'Glocal' politics of scale on environmental issues: Climate change, water and forests

The lack of objective ability to define the level of a problem leads to the politics of scale. A multidisciplinary, glocal approach helps scholars and policymakers to transcend such territorial traps and understand how scale is used as a political tool by social actors. This chapter explains how a scale is constructed in different issue areas. It also explains the affect of this construction on governance at multiple levels of governance. The chapter updates that theoretical framework based on iterative applications of the existing framework to case studies and subsequent revisions of the theoretical framework. This framework identifies four types of motivation that lead countries and social actors to scale an issue up or down in relation to the administrative scale. This framework is then applied to three case studies (water, forests, and climate change). The chapter compares and contrasts how the politics of scale play out in each area.