even where the impacts of global environmental change have a placed-based impact (Ostr”