Multi-level governance and the politics of scale: The challenge of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Abstract

Over the last years, Multi-Level Governance (MLG) has become a buzzword, and not only for environmental policy. Informed by previous research on federalism, this new form of political steering (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Heinelt et al. 2002; Bache and Flinders 2004) became paradigmatic for the European integration process and decision making in that supranational entity. If EU environmental policy represents a “unique system of multilevel environmental governance” (Jordan 2005: 2), it is questionable whether the EU model is transferable to other regions. Moreover, in research about environmental governance, in the EU and beyond, the term “level” denotes existing institutional systems or procedural processes at specific spatial dimensions such as international or supranational institutions (Multilateral Environmental Agreements, European Commission, etc.), national authorities or democratic institutions (e.g. national parliaments), or local decision making processes. The different levels are simply taken as given! The production of these spatial levels, i.e. the production of social space on a specific spatial scale-e.g. the production of Europe in a historical process-and its meaning for the relationships between the different levels, is regularly excluded in MLG approaches. Analyses therefore underestimate or often simply neglect the processes of up-scaling and down-scaling of decision making through the strengthening or weakening of existing levels and/or the construction of new levels. MLG approaches therefore often miss the associated impacts on policy making. It is exactly this question-how the scalar dimensions of social and political processes are produced-that is emphasized by approaches from critical geography dealing with the politics of scale (e.g. Smith 1995; Swyngedouw 1997; 2004; Brenner 2001; 2004; Brenner et al. 2003; Heeg et al. 2007). The question of scale has also become prominent in a variety of issues regarding environmental problems. For environmental governance, in particular, the question of how to connect socio-economic, political and ecological scales is critical (Cash and Moser 2000; Meadowcroft 2002; Bulkeley 2005). The emergence of “beyond-the-border-problems,” environmental problems, where the causes and consequences are splitbetween different countries and political authorities, pose vexing challenges. In these cases, the gains and losses related to environmental threats, as much as the costs of political responses, are often distributed among different regions or spatial scales. To address these distributional effects, the power relations of the different actors involved at these different scales have to be taken into account. Transboundary environmental problems therefore raise questions of how to connect the scale, the interplay and the fit of environmental regimes and institutions (Young 2002). Furthermore, as analyzed in the politics of scale, power relations connected to the relationships between different levels of decision making are important. The central question of the “politics of scale” approaches used in critical geography-the production of spatial scale and the relevance of the production processes for environmental governance, however, is seldom mentioned in the literature on environmental governance (Brown and Purcell 2005; Bulkeley 2005). Recent discussions about environmental governance will be analyzedbelow in order to demonstrate that the production of scale is often neglected and that this disregard has profound impacts on the way the notion of MLG is used. The concept of scale will be introduced to address this shortcoming and to deal with the complex transformations which give rise to notions of multi-level governance. Moreover, a better understanding of the scale issues in Multi-Level Environmental Governance can improve our understanding of the rescaling of politics in general. It will be argued that scale-related thinking has some advantages to explain the complex transformation connected with multi-level politics. In particular, the analysis of how distributional conflicts within and between different levels are resolved-or regulated without really being resolved-could benefit from the politics of scale approach. Above all, this approach uses the notion of power and domination to explain how the power relations connected with distributional conflicts are inscribed in political institutions. The integration of the notions of power and domination into governanceapproaches, however, is a challenge. Governance approaches are marked by a problem-solving bias which tends to exclude questions of domination (Mayntz 2005), too easily assuming that actors or institutions are actually interested in solving problems. This problem-solving bias is an important gap in recent governance approaches. When we examine distributional conflicts within and between different levels we have to address the question whether actors are genuinely interested in solving problems-or whether they are more interested, considering possible losses, in merely handling the consequences of the problems (in material as much as in political terms) without actually trying to solve the problem effectively. To do this, we have to take into account the power relations between the actors’ diverging interests, and how the interests are inscribed in institutional measures-that is: how much they were able to influence the measures adopted-and thus the structural selectivities inscribed in the institutional responses on different scales. This argument will be supported by referring to a very important exampleof environmental assessments and environmental policy making: the MillenniumEcosystem Assessment. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), published its main results in 2005 (see MA 2003; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c) and provides an excellent overview of a broad range of empirical issues connected with the question of scale in environmental sciences and policy. Moreover, it offers important methodological tools to move forward towards an integration of social and ecological scales, using multi-scale assessments and focusing on cross-scale interactions. A much closer look at the results of the assessment as well as at theapproaches applied, however, makes it obvious that some questions remain unresolved and that several new challenges have emerged. This article has made use of a valuable study at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ which analyzes the relevance of the MA for Germany (see Beck et al. 2006). In this study, we became aware of the methodological gains connected with the MA approach as well as of the impulses this approach gives to multi-level environmental governance. Nevertheless, in their present form, the policy options discussed within theMA do not acknowledge that the societal externalization or “misplacement” of environmental effects is a specific “beyond-the-border” or “trans-local” environmental problem of particular importance to industrialized countries. The term “misplacement” addresses the impacts on ecosystem services in other parts of the world while providing human well-being for a particular society in a specific region or nation-state. Thus, the term emphasizes the relevance of cross-scale interactions and the power relations involved for governance strategies at the regional and/or local level. To fully grasp these cross-scale interactions, it is necessary to analyze how socio-spatial dimensions are produced by social processes, rather than dealing with them simply as givens. In the conclusion, we will discuss the degree to which the misplacement of environmental threats is due to power relations within and between different social scales and its impact on the local level.