Politics of Scale: Decentralization and Centralization of Oil Exploitation Right in Northern Shaanxi, China

Background: The impact of oil exploitation on local economy is often subject to the national resource management system. Monopolistic vertical resource management often makes local struggle ineffective. However, there is a successful local oil economy in China. This paper focuses on the formation of a special oil economy and reallocation of resources, power, and capital in Northern Shaanxi, China. This is a typical case of competing interests across multiple scales. It presents a typical case of the reconfiguration of resources, power, and capital at multiple scales.Methods: We introduce the ‘politics of scale’ to analyze the decentralization & centralization of oil exploitation rights, and the game among the government, state-owned enterprises, private enterprises and residents.Results: There are three findings. First, driven by fiscal interests, governments as the actual owners of the state capital, were directly involved in the politics of scale. Second, the interest conflicts among local state-owned enterprises, local governments were concealed owing to the strict administrative hierarchy and authority of the power, and they became a unified whole of interests and won the battle for oil resources with the central state-owned enterprises. Third, governments’ behavior strategies were simple and crude in scaling-down, mainly by hierarchical control and administrative orders. Private capital's behaviors were more diversified in scaling-up, but were completely suppressed and eliminated by the government agencies.Conclusions: We argue that politics of scale is an effective framework to explain multi-scale regulation, and is also a strategy of power competition among all practice parties.

“This Mine is for the Entire Casamance Coastline”: The Politics of Scale and the Future of the Extractive Frontier in Casamance, Senegal

As evidenced by the widespread controversy surrounding an otherwise small-scale mining investment pending in Casamance, Senegal, uncertainty shapes the extension of the extractive frontier. Fent argues that amid this uncertainty, different actors are able to politicize or depoliticize extractive investments through the work of scaling. Opponents cast the project as part of larger-scale, longer-term extraction, linking it with regional narratives. By contrast, state and corporate actors depoliticized the mine by emphasizing its limited extent and downscaling conflict to the local level. This demonstrates the conflictual processes through which extractive frontiers are realized—and resisted—through both space and time.

The globalization of Just Transition in the world of labour: politics of scale and scope

Just Transition has become the major expression of labour environmentalism at the global level and global union organizations have played a central role. My goal in this article is to provide an analytically informed account of this trajectory. The first part of this contribution, therefore, clarifies the analytical scheme. In the second and main part I will use this analytical scheme to trace the role of global unions in the globalization of just transition within global labour. In particular I will argue that the globalization of just transition within the world of labour remains a work in progress while it reflects both North-South and sectoral dynamics. I close by commenting on the causes behind these findings and the prospects and challenges of broadening just transition.