THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCALE AND EUROPEAN GOVERNANCE1

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces some concepts for analysing scalar aspects of governance, governance failure, and meta‐governance. There is now a significant corpus of work on multi‐level governance in the European Union as well as an enormous literature on various modes of governance. Although the problem of scale is often posed directly for the EU case (notably in terms of the ‘multi‐level’ character of its political regime), scalar issues are also important for all forms of governance. For effective governance must take account of the specific spatio‐temporalities of its objects and mechanisms as well as the spatio‐temporal location and horizons of action of the subjects involved in its exercise. In particular, among their other relational properties, the objects of governance are more or less embedded in space, place, and scale and linked to distinctive temporal relations and emergent temporalities. This indicates the relevance of a strategic‐relational concern with space, place and scale, with spatial, local and scalar imaginaries, and with attempts to secure spatio‐temporal fixes to facilitate the reproduction of objects of governance. Given space constraints, I focus here on two sets of issues: (i) theoretically, the role of scale, scalar divisions of labour, the relativisation of scale, and multi‐scalar governance; and (ii) substantively, the now paradigmatic case of the European Union as a novel form of multi‐scalar meta‐governance.