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

Abstract

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