Abstract
This article examines regional environmental governance (REG) through the lens of human geography theory on scale. Drawing on a case study of the Micronesia Challenge, a regional conservation commitment among five Pacific islands, I advance a critical theory of REG as a scaling process and tool of politics through which regions are (re)made and mobilized in support of diverse agendas. Results highlight understudied dimensions of REG, including: motivations for scaling environmental governance to regions; the co-production of regional and global environmental governance; the mutable expression of regionality within REG; and the ways in which REG is leveraged for resource mobilization, global visibility and influence, and conservation. The potential for REG to empower subaltern groups while advancing conservation is promising, and an important area for future research. The overall contribution of this article is a more complex, politicized understanding of REG that complicates a scholarly search for its inherent characteristics.
Highlights
This article examines regional environmental governance (REG) through the lens of human geography theory on scale
To this I add the related question, “Why is a region?”. This paper addresses these questions with a case study of the Micronesia Challenge, analyzed through the lens of human geography theory on scale and scalar politics
The Micronesia Challenge commitment applies only to the near-shore marine areas around each individual participating island, the geographic scope of action in its outreach materials was sometimes represented by contiguous regional polygons and associated statistics claiming that the Micronesia Challenge covers “6.7 million square kilometers of ocean” and “represents more than 20% of the Pacific Island region—and 5% of the largest ocean in the world.”
Summary
Balsiger and Prys (2014) defined REG as a heterogeneous category of agreements that exhibit contiguity in their membership (i.e., among two or more neighboring countries), their spatial ambit (i.e., a contiguous area), or both. Gruby and Campbell argue that regions are tools of scalar politics that actors construct and mobilize to reshape their influence within global environmental governance processes. This article extends this understanding of strategic regionalization to REG, to argue that to really understand REG, we must attend to the politics underlying the scaling of environmental governance to regions. I examine the Micronesia Challenge through the lens of scale and scalar politics This means approaching regions as strategically constructed tools of politics through which actors attempt to fix (i.e., establish) a spatial construction in space and time, in an effort to fix (i.e., solve) a particular problem for a particular group (McCann 2003). Guam is an unincorporated territory of the US, and the CNMI is a commonwealth in political union with the US
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