Steeped in US soil, this first global history of rangeland science looks to the origin of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American West, exploring the larger political and economic forces that - together with scientific study - produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well-being. Neither scientists nor public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy - from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities - contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates to this day. The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of these conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists. -- from back cover.

Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. Nevertheless, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice. Drawing on empirical data from the field of education governance, the book traces how scales are crafted and mobilised in policymaking practices, demonstrating that ‘scalecraft’ is key to understanding the production of hegemony.

Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. Nevertheless, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice. Drawing on empirical data from the field of education governance, the book traces how scales are crafted and mobilised in policymaking practices, demonstrating that ‘scalecraft’ is key to understanding the production of hegemony.

Critical Heritage Studies is a new and fast-growing interdisciplinary field of study seeking to explore power relations involved in the production and meaning-making of cultural heritage. Politics of Scale offers a global, multi- and interdisciplinary point of view to the scaled nature of heritage, and provides a theoretical discussion on scale as a social construct and a method in Critical Heritage Studies. The international contributors provide examples and debates from a range of diverse countries, discuss how heritage and scale interact in current processes of heritage meaning-making, and explore heritage-scale relationship as a domain of politics.

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.

Current trends towards collaborative governance aim at giving people more say in the policies that shape their lives. But one crucial question about collaborative governance that has been all but ignored is how it can, or can't, work at different scales? This book takes up that question, exploring the challenges of operating at a single scale, across multiple scales, and moving between scales. The book explores the overlooked role of scale and scaling in a wide range of policy areas, including employment policy, water management, transportation planning, public health, university governance, artistic markets, child welfare, and humanitarian relief. It presents case studies from around the world, and from the local to the global.

The social sciences are still predominantly modernist disciplines and, as such, products of the Enlightenment. Recent challenges to Enlightenment thinking thus carry with them the potential or threat to transform the social sciences radically. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences examines the nature and potential of this postmodernist challenge in each of the major social sciences. Starting with the practices of particular disciplines and proceeding to matters of shared concern, the essays provide an accessible discussion of the contemporary impact of postmodernism on social scientific thought.

We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially “ideas that work,” are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of this phenomenon, one that compares processes of policy development across two rapidly moving fields that emerged in the Global South and have quickly been adopted worldwide⎯conditional cash transfers (a social policy program that conditions payments on behavioral compliance) and participatory budgeting (a form of citizen-centric urban governance). Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore critically analyze the growing transnational connectivity between policymaking arenas and modes of policy development, assessing the implications of these developments for contemporary policymaking. Emphasizing that policy models do not simply travel intact from sites of invention to sites of emulation, they problematize fast policy as a phenomenon that is real and consequential yet prone to misrepresentation. Based on fieldwork conducted across six continents and in fifteen countries, Fast Policy is an essential resource in providing an extended theoretical discussion of policy mobility and in presenting a methodology for ethnographic research on global social policy.

Local government is the hidden leviathan of American politics: it accounts for nearly a tenth of gross domestic product, it collects nearly as much in taxes as the federal government, and its decisions have an enormous impact on Americans' daily lives. Yet political scientists have few explanations for how people vote in local elections, particularly in the smaller cities, towns, and suburbs where most Americans live. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources and case studies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of electoral politics in America's municipalities. Arguing that current explanations of voting behavior are ill suited for most local contests, Eric Oliver puts forward a new theory that highlights the crucial differences between local, state, and national democracies. Being small in size, limited in power, and largely unbiased in distributing their resources, local governments are "managerial democracies" with a distinct style of electoral politics. Instead of hinging on the partisanship, ideology, and group appeals that define national and state elections, local elections are based on the custodial performance of civic-oriented leaders and on their personal connections to voters with similarly deep community ties. Explaining not only the dynamics of local elections, Oliver's findings also upend many long-held assumptions about community power and local governance, including the importance of voter turnout and the possibilities for grassroots political change.

"Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent struggles and strategies around scale. Consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers and cultural studies scholars, this volume explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global"--