Nests, Webs and
Constructs:
contested
concepts of scale in political geography
Richard Howitt
Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University,
Australia
Chapter prepared for inclusion in
John Agnew, Katharyne
Mitchell and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Eds) A Companion to Political Geography, Blackwell, Oxford.
December 2000
Go to PDF version of this paper
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
Contested ideas about
space and scale have been influential in important recent debates in social
science. Divergent concepts of space and ideas about its implications for
social processes have been widely canvassed and hotly debated. Indeed, the
emergence of new ideas about space is widely credited with challenging the
previous dominance of historicism in the social sciences. While ideas of space
remain important debating points, ideas of scale emerged in the 1990s to
challenge dominant understandings of social and political processes. There has
been vigorous debate about scale and its implications within political
geography in particular. It is clear that scale certainly matters for critical
geopolitics. This is particularly clear when one considers the words written
about globalization, the nation state, regionalism and localism. Yet, for all
this, scale remains a troubling and even chaotic concept.
There is a wide consensus
amongst human geographers that the social construction of scale affects
cultural and political landscapes. This is particularly obvious in the debates
about both globalization and localism. Within economic geography, the dominance
of a production-centered discourse has often reduced ‘politics’ to
consideration of the ways in which states and corporations have constructed
scales for their economic or strategic benefit at the expense of workers or
others. In this discourse, issues of social reproduction, cultural dimensions
and non-economic issues of identity politics relatively unexplored. Yet in a
wider notion of politics and political geography, it is these same issues that
have gained prominence in the 1990s. The assertion of a ‘cultural turn’, for
example, was accompanied in many studies with a return to consideration of
localism, specificity and diversity. It is tempting indeed, many have been
tempted to deal with this tension between economic and cultural discourses as
a binary, and to conflate it with the simplified global-local scale binary.
Discussing the politics of scale in this framework becomes a relatively simple
matter, identifying the ways in which relatively local groups constitute their
identity within a relatively local politics, and how they seek to counteract
disempowerment by jumping scales to assert their specific concerns at a wider,
more general scale. This seems attractive. For activist politics, it provides a
way of engaging with the challenge of thinking globally and acting locally.
Yet, like all binaries, this one has its limits. Conflating the
global-economic-general and contrasting it with the local-cultural-specific
obscures important dimensions that an alternative approach to scale might bring
to critical geopolitical analysis, and responses built from it.
Part of the problem
facing any contemporary discussion of scale issues in political geography,
however, commences with an effort to explain just what this powerful concept
actually means. While there is clarity about the nature of social construction,
there is much less clarity about just what sort of a thing scale might be. This
chapter reviews the ideas of scale that have emerged in political and economic
geography, and their implications for critical geopolitics. It argues that one
of the implications of the discipline’s increasing awareness of the ‘politics
of scale’ is that in trying to understand, participate in or influence spatial
politics, one needs to conceptualize and analyze interconnections between
scales and the simultaneity of those connections. This chapter considers in
turn the implications of contested notions of scale for the critical
geopolitics of environment, difference, place and power. Using the experience
of indigenous peoples efforts to secure recognition of their rights and to
influence contested cultural landscapes, it argues that a critical geopolitics
that engages with the scale politics of power, identity and sustainability
offers dispossessed, marginalized and disadvantaged peoples a better framework
for political action across and between multiple scales. This, in turn,
requires geopolitical analysis to articulate and apply more sophisticated
approaches to questions of scale.[1]
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
Within human geography,
there has been a robust discussion of the concept of scale in recent years. Two
figures dominated discussion of scale in the 1980s Peter J Taylor (eg. 1982,
1987, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000a, 2000b) and Neil Smith (eg 1984, 1988,
1992, 1993, Smith & Ward 1987). Both argued scale was a fundamental concept
in political geography, and their ideas have strongly influenced the terms of
more recent debate. Drawing on Wallerstein’s world systems theory, Taylor
advocated a three level model of scale in geopolitics. He identifies
‘world-economy’, ‘nation-state’ and ‘locality’ as the three critical scales at
which the processes of the world economy are manifest (eg 1993: 43-48). Smith,
who maintains Taylor’s notion of a hierarchy of scales, highlights urban,
regional, national and global as the critical scale categories in his analyses.
In their contributions, Taylor and Smith both advocated a politics of
engagement that was oriented to a practical geopolitics consistent with
Harvey’s earlier advocacy of an ‘applied people’s geography’ (Harvey 1984). For
both, however, scale categories remained rather more fixed than more recent
debate has suggested. Agnew (1993) argued against reification of specific scales
as distinct levels of analysis, but acknowledged that because different
disciplines had come to specialize in analysis at different scales, integration
of analysis across scales had become increasingly difficult. It is precisely
this issue, of undertaking meaningful analysis across scales or at multiple
scales, that has been so troubling in operationalizing scale as a fundamental
concept with practical rather than merely rhetorical value.
In contrast to the rather
rigid concepts advocated previously, more discursive and relational notions of
scale have emerged since the early-1990s. Howitt (1993) rejected the idea that
scale categories are ontological givens, and questioned the previously
unquestioned assumption that scale was necessarily a matter if nested
hierarchies. An editorial in Society and Space (Jonas 1994) marked a new
point of departure for discussing social relations as an element of scale.
Jonas emphasized that the political dimensions of spatiality constitute a core
issue in conceptualizing scale. Taking up Massey’s challenge (1992) to develop
a dynamic concept of the spatial in the domains of politics, he sought to
untangle the links between ‘scale as abstraction’ and ‘scale as metaphor’,
pointing out that the tension between globalization and locality research was
often a research frameworks that were having trouble dealing with the
simultaneity and complexity of power relations, identity and difference that
Massey saw as challenging naïve notions of space. Jonas’ piece clearly
reflected a rapidly growing momentum to move beyond rigid scale labels and
naïve conceptualizations of scale itself. His call for a move towards a more
sophisticated discussion of the “scale politics of spatiality” was quickly
added to by both theoretical and empirical contributions.
In 1997 the journal Political
Geography ran a special issue under the title ‘Political Geography of
Scale’. Guest editors Delaney and Leitner suggested “scale is a familiar and
taken-for-granted concept for political geographers and political analysts”
(Delaney and Leitner 1997: 93). They opened with a confident definition of
scale as “the nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the
local, regional, national and global” (p93) and asserted scales are
periodically transformed and constructed. The four papers in this special issue
advocated a ‘constructivist’ approach to scale and taken together they provide
a powerful opening in what the editors saw as “a theoretical project that
necessarily involves attention to the relationships between space and power”
(p96). But despite their best efforts, they found scale remained elusive:
The problematic of scale in this
context arises from the difficulties of answering the question: once scale is
constructed or produced, where in the world is it? Scale is not as easily
objectified as two-dimensional territorial space, such as state borders. We
cannot touch it or take a picture of it (Delaney and Leitner 1997: 96-97)
Since that special issue,
scale has been an almost constant presence in the pages of Political
Geography. Some eighteen papers have considered scale as their theoretical
focus. Clearly, scale has been accepted as a central and contested idea in both
the journal and the discipline. In 1998 scale was a major concern of Cox’s contribution
and a series of commentaries (Cox 1998a, 1998b; Jones 1998; Judd 1998, MP Smith
1998). In 1999, a paper by Morrill raised considerable comment concerning the
role of jurisdictional issues in mediating conflicts across scales (Morrill
1999a, 1999b; Swanstrom 1999; Martin 1999; Fanstein 1999). In 2000, Taylor’s
paper on ‘world cities and territorial states’ in conditions of globalization
raised important issues of the role of nation states and trade blocs as a
“nexus of power which straddles geographical scales” (Taylor 2000a: 28; see
also Vasanyi 2000; Shapiro 2000; Douglass 2000; Taylor 2000b).
Cox (1998a) pointed out
that scale is a central concept in political discourse. In seeking to clarify
the ‘spaces of engagement’ that constitute local politics, he also sought to
unsettle previously dominant concepts of scale (also 1993, 1997, 1998b, Cox
& Mair 1989, 1991). His paper argued that there is a scale division of
politics in which it is relationships between scales rather than just jumping
between them that offers a new view of local politics. Commentary on Cox’s
paper highlighted the importance of context in dealing with ideas of scale. K
Jones (1998) considered the way that jumping scales really involves a politics
of representation, with local groups “actively reshaping the discourses within
which their struggles are constituted (and) discursively re-present(ing) their
political struggles across scales” (1998: 26). She also notes the
epistemological concerns about scale categories, and the way that certain
concepts of scale render some questions simply un-askable. Judd (1998) responds
by reminding us that the power relations that are constructed by the state’s
construction of scales in material forms through jurisdictional, administrative
and regulatory structures, restricts the flexibility of resistance considerably
more than Cox allows. MP Smith (1998) takes Cox to task for being too vague in
terms such as “more global”. He criticizes Cox for relegating the ‘global’ to a
conflated presence with “scales like the regional and the national” (1998: 35).
He draws on his own work on cross-border, transnational migrant identities (eg
MP Smith 1994) to remind us that it is the social construction of networks,
identities and relationships that constitute the scaled spaces of engagement
that Cox highlights.
In the same journal,
Morrill considered how different jurisdictional scales are harnessed by
powerful vested interests to their own purposes. In particular, Morrill was
concerned to address the question of “whether there is an optimum or
appropriate level of decision-making or balance of power across geographical
scales” (199a: 1). Using a case study of decision-making about future uses of
the Hanford nuclear reservation site in Washington state, Morrill argues that
in the USA higher levels of government are increasingly harnessed (usually by
capital) to preempt local decision-making and impose “metropolitan values and
preferences” (1999a: 2). He points out that federal regulation of the nuclear
industry circumscribes local autonomy at Hanford from the start, but that
planning processes generally favouring metropolitan priorities over rural
concerns reinforces this. Swanstrom (1999) contradicts Morrill’s conclusion by
suggesting that the absence of local planning and land use regulation from
central authorities characterizes the decision-making process in the USA, and
suggests that Morrill’s policy suggestions to support local autonomy are
flawed. Martin (1999) unpacks the assumed congruence of local interest groups
and local government, advocating a view of cross-scale relationships that is
based on a more careful consideration of multiple interests and social
identities at each scale implicated in a decision-making chain. Fanstein (1999)
suggests that Morrill has misread some aspects of the Hanford case as
demonstrating the power of higher levels of government, because the outcomes at
Hanford represent a reduction of federal control of the site. Perhaps the most
interesting issue emerging from the discussion of Morrill’s paper is the
assertion that one scale (the local) does or does not warrant privileging as
more politically or environmentally ‘correct’ (Morrill 1999b: 48).
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
This debate about the
practical implications of theoretical work is perhaps one of the most important
issues of debate in the recent scale literature. Even before there is consensus
on the ‘what’ of geographical scale, there is plenty of heated discussion of
the ‘so what’ questions. Many commentators have struggled with the apparent
paradox of scale that it matters, but is almost meaningless as a stand-alone
concept: it only matters in context as a co-constituent of complex and
dynamic geographical totalities. This paradox leads us back to the issue of
‘social construction’, and a number of studies that seek to clarify the ways in
which scale jumping strategies allow us to better conceptualize the
construction of scale. Drawing on N Smith's work on the social production of
scales, Swyngedouw argues that “theoretical and political priority ... never
resides in a particular geographical scale, but rather in the process through
which particular scales become (re)constituted” (1997a: 169). Unlike Smith,
however, Swyngedouw incorporates Massey’s innovative ideas of the “geometry of
power” (eg 1993a, see also 1992, 1993b, 1994, 1995) and takes seriously the
considerable tension between the economic, political and cultural domains in
relation to the social construction of scale (see also Swyngedouw 1992, 1997b).
His awkward neologism ‘glocalization’, the simultaneous and contested shift
up-scale towards the global and downscale to the local as a response to
changing economic, political and cultural pressures is one of many he coins
to meet the needs of a new scale vocabulary. Swyngedouw’s great contribution
has been his insistence that the nature of scale politics is to be found not in
a theoretical discourse, but in the real-world practices of social conflict and
struggle. Although he maintains an unexplained commitment to nesting of scales[2],
Swyngedouw’s efforts to provide a new vocabulary of scale has been extremely
helpful.
In moving from the
abstract discourses of a ‘theory of scale’, there have been many efforts to
clarify the sort of impacts scale has in practice. Adams’ investigation of the
way telecommunications create new linkages across space (1996) emphasized the
importance of networks of relations rather than areally-bounded and
hierarchically nested places as a constituent of scales. He considers the scale
at which protest, resistance, autonomy and consent might be constructed. He
considers the networks and flows of information, recognition and support
constructed through telecommunications technology in Tiananmen Square in 1989,
in the popular movement for democracy in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, and
the US civil rights movement in the mid-1950s. Each of these examples
demonstrates the ways in which scaled and territorially-bounded jurisdictions
are unable to contain or control protest movements’ abilities to jump between
scales. The paradoxical and simultaneous harnessing-of and harnessing-by mass
media constructs new audiences for (and supporters of or participants in)
protest. There is no nested hierarchical vision of scale relations in Adams’
account. Kelly also rejects the idea of hierarchy in his investigation of the
place-based politics of a power station in Manila, Philippines to advocate the
case for a view of scales as constructed rather than absolute categories (1997)
His paper offered the sort of detailed reading of the “translation of the
globalization discourse into development policies” (1997: 151) needed to get
beyond a rhetorical consideration of scale in the emergent discourse of
globalization. Leitner adopts a “constructionist perspective” on scale,
understood as a “nested hierarchy of political spaces” (1997 125) to consider
the institutional context of migration in Europe. Herod and Agnew have also
provided widely cited empirical studies. Herod’s work on the scale politics of
labor restructuring in the United States (eg 1991, 1997a, 1997b) and Agnew’s
work on post-1992 political restructuring in Italy (eg 1997) have both cast
considerable light on the processes referred to as ‘social construction’. Herod
considers the way in which organized labor’s approach to contract bargaining in
the eastern USA in the 1970s constructed new geographical scales. In the first
instance, inter-union rivalry and technological change in the late-1950s
produced a national scale bargaining strategy which pushed the International
Longshoreman’s Association’s focus upscale from regional agreements to a master
national agreement. By the mid-1980s, employer reorganization and changes in
working conditions around the USA produced a scale politics, in which the use
of non-union labor in southern ports undermined the power of the master
contract to meet the needs of many of its intended beneficiaries. Herod’s
analysis provides a powerful demonstration of how it is particular
relationships, developed in specific institutional, technological, political
and economic contexts that constitute the scales which themselves become
institutionalized as self-evident and embedded in real world economic
geographies. Rather than organized labor, Agnew focuses on political parties
and how they are implicated in “writing the scripts of geographical scale”
(1997: 101), focuses on the role of political parties in linking individuals to
collective action by articulating goals around which people can be mobilized.
The institutional organization of electoral processes link parties, policies
and populations to particular places in particular ways, and bring them
together in organized political relationships. Their mediation and utilization
of the politics of difference, identity and territoriality contribute to the
constitution of the state whether this is in terms of local, regional,
national or supra-state governance. The collapse of old-style parties and the
emergence of new style parties in 1994 defined new scale relationships even
if they fitted within the old spatial boundaries of the nation.
Although less cited that
work from North America and Europe, Fagan (eg 1995, 1997, Sadler and Fagan
2000), Howitt (eg 1993a, 1998a), McGuirk (1997) and others have forged an
Australian perspective on scale issues which advocates a radically relational
approach. Howitt’s (1993a) critique of the dominant thinking about scale
suggested that the idea of scale as a set of nested hierarchies was totally
inadequate for understanding scale politics, and that the widespread conflation
of scaled ideas had produced conceptual confusion in many presentations. He
advocated an empirically grounded dialectical approach to investigation of
scale issues. Fagan (1995) offered a powerful critique of the difficulty
geographers were having in handling the idea of globalization and its
implications for action, resistance and responses at other scales and
geographers’ analysis of and contributions to them. He pointed out that the
very processes that were being rhetorically constructed as fundamental to an
irresistible globalization “can be constructed as local” (1995: 7 his
emphasis). His careful examination of ‘the region as political discourse’
provided a scaled analysis of political economic changes in Australia and the
Asia-Pacific region that considered the nature of power relations within and
across scales as critical to political process and real-world geographies.
Howitt et al (1996) argued that indigenous and other resistance to the New
World Order advocated by the USA in the Gulf War was in large part a the
contestation of resources, identity and territory and was producing new
geopolitical relationships across scales. Such shifts in scale produces new
analytical interest in scales, places and relationships that were previously of
only marginal interest to political geography (Goldfrank 1993, Routledge 1996).
McGuirk (1997) was also concerned to move beyond rhetorical discussion and
applied a relational view of scale to her careful analysis of urban planning
issues in the western suburbs of Adelaide. Contra the widely advocated view
that globalization was driving development processes on the ground and
subordinating local relationships, McGuirk’s paper demonstrates just how wrong
it is “to regard localities and regions as being at the mercy of external
uncontrollable and mythologised global forces, because they are themselves a
formative part of global processes” (1997: 493). Fagan (1997) reflected on the
way in which the local-global debate in academic circles was paralleled in
political circles. His examination of restructuring the Australian food
processing industry returned to his theme of the need to integrate global and
local analyses in a non-deterministic and politically-informed way.
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
A recent review by
Marston focused on the issue of social construction. She argues, correctly,
that much of the recent literature reinforces the separation of the economic
domain, and specifically a productionist view of the economic, from wider
issues of social reproduction and consumption. Indeed, despite the so-called
‘cultural turn’ in geography, attention to cultural (and cross-cultural) issues
in the discussion of scale, remains limited. In advocating a view of scale as
having (at least) three dimensions size, level and relation Howitt (1998a)
re-emphasized the importance of social relationships in space as fundamental in
constructing geographical scales. Following Howitt, and Swyngedouw (1997),
Marston (2000) offers an expanded concept of scale that encompasses the domains
of reproduction and consumption as well as production, as a synthesis of the
recent debates.[3] Her
presentation of gender dynamics points out that changes in women’s roles in
social reproduction and consumption in the late-19th and early-20th
Centuries in the USA not only created new spaces new domestic spaces, new
retailing spaces, new social spaces but also new scales by organizing social
relationships in new ways. Marston convincingly explores the ways that the
dynamics of these social processes and networks are embedded in the changing
relationships between public and private domains, between retailing,
production, media, politics and the institutions of governance. She suggests
that we can see these processes producing new scales such as ‘home’ and
‘neighborhood’ in ways that echo loudly not just in the political geographies
of the USA in the early-20th Century, but throughout the
contemporary world.
Since the Marxist and
behaviourist challenges in the 1970s to positivist efforts to constitute
geography as a spatial science, social justice as been a key concern of
politically engaged geographers (Swyngedouw 2000). The traditional image of
‘blind justice’ finding solutions to conflict without fear or favour using
mechanical scales offers a fortuitous starting point for our discussion of
geographical scale. The image of scale as a relatively straightforward
mechanism that juxtaposes, compares or relates phenomena in space and time is
consistent with the image of geographical scale as a set of distinct platforms
upon which geopolitics (and other social phenomena) are performed. Building on
this image, it has been easy to privilege one scale or another as the
preeminent platform for political action. International relations, for example,
posits the nation state and its interaction with other nation states as
preeminent, as did conventional geopolitics. World systems theory posits the
global sphere as the most significant scale Taylor 1988, 1993, 2000). Locality
studies have privileged the local as the scale at which meaning or
lived-experience is constructed. The paradoxical positions taken on local, national
and global scales was a starting point for much of the critical discourse on
scale referred to above.
In contradiction of the
neat schemas of scale as a nested hierarchy, neither geopolitics nor social
justice is not reducible to a single dimension in space, in time, or in
cultural relations. Peoples’ struggles for justice, their efforts to construct
new geographies of justice, are always multifaceted. They always reflect (at
least) economic, cultural and environmental politics. In her seminal paper on
social justice, Fraser (1995, also 1997) used a bi-polar tension between the
old-style socialist (economic) politics of distribution and the new
post-socialist (cultural) politics of identity to make the point that a new,
‘post-socialist’ dynamic had to be addressed in the social justice movement. In
proposing a contradiction between the strategies of redistribution and
recognition, Fraser’s analytical framework lost sight of geography, territory
and scale as key constituents of political relationships in the real world.
Like the ‘level playing field’ of the free market imaginary, Fraser’s placeless
analytical framework has powerful pedagogic and rhetorical value, but it misses
the point that concrete social relationships are always placed and scaled. Critical
geopolitics has sought to meet the challenge of dealing simultaneously with
issues of justice, equity and sustainability at multiple scales.
No simple schema that
privileges a singular scale as the essential scale at which justice can be
achieved is reasonable. And no schema that excludes the scale politics of
place, territory and power, will adequately address the nature of geopolitics
or the struggle for social and environmental justice. Again, these concerns
return us to the issue of the social construction of scale. Harvey tackles this
issue, and follows N Smith in conceptualizing social processes operating in a
way that produces “a nested hierarchy of scales (from global to local) leaving
us always with the political-ecological question of how to ‘arbitrate and
translate between them’” (1996 203-4, quoting N Smith 1992: 72). Harvey
usefully goes on to discuss the ways in which social conceptions of space and
time are constructed in social processes and simultaneously become objectified
as pervasive “facts of nature” (1996: 211) that regulate social practices. Yet
neither Smith nor Harvey are clear as to why the social construction of scale
produces a nested hierarchy of scales. Howitt (1993a) argued against the notion
of both nesting and hierarchy as adequate metaphors for geographical scale,
suggesting that it was in cross-scale linkages, awkward juxtapositions and
jumps, and non-hierarchical dialectics that the nature and significance of
scale is to be found. Swyngedouw (1997) follows a similar approach, but retains
a notion of ‘nesting’ while rejecting some aspects of ‘hierarchy’.
So, what are the
mechanisms of social construction of scale? Using struggles for social and
environmental justice, let us take a step deeper into this issue. Cox (1998a)
suggests that it is not the social construction of scale that matters, but the
social construction of the politics of scale. Using a focus on the institutions
of local governance, Cox identifies a “scale division of politics” (1998a: 1).
He advocates a shift away from an “areal concept of scale” (1998: 19) to a view
of scale as the spatial form of social networks. Marston’s weaving of social
reproduction and consumption into her ideas about the construction of scale,
alongside issues of economic and political processes, accusing those who have
focused on the political and economic dimensions of scale of telling “only part
of a much more complex story” (2000: 233). She emphasizes also the way in which
the social construction of this less-than-local scale in turn influenced the
practices of social reproduction and consumption in ways that were quite
profound, and which “reached out beyond the home to the city, the country and
the globe” (2000: 238).
Silvern takes another
United States example the efforts by Wisconsin Ojibwe to utilize treaty
rights to influence natural resource conflicts to consider how the scale at
which sovereignty is constituted reflects an ongoing struggle “over the control
of territory and the political construction of geographical scale” (1999: 664).
In Silvern’s study, as in Marston’s, scale is simultaneously constructing and
reflecting the spatial form of social relations. In Marston’s study it is
gender politics that takes priority in understanding the construction of the
domestic scale in emergent US capitalism, while in Silvern’s study it is the
ethno-politics of conquest and dispossession that underscores the creation of
Federal and state sovereignties in US legal proceedings, while denying the
legitimacy of tribal sovereignty. Despite the long standing doctrine of a
tribal sovereignty, constrained by European legal principles of ‘discovery’,
derived from the decisions of US Chief Justice Marshall in the 1820s and 1830s
(see eg Canby 1988), Silvern reports the state of Wisconsin sought to restrict
the exercise of tribal rights to co-manage natural resources by severely
circumscribing the geography of Ojibwe treaty rights. Like Marshall’s court 150
years earlier, the state’s courts found that it was non-tribal principles that
defined their jurisdiction and the scope of their capacity to recognize a
sovereign entity constructed external to that jurisdiction. Despite some
success in securing co-management standing through the courts, the Ojibwe were
unable to establish what Silvern refers to as “scale equivalency to the state
when it came to management of … resources” (1999: 661). Notzke (1995), from a
Canadian perspective, similarly sees questions of co-management rights, as
representing a challenge to jurisdictional and constitutional sovereignty.
McHugh (1996) suggests that indigenous peoples’ efforts to establish
recognition of tribal sovereignty in New Zealand, Canada and Australia has
established significant constraints on the institution of the Crown in those
jurisdictions. Following Silvern’s reasoning, this affects the ability of
state, provincial and national governments in those countries to construct
hierarchical scale systems that exclude or deny the existence of ‘tribal’ as a
geographical scale. It is colonial (and post-colonial) states that have
assembled instruments of power and institutions of state administration into
nested, hierarchical geographical scales that “facilitate the power of the
dominant society to control, exclude and marginalize native populations”
(Silvern 1999: 665).
Jhappan (1992) offers
another example, this time at the level of international relations, of the ways
in which the indigenous peoples movement has succeeded in upsetting such
taken-for-granted nested hierarchies of control, exclusion and marginalization,
and in the process, have challenged the dominant view of scale as an areal
concept (scale as size) or a hierarchical concept (scale as level). Drawing on
alliances with organized labour, international organizations within the United
Nations and European Community, environmental organizations and consumer groups
in other jurisdictions, and diverse political alliances within Québec, Canada
and the international indigenous peoples movement, the James Bay Cree lobbied
to stop the massive Great Whale River hydro-electric project. Weaving together
a potent combination of local tribal governance and political action,
jurisdictional standing as regulators based on modern treaty rights, and
effective provincial, national and international campaigning, Jhappan sees the
Cree as modifying Québec and Canadian government policy options, and, in the
process, challenging the “nation state’s uncontested sovereignty over domestic
policy” (1992: 61). Cohen (1994) offers an account of the cross-border
alliances between the Cree and environmental and energy consumer groups in the
northeast United States and the ways in which institutions developed as part of
the 1975 treaty settlement provided the vehicle for a new tribal scale to
influence the fate of the Great Whale project twenty years later, while
Puddicombe (1991) suggests that Inuit institutions developed in the same way
adopted a very different scale politics in response to the Great Whale project.
Williams (1999) uses
scale as a tool to explore the politics of environmental racism in the USA, and
suggests that scale is not only socially produced, but also produces social
outcomes (socially generative). He identifies a scale politics that “centers on
an antagonistic relationship between a societal problem and its political
resolution” (1999: 56). The acceptance of common ground between environmental
justice advocates and the objects of their criticism often focuses on
ideological notions of procedural fairness and equitable distribution of costs
and benefits. Williams notes, in relation to distributional issues affecting
environmental risk, that the ability of powerful institutions to convince
regulators and a wider public that they have followed fair procedures allows an
impersonal (and highly-valued) ‘market’ to justify distributional outcomes
reducing critics to rather self-interested and locally myopic players. In the
process, Williams suggests, industry ‘wins’ the scale politics of environmental
justice (1999: 66). It is worth observing that powerful institutions
(governments, corporations, even some social justice groups) are also able to
re-write the local scale politics as constituted by much wider scale forces
recall, for example, Fagan’s suggestion (1997) of the way that manipulation of
brands by global food producing companies reconstitutes a powerful global
corporation as a local heritage value.[4]
Silvern (1999) also opens
a window on an environmental politics of scale in his consideration of tribal
efforts to argue that they have regulatory standing in state decision-making
about mining and other environmentally degrading activities. This parallels
Morrill’s concern (1999a) with the issue of jurisdictional scale in planning
and land use decisions. M Jones (1998) takes up similar issues in relation to
the changing nature of local governance in the United Kingdom, calling for
‘relational theory of the state to adequately address the shift from local
government to local governance. MacLeod and Goodwin suggest that many of the
institutional responses to globalization, regional restructuring and localism
in Europe, have failed to problematize scale and consequently “appear to treat
as ontologically ‘pre-given’ the scalar context” of their work (1999: 711).[5]
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
The need for a scaled
analysis in critical geopolitics is particularly obvious in the case of
indigenous rights, where the construction of postcolonial nation states was
predicated on the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples. The
construction of territorial authority over indigenous domains has involved the
construction of specific scales of social control (the mission, the community,
the reservation), political representation and participation (the ‘tribe’
defined by government), service delivery, governance and recognition (the
department, the Bureau, the Commission). At national and sub-national levels,
governments established legislation and systems of social control that sought
to define indigenous peoples as people without geography (Howitt 1993c; Dodson
1994). At the scale of the body, indigenous people were disciplined to conform
or be punished. Disciplined through banishment or integration, indigenous
identities were subject to the most invasive levels of control removals of
children from families, outlawing of languages and cultural practices,
replacement of names, imposition of mission- or government-arranged marriages,
special controls on wages, movement and activities. At the scale of family and
clan, indigenous peoples were disciplined by processes of territorial
domination, displacement and relocations, threats and exercise of force and the
spatial discipline of new settlements and ‘communities’. At the scale of the nation,
indigenous societies were disciplined by dishonoured treaties[6],
legal frameworks which took their ancestral domains from them, political
systems which simply excluded them from democratic process, and economic
practices that ignored or by-passed their property rights, skills and
aspirations. At the scale of the international system, the club of nation
states that had dispossessed them established new institutions that restricted
their access to international arenas for legal and political redress.
Despite this, indigenous
politics provides many examples of the harnessing of scale analysis to the
purposes of social transformation to simultaneously pursue the economic
politics of redistribution, the cultural politics of recognition and the
environmental politics of sustainability. In my own experience, the issue of
just what scale is has been greatly clarified in my work alongside indigenous
colleagues in actually re-building the scales of family, clan, language group,
tribe and peoples in the wake of Australia’s unacknowledged genocide (Tatz
1999, also Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). In Australia,
Aboriginal groups have long struggled to overcome the legacies of the colonial
and post-colonial fragmentation of their traditional domains. This has never
been just a matter of jurisdictional recognition of property rights. Official
indifference to more radical aspects of a reconciliation agenda including a
naïve and self-interested assertion that negotiating treaties in Australia
would divide national sovereignty[7]
have left little room for political maneuver. Yet it is in the scale politics
of identity, difference, territory and governance that opportunities can be
found.
In re-building indigenous
governance, the process of social construction of geographical scales is laid
bare. To construct the means of new forms of social, economic or political
participation, the networks and relationships that bring people together must
undergo transformation through their confrontation with, marginalization from
and interpenetration by the institutions, relations and processes of existing
complexes of territory-governance-identity. In Québec, for example, the 1975
negotiation of the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement provided for new
institutional arrangements for local governance and participation among the
Cree and Inuit peoples. In 1971 these communities were brought together for the
first time as a people in response to Hydro-Québec’s proposal to regulate
every single river in the north:
For the first time in
history, the Cree sat down together to discuss their common problem - the James
Bay Hydroelectric Project. But we found out much more than that we found out
that we all survive on the land and we all have respect for the land. Our Cree
Chiefs also found out that our rights to land, our rights to hunt, fish and
trap and our right to remain Crees were considered as privileges [not rights]
by the governments of Canada and Québec (Billy Diamond, then Cree Chief at
Rupert House and later lead negotiator in the James Bay and Northern Québec
negotiations, quoted in Feit 1985: 40).
Twenty-four years later,
the Cree institutions established through negotiation of Canada’s first modern
treaty were advocating seccession from Québec if Québec seceded from Canada
(Grand Council of the Crees 1995). By bringing together cultural, territorial,
environmental, economic and jurisdictional concerns and by doing this in the
context of on-going transformational relations with provincial, federal and
international authorities (see eg Cohen 1994; Jhappan 1992; also Howitt
forthcoming) the Cree succeeded in constructing a new scale.
This scale of tribal
governance is clearly not an ontological given. It never appears in the
standard scale lists of ‘local’, ‘national’, ‘global’.[8]
It does not even appear in those extended lists that include the scale of ‘the
body’, ‘home’ and ‘infinity’ (see Howitt 2000). In recent work in South
Australia, the reality of constructing such a new scale has been driven home to
me yet again. In preparing for negotiations with the state government of South
Australia, native title claimants[9]
have been brought together as a congress to discuss how they might construct a
way of negotiating with a united voice that did not subsume their local
autonomy as distinct groups, with distinct traditions, values, histories and
experiences. As I have noted elsewhere (Howitt 1997), in pursuing ‘regional
agreements’ to recognize native title, the ‘region’ cannot be assumed. The
spatial, social and political scale (which best see as co-constituents of
‘geographical scale’, perhaps along with ecological, economic and other
dimensions of scale) must be negotiated as concrete relationships of mutual
recognition, accountability and acceptance in order for them to become a
meaningful vehicle for engaging with the transformational politics of
negotiation with state, corporate or other interests about native title,
reconciliation or sovereignty. Current discussion of a single national treaty
in Australia is doomed to fail until there is some success in realizing the
national scale as a meaningful scale of indigenous identity. In South
Australia, the nascent state ‘Congress’ will rely upon a dialectical engagement
with its own Aboriginal constituents, and its state and industry negotiation
partners. A group that claims representativeness without the concrete network
of relationships that constitute a geographical scale of ‘statewide indigenous
congress’ will soon find itself criticized as discredited in the communities.
Similarly, a well-developed statewide network that is not recognized by the
state and other powerful groups, will soon fall prey to fragmentation and
division.
In other words, the
social and political construction of scale is precisely social action the
concrete processes of organizing a political response, a vehicle for
participation, recognition and change. This is always, as so much of the work
cited above demonstrates, a matter of links within and across scales to provide
opportunities for transformation of existing power relations. What is crystal
clear in indigenous politics is the need to link social, cultural, territorial
and institutional relations in constructing geographical scales at which social
action may occur. For other groups, access to existing institutions has perhaps
masked some aspects of the political construction of scale. Or, as Marston
(2000) points out in relation to women’s actions in the construction of new
geographical scales, the blindness of the dominant productionist paradigm has
rendered their action virtually invisible. But of course, Herod’s trade unions,
Agnew’s political parties, Fagan’s food corporations, McGuirk’s urban planners,
Kelly’s Philippine activists, and the other scale-builders whose actions are to
be glimpsed through the literature trying to make more sense of their activity,
are all engaged in the same sorts of processes. They seek to mobilize social
networks, political institutions, economic resources and territorial rights to
the task of creating new geographies new landscapes of power and recognition
and opportunity.
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
References
If critical geopolitics
is about some form of ‘critical engagement’ (Routledge 1996) or ‘situated
engagement’ (Suchet 1999) and supporting dissent understanding it, fomenting
it, participating it, responding to it it is apparent that scale is an
important issue because both analysis and dissent are necessarily engaged in
addressing and crossing scales. Whether it is a question of organized labor
seeking an appropriate forum to contest employers’ privileges in setting wages,
working conditions or other issues; or marginalized indigenous peoples seeking to
rewrite the rules of engagement with post-colonial societies and states; or
environmentalists seeking to curtail the impacts of globalization on ecological
sustainability, relationships and issues at one scale are actually
reconstituted and need new tools of engagement, analysis and response.
The challenge of scale in
contemporary political geography is that it presents a paradox. On the one hand
it seems self evident. Scale is a term that easily slips into our discussion
because the scaled processes of ‘globalization’, ‘national sovereignty’ and
‘local action’ that are the taken-for-granted focus of so much political
geography are so obvious. Similarly, it is equally obvious that scales are
socially and politically constructed. Yet, when one tries to offer a definition
of just what is being constructed, most attempts are unsatisfactory. In the 4th
edition of the Dictionary of Human Geography, N Smith (2000: 727) takes
2½ pages to arrive at the statement that the “question of scale will become one
of mounting theoretical and practical relevance”, but does not provide a
definition. The nature of scale, then, is paradoxical. But the recent
literature on scale has rendered the reason for this much clearer. For a long
time, it was assumed that scale was a question of either size or level (eg of
complexity). What emerges from the recent literature is that scale is
preeminently a matter of relation, and that approaches which seek to summarize
this dimension with the gloss of labels such as ‘global’ or ‘local’ without
engaging with what is actually encompassed in context by the term, will
actually miss the substance of the term and the phenomenon it represents. Like
the other quintessentially geographical term ‘place’, ‘scale’ is rendered most
meaningful in its development as an empirical generalization a concept made
real by building up an understanding of complex and dynamic relationships and
processes in context. As an theoretical abstraction the risk is that ‘scale’ is
reduced to a set of meaningless labels that say something about size and
complexity, but which hide precisely the terrain with which critical
geopolitics is most interested the terrain of real landscapes in which spaces
of engagement offer a myriad of transformational opportunities at a myriad of scales.
What is paradoxical,
perhaps, is not the nature of scale, but geographers’ efforts to theorize scale
in some way that divorces it from its geographical context. If the role of our
theory is to better equip us for our situated engagement in struggles for
justice, sustainability and transformation, theory divorced from the scaled
landscapes of change are probably of limited value.
Intro;
The Idea of Scale; Ideas into Practice;
Social Construction the consensus view; Social Construction as Social Action; Conclusion;
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[1] Despite the broad literature drawn upon in geographers’ discussions of scale, it remains a poorly understood concept within the discipline, and virtually unacknowledged beyond it. For example, a recent literature in Ecological Economics (Clark et al 2000) limits its consideration to quantitative concerns, citing only the rather naïve Meyer et al (1992), Harvey (1969), Jammer (1954) and Forer (1974) to represent discussion of scale issues in geography!
[2] For example, in the conclusion to his 1997 paper in Cox’s collection (1997), Swyngedouw refers to “a nested set of related and interpenetrating spatial scales that define the arena of struggle, where conflict is mediated and regulated and compromises settled” (1997: 160). The inclusion of the term “nested” in this passage is not supported by much of his previous discussion and seems more a legacy of earlier assumptions than a product of the reflection presented in the paper.
[3] It is not only in ecological economics that much of the literature Marston reviews is missed. In their 1999 discussion of geopolitics, identity and scale, Herb (1999) and Kaplan (1999) refer to none of this conceptual debate, other than Taylor’s work. Their interesting discussion of the interdependence of territoriality, identity and geopolitics, and their reliance on the idea of scale, ultimately reproduces a complex nesting metaphor, in contrast to the relational notions of contested sovereignties discussed below.
[4] I have made a parallel point in discussion of the scale politics of social and environmental impact assessment, where benefits of a proposed development are aggregated to present persuasive ‘state’ or ‘national’ benefits, while social and environmental costs are often represented as ‘merely local’ and parochial (1993b). See also a similar point about the political tension between ‘vested’ and ‘representative’ interests in the Australian mining industry (Howitt 1991).
[5] A related question is raised by Wilson et al (1999) in their consideration of “scale misperceptions” in the management of social-ecological systems. The imposition of conservation area and other jurisdictional boundaries on the development of ecological relations such as non-human populations, clearly affects management options. This common mismatch has increased the pressure for bioregional planning as a way of matching ecological and administrative boundaries (see eg Brunckhorst 2000).
[6] The irony, of course, is that the revolutionary pariah state of another century was the USA, whose existence was first acknowledged in international law by treaties with First Nations that were later to be subsumed as ‘domestic dependent nations’ (see eg Williams 1990)
[7] Australia is a federal state, with national sovereignty already divided between six colonial states, each of which retains a direct link to the Queen of the Australian Commonwealth, who is, of course, also the Head of State of the United Kingdom. This division of sovereignty never troubles conservative and racist criticism of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander efforts to reassert their own sovereignty. Indeed, a recent referendum on a shift from monarchy to republic status for the Commonwealth was rejected. These issues are taken up in more detail in Howitt 1998b).
[8] Indeed, in one of the key early texts the raises issues of scale, N Smith renders First Nations completely invisible in his rendering of the American landscape as “poetic nature” (1984: 7). In a later paper Smith reinforces his marginalization of First Nations in a throw away reference where he suggests that “the whole Lower East Side, not just the park, had become ‘Indian Country’” (1993: 93). This did not mean that there had been a recognition of tribal ownership of the neighborhood. Indeed, Smith’s reference is a careless reinforcement of indigenous invisibility (1989). It parallels Soja’s cacophonous blindness to the First Nations of California in his influential account of the history of Los Angeles which, like so much ostensibly ‘radical’ geography, placed indigenous peoples quite literally outside geography! (see also Howitt 1993c).
[9] Native title rights were formally recognized in Australia by a High Court decision in 1992. Indigenous claimants must lodge native title claims for adjudication under new legislation, enacted in 1993 and amended in ways that many, including the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (W Jonas 2000: ch 2), found racially discriminating.