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recognised environmental dilemmas' for example, refl ects a managerial rather than
analytical approach to governance that obscures the politics of defi nition (Davidson
and Fickel, 2004). The
politics
of environmental governance, then, is a critical ques-
tion to be brought to the fore. It is a question that may be highlighted by asking
simply governance of what, by whom, and to what end?
In seeking a better grip on it, we unpack in the next section some of the compet-
ing claims that become loaded onto the concept of 'environmental governance'.
Divergences in meaning originate from two sources: differences in the underlying
'problematic' or object of governance (i.e., the relations being governed); and dif-
ferent stances towards the function of knowledge-production (critical knowledge
vs. instrumental knowledge). It is important to keep these two axes of difference
separate, as the contested concepts at the heart of governance involve not only
epistemological questions about the role of academic knowledge and practice but
also more fundamental, ontological questions about the composition of society. For
heuristic purposes we can identify a matrix bounded by a horizontal axis (along
which we have arranged six different problematics) and a vertical axis (describing
two different stances towards the function of knowledge). This produces the 6
2
matrix in fi gure 28.1. A key distinction, we suggest, is between approaches derived
from political economy that understand governance as an
immanent
process rooted
in the social relations of production (in its broadest sense); and those derived from
realist approaches to international relations and development studies that approach
governance as an
intentional
process - i.e., an active intervention to secure a par-
ticular outcome (cf. Hart, 2001, Cowen and Shenton, 1996). By borrowing this
distinction from critical approaches to development, we can see not only how dis-
courses of environmental governance describe signifi cant shifts in the spatial, admin-
istrative and political relations of governing nature, but also how proposals for
fi xing various 'environmental' crises produce particular forms of social order. Envi-
ronmental governance, then, is about
both
the social organisation of decision
making with respect to the environment,
and
the production of social order via the
administration of nature.
×
Governance as a problematic of scale
For many researchers the core problematic which environmental governance
addresses is the de- and re-constitution of scalar relations. A range of environmental
phenomena suggest the contemporary period is marked by a radical reworking of
geographical scale: city and provincial governments seizing the initiative from
national states in crafting 'global' initiatives around fair-trade and climate change
(Bulkeley, 2001); the pervasiveness of transboundary material fl ows associated with
pollution and the movement of hazardous and municipal wastes (Spaargaren et al.,
2006); efforts to craft new regulatory structures for various 'global' natures (oceans,
Antarctica, genetic diversity) that are outside interstate systems of regulation (Stein-
berg 2001). In considering how work on environmental governance addresses scale,
however, we fi nd a paradox. A key attribute of the concept of governance is that
it is scale-free: like a number of other foundational geographical terms (e.g., 'eco-
system' or 'watershed'), governance may be used in reference to a rich range of
spatial imaginaries from global climate and oceans to local species and neighbor-
hoods. The concept of governance, then, is inherently agnostic when it comes to
the question of an absolute scale at which governance is achieved. But at the same
