Scalar Strategies in Climate-Change Politics: Debating the Environmental Consequences of a Natural Gas Project

Abstract

In this paper I argue that environmental policy research could benefit from developing an understanding of how the concepts of ‘scale’, ‘scalar strategies’, and ‘struggles over scale’ play out empirically in processes of environmental policymaking and planning. I emphasise how scale, as an issue in environmental governance, is not merely an independent variable causing specific outcomes; rather, it is negotiable, allowing actors to adopt different strategies in order to pursue their varying agendas. I show how a local struggle can be represented as a global struggle: a case study concerning the domestic use of natural gas in the Norwegian city of Stavanger, and how this metamorphosed into a struggle about what was the appropriate geographical scale at which the environmental and climatic consequences of a natural gas project should be assessed, is described. By framing climate change as a global issue, local actors were able to portray the natural gas project as environmentally friendly. I argue that the realisation of this natural gas project should be seen in light of how strategies over scale—which were developed in the debate—fitted with climate discourses institutionalised in national policy and politics.