Do scale frames matter?

One of the PhD students I'm working with - Maartje van Lieshout - has just published an article on Scale Frame Mismatches in the Decision Making Process of a “Mega Farm” in a Small Dutch Village. The article is part of a special issue on Scale and Governance in the interdisciplinary open access journal Ecology and Society.

This is the abstract:

Scale issues are an increasingly important feature of complex sustainability issues, but they are mostly taken for granted in policy processes. However, the scale at which a problem is defined as well as the scale at which it should be solved are potentially contentious issues. The framing of a problem as a local, regional, or global problem is not without consequences and influences processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little is known about the ways actors frame scales and the effect of different scale frames on decision making processes. This paper addresses the questions that different scale frames actors use and what the implications of scale frames are for policy processes. It does so by analyzing the scale frames deployed by different actors on the establishment of a so-called new mixed company or mega farm and the related decision making process in a Dutch municipality. We find that actors deploy different and conflicting scale frames, leading to scale frame mismatches. We conclude that scale frame mismatches play an important role in the stagnation of the decision making process.

This is the full reference:

van Lieshout, M., A. Dewulf, N. Aarts, and C. Termeer. 2011. Do scale frames matter? Scale frame mismatches in the decision making process about a “mega farm” in a small Dutch village. Ecology and Society 16(1): 38. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss1/art38/

The pdf-version of the article can be downloaded here.