Geoscience Reference
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time work on environmental governance is positively evangelical in its contention
that governance is all about scale: recognition of the complex spatialities of envi-
ronmental degradation and ecological interdependence, in other words, create the
analytical and policy space that 'environmental governance' has come to fi ll. Long
a core concern for geographers, the understanding of governance as a problematic
of re-scaling is now found across a broad swathe of social science research on envi-
ronmental governance.
Understood as a problematic of geographical scale, research on environmental
governance expresses the broader 'spatial turn' within the social sciences. A distinc-
tion can be made, however, between research in which processes of re-scaling are
the things to be explained (and where scalar outcomes are uncertain), and work in
which different scales of governance are already assumed and governance jumps
one or more notches in the scale hierarchy. The distinction here is between a proces-
sual understanding of scale as a produced outcome of political-economic activity,
and Cartesian understandings of scale as a nested hierarchy describing different
levels of territorial extensiveness (Bulkeley, 2005, p. 877). Much of the applied
environmental management literature on governance, for example, adopts a proces-
sual view of scale as the outcome of deliberation and social decision, but looks to
natural systems - watersheds, river catchments - for guidance on the geographical
scale of governance regimes in order to avoid what it sees as 'the costs of dysfunc-
tional environmental management caused by inappropriate jurisdictional boundar-
ies' (Brunckhorst and Reeve, 2006, p. 147). This approach is also found in the
normative literature on bioregionalism, with its conscious effort to re-imagine scales
and spaces of governance in ways quite different to those of conventional political
units.
Governance as commodity chain co-ordination
A core strand of research on governance concerns the coordination of exchanges
within and between fi rms and the relative distribution of power among competing
actors (e.g., between producers and consumers) along a production chain. A sub-
stantial literature within economic geography, for example, describes the organisa-
tion of production chains (also known as fi lières ) and distinguishes between two
ideal types of governance: hierarchy (where exchanges are internalised with a fi rm)
and markets (where exchanges occur by contracts between fi rms) (see Lewis et al.,
2002, Coe et al., 2004). Governance in this work describes 'patterns of authority
and power relations which structure the parameters under which actors operate,
including what is produced, how and when it is produced, how much is produced
and at what price' (Humphrey and Schmitz, 2001; Taylor, 2005a, p. 130). Despite
an extensive body of work on manufacturing and agro-food commodity chains that
examines the implications of different forms of governance for regional develop-
ment, industrial upgrading and labour practices (e.g., Gereffi et al., 2005, Ponte and
Gibbon, 2005), the environmental implications of these relations of governance
along commodity chains and across production networks have only recently begun
to be investigated. Work on fair trade commodities, confl ict diamonds, and forestry
certifi cation, for example, demonstrates the analytical possibilities of thinking about
environmental governance along the structure of commodity chains (Cashore et al.,
2004; Taylor, 2005a; 2005b). This work draws attention to the ways in which the
structure of the production network infl uences how consumer demands translate
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