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Abstract:
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"The explorative paper in hand looks at the re-configuration of social-ecological systems. It is to provide ideas for the evaluation and explanation of the role of spatial scale in changing social ecological configurations and the processes and factors that socially construct spatial scales of jurisdictions. When we talk about institutional rescaling of social-ecological systems we mean institutional change along spatial scales. However, as institutions themselves do not have a spatial scale we rather look at the way they are re-scaled across spatially defined jurisdictions. The paper has a twofold aim: a) to propose factors that potentially explain institutional rescaling, i.e. the change of spatial level with which institutions are associated, including the social construction of scale. That way the paper aims b) to propose a pathway to evaluate hypotheses on institutional change along scale (re-scaling) derived from the literature, from theory and an illustrative case. The paper is inspired by the positive interest in the social construction of spatial scale that geographers hold. We aim at enhancing their understanding through adding new perspectives on social change derived from theories of institutional change. However in the limited scope of this paper we can do no more than opening up the discussion and developing first steps towards the realisation of the outlined agenda. The paper develops the argument as follows. First, different understandings of scale and rescaling that geographers, ecologists, ecological economists, neoclassical economists and institutional economists associated with social-ecological research approaches hold are presented and evaluated. Second, a framework for analysing socialecological interactions is introduced. Third, the spatial scale dimension of different categories proposed for analysing social-ecological interactions and the role of the spatial level of analysis is evaluated. Fourth, aspects of social-ecological re-scaling are evaluated for an illustrative case concerning the reconfiguration of water
management in the Algarve, Portugal. Fifth, a set of categories for comparing theories of institutional change are developed. Finally, a research agenda is developed whose aim it is to develop a theory of institutional re-scaling in an iterative fashion."
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