China and the environment: The question of scale

Abstract

This introduction analyzes the question of scale in relationships between China and the environment. Scholars across fields have long debated the role of scale, revealing how different scales—from political-economic systems to global processes—shape environmental change. China, with its vast size and global significance, provides a crucial case for investigating these dynamics and relations. First, dominant environmental narratives are interrogated, revealing contradictions between China's historical environmental legacies and its capacity for long-term ecological resilience as it becomes further incorporated within global capitalism. Following this, it introduces the contributions to this “Special Issue on China and the Environment” through the multiple lenses of scale, drawing on insights from environmental sociology, geography, and ecology. Environmental-sociological formulations of scale foreground micro, meso, and macro scales that correspond with different actors, processes, and relations. Overlapping with this understanding, geography and ecology see scale in terms of size, level, and relation and as situated in space and time. This introduction analyzes scale as both a critical framework for understanding China and the environment and as a method for circumventing contradictions embedded in common narratives of China and the environment. These include historical narratives that posit either degradation or resilience, as well as narratives that emphasize China's particularism or challenge Chinese exceptionalism. We argue for a politics of scale as a method for analyzing China's relationship with the environment. In this, we call for explicit attention to the multi-scalar processes and relations across space and time, which can account for historical context, uneven power dynamics, and socio-ecological relations.

Introducing scale in China's human–environment relations

Where and when do relationships between China and the environment begin? When and where do they end? How can they be bound spatially and temporally? The question of scale animates this introduction, as well as the articles that follow in this special issue.

There are multiple ways to understand and engage with scale. ¹ This is evident from human–environment scholarship, which has long engaged with questions of scale (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Brad, 2016; Bulkeley, 2005; Castree, 2024; Dietz et al., 2020; Neumann, 2008; Legun et al., 2020; Lockie, 2015; Sayre, 2005; Swyngedouw, 1996, 2004, 2010; Swyngedouw and Cox, 1997). Engagements with scale cross disciplines, including human geography, political science, and environmental sociology, among others. Influential works in critical land-use research brought attention to the role of power and institutions in structuring such relationships (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Swyngedouw, 1996, 2010; Swyngedouw and Cox, 1997). Emphasizing a spatial understanding, Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) examine the role of uneven resource access and multiple causes of land degradation beyond the local scale by incorporating regional, national, and global scales. Swyngedouw (1996) offers insights into political and spatial re-scaling through “glocal” elite coalitions. Employed as a verb, “scaling” has been conceptualized in relation to new forms of authoritarian governance. More recent explorations in the tradition of critical land-use research consider scale in terms of geographical magnitude, such as in the ways land grabs occurring under the guise of sustainability transitions are mediated by actors across various scales (Inan and Albulut, 2022; Klingler et al., 2024). Further recent interventions criticize the narrow focus on spatial and place-based scales, emphasizing the need to investigate higher-scaled geographies related to market access and control (Ribot, 2025).

Indeed, questions of power and uneven positionality run through analyses of scale, as do questions of environmental change. Recent works demonstrate how attention to scale allows for a nuanced understanding of complexity that undergirds global environmental change. For instance, scholars have critically engaged with mismatches between local and global approaches to addressing socio-ecological problems (Folke, 2007; Friis et al., 2023; Newig and Moss, 2017). Through studying scale, the hope is to better manage complex and rapidly changing socio-ecological problems. In this vein, scale is thought of in a solutions mode. We draw attention to these different perspectives and, in line with Castree (2024), emphasize the convening power of scale to foster dialogue across disciplines and an integrated understanding of a multidimensional climate-changed world.

China is a particularly important case through which to consider scale, not just given the size and heterogenous characteristics of the country and its roles in global environmental change and geopolitics, but also regarding its prominent environmental history (Bao, 2004; Wang, 2023). Historical works tend to focus on the historical evolution of human–environment interactions in China (Fan, 2023; Fang et al., 2024; Huang and Su, 2009; Xiao et al., 2015; van Ess, 2022). Implicit in this is a spatiotemporal understanding of long-term ecological dynamics and social change. While many offer insights into early state formation, ecology, and socio-environmental resilience, political dimensions and their relation to scale are underemphasized. The focus on ancient and traditional environmental histories often comes at the expense of studying contemporary environmental, political, and social concerns (Bao, 2004). Studies on contemporary environmental governance in China tend to focus on the top-down nature of the political system (Li and Shapiro, 2020), while others emphasize the role of civil society (Mertha, 2010). Less common in scholarship on China and the environment, however, is an explicit engagement with scale.

This introduction explores this question and contends that centering scale should be the hallmark of research on China and the environment. In what follows, we briefly introduce dominant narratives in the field of China and the environment, as well as some of their key contradictions. We then turn to different perspectives on scale from environmental sociology, geography, and ecology to analyze how they can attend to and move beyond these contradictions in the field by accounting for uneven power dynamics, historical context, and socio-ecological relations across geographical scales. Scale, we argue, can help us to make sense of these contradictions and open up novel directions for future research on China and the environment. More specifically, we contend that scale is both a critical framework for understanding environmental governance in China and globally, as well as a method for circumventing contradictions embedded in common narratives about China and the environment. These narratives include histories that posit either degradation or resilience, as well as contradictory narratives that suggest either Chinese particularism or conversely challenge Chinese exceptionalism. Our analyses highlight the contributions in this special issue, pinpointing how these articles attend to scalar dynamics and relations.

China and the environment: Predominant narratives and their contradictions

Scholarship on China and the environment tends to reflect one of three types of narratives. One type focuses on historical aspects of human–environment relations. These narratives often emphasize either the detrimental environmental effects of Chinese social and political systems or, conversely, the resilience of such systems. The second type analyzes relationships between the Chinese state and environmental governance, often emphasizing its authoritarian nature, which is seen as a marker of difference from Western political systems. The third type emphasizes material relations rather than political systems, and brings attention to commonalities and comparison between China and the rest of the world. While categorization inevitably risks oversimplification, and these modes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, these types reflect the predominant narrative threads in scholarship on China and the environment. Our analyses of these dominant narratives highlight some of the contradictions across these narratives.

Historical perspectives: Environmental degradation or enduring resilience?

A key tension in historical scholarship on China and the environment is an emphasis on environmental degradation or, conversely, resilience. Environmental degradation narratives tend to focus on China's historical and political transitions and their effects on environmental change. These include works on premodern China to the present. A common theme is how state interventions degrade the environment. As Lander (2021) argues, the birth of Chinese civilization corresponded with the replacement of a biodiverse landscape with a monocrop agricultural landscape. A sedentary agricultural system simplified taxation and undergirded the formation of China's early dynasties. The geographical expansion of the agricultural taxation system and rice agriculture, for instance, contributed to the loss of indigenous animal life, such as elephants, and corresponded with the geographical extent of dynastic territories (Elvin, 2004). Similarly, scholarship on the pre-reform period emphasizes warring with or conquering nature to advance state modernization policies (Shapiro, 2001). Economy (2011), likewise, characterizes the post-reform era as exhibiting a development-first ethos that sacrificed the environment for economic gain. These works exemplify environmental degradation narratives within the field of China and the environment.

Other historical accounts of human–environment relations in China, however, tell tales of enduring socio-ecological resilience. Aside from major ecological disruptions, this alternative line of discussion revolves around the strength of people's adaptability (Fang et al., 2024; Li et al., 2021; Shen et al., 2024). Accordingly, people were not passive victims of environmental change but rather drew on local cultural adaptations to respond (Shen et al., 2024). Fang et al. (2024) explore how imperial governments, local authorities, and communities adapted through innovations in irrigation, granary systems, disaster relief, and social policies aimed at mitigating famine risks. Shen et al. (2024) demonstrate how agricultural populations became impactful “ecosystem engineers” by culturally adapting to arid ecosystems through establishing complex agricultural systems based on traditional knowledge. Li et al. (2021), for instance, study the evolution of roof design in traditional northern Chinese architecture in response to extreme snow events over the past millennium. Their study portrays Chinese people's adaptation to environmental change as “intelligent long-term adaptive behavior” (Li et al., 2021: 5).

Another mode of resilience studies explores how significant ecological stress and climatic patterns correlate with societal and political changes. Some of these works examine how environmental change led to the weakening and fall of dynasties from Zhou (1046–256 BCE) to Tang (618 to 907 CE), and from Ming (1368 to 1644 CE) to Qing (1644 to 1912 CE) (Fan, 2023; Huang and Su, 2009; van Ess, 2022; Xiao et al., 2015). They offer longue durée analyses of interactions between society and nature and show how social and political practices have evolved throughout time. Whereas most of these works tend to leave the political untouched, they intersect with discourses around tianxia (“All under Heaven”) and tianming (the “Mandate of Heaven”), which speak to how the emperor's political legitimacy could be strengthened or lost depending on how major natural hazard events were dealt with (see Kim, 2024; Shapiro, 2001). Other works, in this vein, debate the role of water management for political legitimacy and state formation (Muscolino, 2014; Pietz and Giordano, 2009; Zhang, 2016).

Chinese particularism: State power, environmental governance, and authoritarian environmentalism

A second type of narrative in scholarship on China and the environment tends to focus on relationships between the environment and the state, often suggesting some form of Chinese particularism characterized by how the state approaches environmental problems. Emblematic of this work are debates around authoritarian environmentalism (AE), which consider whether autocratic governance structures may enable more decisive and consistent environmental action or hasten the green transition (Beeson, 2010; Eaton and Kostka, 2014; Gilley, 2012; for a recent critical review of AE see Eaton and Kostka (2024); Li and Shapiro, 2020; Li and Zinda, 2023; Lo, 2021; Shen and Jiang, 2020). Some argue that AE may be more efficient when it comes to rapid production of domestic policies through centralized control, despite challenges with policy implementation (Beeson, 2010; Gilley, 2012). This body of research also discusses central features of the Chinese political system, such as party-led decision making, top-down policy formulation, limited public participation, and decreasing policy experimentation (Eaton and Kostka, 2014; Gilley, 2012; Zhang and Zhao, 2026). Other angles emphasize social and procedural injustices as well as the limits of non-participatory approaches to environmental governance (Li and Shapiro, 2020; Lo, 2021).

In a related but distinct vein, scholars have examined relationships between ecology and power, particularly through science, technology, and planning interventions aimed at green urbanization. Rodenbiker (2023a), for instance, demonstrates how eco-developmental logics and techniques have become central to expressions and constitutions of state power. Rather than portraying a modernist state whose power derives from state simplifications of nature, as Scott (1998) posits, Rodenbiker argues that frontiers of local state formation are produced through attempts to mechanize nature and optimize socio-spatial relations. This occurs through practices like urban-rural coordinated planning and ecological protection zoning. Urban modeling is crucial in this regard as it portrays socio-spatial optimization as achievable through planning models and necessary for a sustainable future (Hoffman, 2011). In an attempt to create a society organized around circular ecologies and economies, the state has introduced systematic waste recycling programs to convert trash into resources (Zhang, 2024). The rapid metabolic rate of China's urbanization, however, brings rural-to-urban migrants into cities to organize around the scrap trade, where they turn garbage into tradable commodities (Liebman, 2023). These works focus on relationships between state power and nature, with attention to socio-ecological relations between different actors.

Studies of AE, however, tend to overlook the heterogeneity of actors within the state apparatus—a lacuna that research on authoritarian fragmentation aims to fill (Gong, 2025; Kostka, 2016; Lo, 2015; Tomba, 2014; Teets and Hurst, 2014). The discourse on state heterogeneity offers insights into the political space local governments have to act on behalf of local interests. Some of these works also pay greater attention to central–local relations, potential weaknesses of top-down governmental approaches, and the role local actors play in maneuvering between central state requirements and local needs (Ahlers et al., 2015; Eaton and Kostka, 2014; Gilley, 2012; Kostka, 2016; Kostka and Mol, 2013; Kostka and Nahm, 2017; Li, 2010). Recent works hint at the dual tendencies of (re)centralizing and decentralizing environmental institutions in China, calling for an updated understanding of AE and a more balanced account of China's green transformation (Xiang and Lo, 2025; Zhang and Zhao, 2026).

Challenging Chinese exceptionalism: Global capitalist expansion

A third narrative within scholarship on China and the environment emphasizes material relations, as well as commonalities across regional contexts. Rather than focusing on China's autocratic political system, interventions in this realm posit that China's relationship to the environment is not peculiar. Nor does it differ fundamentally from the experience of other industrializing countries. In this vein, Harrell (2023: 78–89) provides an ecosystemic periodization of modern Chinese history according to adaptive cycles wherein periods of extensive exploitation give way to conservation and an eventual reorganization of social-ecological relationships. This entails transitioning from a release of social-ecological forces to a phase of slow growth, high potential, and social reorganization, to a phase of steady growth and developmentalism, and eventually to a phase of conservation and eco-developmentalism, not unlike those of other industrializing countries. Deemphasizing Chinese exceptionalism, Zee (2022) illustrates how attempts to control the weather through sand fixation infrastructures produce techno-managerial assemblages that shape the spatial trajectories of sand particulates across continents. Here the emphasis is on material relations across geographical spaces. Material relations are also at the center of comparative works that explore how concrete social and economic relationships that arise around the production, distribution, and access to basic material goods (e.g. food, land, and resources) impact vulnerability to climate change (Teebken, 2022, 2024a, 2024b), as well as cultural politics of biodiversity loss (Zhu, 2022). By studying different political systems, and how political economy reproduces uneven vulnerability to climate change, it becomes clear that China is but one country among many striving for solutions to challenging socio-environmental problems.

Indeed, the role of China and the environment is increasingly important not only in social studies on the environment but because China's relationship with the environment increasingly bears on life everywhere else. One sense in which this is important is the environmental impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive international infrastructure investment platform with interventions in over 130 countries (Teo et al., 2019; Harlan, 2021; Rodenbiker, 2023c). Chinese investment and infrastructure construction clearly have an effect on environments beyond China's borders, as Chinese capital seeks spatial fixes abroad (Harvey, 2018). The injustices embedded in development and the externalizing of environmental (and social) costs as part of contemporary economic growth paradigms are problematized in broader socio-ecological perspectives (e.g. Brand and Wissen, 2013; Brand and Wissen, 2017; GKK, 2025; Görk et al., 2017; Keyßer et al., 2025; Schmelzer, 2016). Brand and Wissen (2017) discuss China as a “new center of capital accumulation” and situate the country within global capitalist dynamics. These authors coined the term “imperial way of living” to understand how everyday life is structured around modes of production and consumption that rely on the uneven exploitation and use of resources from elsewhere. This includes classical extractivism (e.g. fossil fuels, metals, minerals), as well as new forms of “green extractivism” within the context of green transitions (e.g. copper, lithium) (Brand and Wissen, 2013; Brand and Wissen, 2024; Riofrancos, 2025).

China is a particularly interesting case in this framing, given the legacy of imperial and colonial resource extraction by the European powers and Japan (the “old hegemons”), wherein the country was subjected to partial colonization. Conversely, scholars claim that China has become a new global center of capital accumulation that is relying on expansion and appropriation elsewhere (Brand and Wissen, 2017). Given the burgeoning middle class in emerging economies, such as China, there is growing competition around existing resources (Brand and Wissen, 2024). The growth of the Chinese middle class fuels the demand for consumer goods that often rely on resource extraction from poorer regions such as South America or Africa. Yet, China, like other countries, actively promotes the green transition, which reproduces new forms of exploitation and resource dependency.

At the same time, China is increasingly positioning itself as a leader on climate change cooperation and other international environmental issues (Harlan et al., 2025; Lewis, 2023; Qi and Dauvergne, 2022). This includes the establishment of the Chinese discourse on building a global ecological civilization (Rodenbiker, 2023a, 2023b). It also includes projects oriented toward nature-based solutions, with international cooperation projects spanning Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America (Zhu et al., 2024), as well as providing green development models for emulation by other Global South countries (Bai et al., 2021; Harlan, 2017). We contend that analyzing contradictions such as China's role in global environmental governance and global capitalism requires examining the politics of scale.

Scale as method for analyzing China and the environment: The papers in this special issue

Across the narrative modes identified above, there is rarely explicit engagement with and analysis of scale. We contend that scholarship on China and the environment can be deepened and extended by foregrounding questions of scale. More specifically, we argue that scale is both a critical heuristic for understanding China and the environment and a method for circumventing contradictions embedded in common narratives of China and the environment. These narratives include historical narratives that posit either degradation or resilience, as well as contradictory narratives that suggest either Chinese particularism or challenge exceptional characteristics, instead emphasizing cross-regional relationships embedded in capitalist development. In this special issue, we emphasize the need to integrate a politics of scale as a method for analyzing China's relationship with the environment. In this, we call for explicit attention to multi-scalar processes and relations across space and time, which can account for uneven power dynamics, historical context, and socio-ecological relations across geographical scales. This entails specificity to the operational scales of a process or relations across spatial and temporal dimensions. Delineating politics of scale can introduce greater specificity and analytical rigor to the analysis of China's relationships with the environment and further disrupt monolithic portrayals.

This special issue foregrounds scale in relation to China and the environment by centering how scale is conceptualized and used in environmental sociology, geography, and ecology. Environmental sociology focuses on the interactions between different actors and processes at micro, meso, and macro scales (Dietz et al., 2020). Geography and ecology tend to consider scale in terms of size, level, or relation across space and time (Castree, 2024; Sayre, 2005). Human geography and political ecology scholarship, furthermore, has illustrated how scale can be thought of as both an analytics and a methodology (Brad, 2016; Castree, 2024; Neumann, 2008). Rather than existing independently of human thought and action, scale is something inherent to the processes of observation and categorization (Sayre, 2005). Methodologically, scale entails attention to macro-, meso-, and micro-processes, as well as to relations that cross hierarchical positions, spaces, and temporalities. Analytical attention to spatial relations and social processes is crucial to scalar analyses in sociological and geographical inquiry (Sheppard and McMaster, 2008). Scale, therefore, is not merely a tool with analytical utility. Scale is also a method. It is inherent to methodological approaches that categorize socio-ecological relationships.

Environmental sociology perspectives on scale: Micro, meso, macro

Dietz et al. (2020) view scale across micro, meso, and macro levels from a social systems perspective. Micro-perspectives refer to individual interactions with the environment and tend to fall into two streams in sociological research: consumer behavior, such as the way consumers make choices that influence greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ecosystems, and beliefs and attitudes, such as the way citizens view environmental issues. In sociology, the micro-scale centers human motivations to action, such as by looking at different values, belief systems, and norms about climate change and the environment, including altruism, self-interest, traditionalism, openness to change, and hedonism (Dietz et al., 2020). These in turn influence when and how people change their behavior, take actions to influence policy, or become active regarding mitigation efforts and adaptation to climate change. Danning Lu and Tianshu Ran's (2026) contribution to this special issue, for instance, focuses primarily on the micro scale. They analyze individual dispositions around sustainable consumption in China's urban middle class. Research on the micro scale has moved from focusing on self and identity to concentrating on social situations for environmental action (Brewster and Puddephatt, 2020). Lu and Ran's work thus also foregrounds the meso scale as it analyzes community social norms and urban systems. In this way, the micro scale sets foundations to bridge to the meso scale.

The meso scale in environmental sociology refers to interactions between groups, organizations, and institutions. It is generally used to analyze how various organizations and networks interact with the environment and exert influence on climate change responses (Dietz et al., 2020). The meso scale is considered an intermediary between the local and the global—the space where different organizations interact. This can include different interest groups at the national level that engage in policy networks. It is also used to refer to the interaction of national governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the private sector as part of multilateral climate negotiations (Dietz et al., 2020; Di Gregorio et al., 2019). In this special issue, Mei Ai, Wenhan Feng, Christine Heinzel, Siying Chen, and Liang Emlyn Yang's (2026) contribution hones in on the meso scale, focusing on how community- and township-level governance is central to flood risk management in China.

Additionally, research in this domain has paid greater attention to supranational multi-level-governance processes, such as global–national linkages in climate change governance (Di Gregorio et al., 2019) and the interplay between Chinese domestic policies and international climate agreements, which is the subject of Passant Aboubakr and Hannes Gohli's (2026) contribution to this special issue. Given new actor constellations and hybrid organizational forms in the climate arena, this scale is becoming increasingly relevant. Examples include public–private partnerships—prevalent in the Chinese context of financing “sponge cities”—and new forms of cooperation between organized communities and the public sector, such as commons–public partnerships to reinforce important public services and promote social and environmental well-being. Yet, drawing from early land-use research (Swyngedouw, 1996), attention must also be paid to the extent to which new (elite) actor constellations result in homogenizing regional spaces, thereby undermining social cohesion.

The macro perspective refers to large-scale environmental processes and broader, systemic phenomena, such as actions that promote GHG emissions with effects that cross countries and regions (Dietz et al., 2020). These include interactions and feedbacks between different social systems. In this special issue, Aboubakr and Gohli (2026) bridge the meso- and macro-scales in their analysis of national and global scale relations in China's ratification of the Paris Agreement. In this, global scales are shown to impact policy intensity at the national scale.

Congruent with critical reflections on global capitalist expansions and China's role therein (see above), macro-scale sociological analyses provide insightful critiques of common economic thinking that tend to narrowly depict environmental costs as contained within bounded geographical areas (Sommer, 2017). For instance, macro-level perspectives highlight the disjuncture between critical political-economic perspectives on capitalism as a growth engine that harms the environment, on the one hand, and ecological modernization theories that posit capitalism can be reformed to reduce its environmental impact (Dietz et al., 2020). Delving into issues of China's emissions, Feng Hao (2026) in this special issue examines provincial-level metrics to shed light on regional patterns in emission quantities. This contributes to the ongoing debate in environmental sociology and disrupts portrayals of China as monolithic. Rather, attention to size, level, and relation are key in this analysis, which aligns with how scale is analyzed in geography and ecology. Although Hao (2026) shows how China has been successful in reducing its carbon footprint by reducing energy intensity and increasing the deployment of renewable energy technologies, the extractive nature of renewables, especially in mining, and their effects on local communities and international constellations requires critical consideration (see Deberdt et al., 2024; Zeng, 2024). Future research could concretize the extent to which China's low-carbon development, like that of other countries, coincides with resource appropriation and environmental degradation and how this can be accounted for in economic models. The global shift from fuels to minerals and “poly-crises” associated with phasing out coal underscore the need to rethink green growth models and ecological modernization paradigms embedded in classic economic theory.

Scale in geography and ecology: Size, level, and relation in space and time

Space has long been seen as the “fundamental stuff of geography” (Thrift, 2003: 95). Examining the relation between space and time within capitalism to understand environmental processes and dynamics has also become a key thread within geography (Castree, 2009; May and Thrift, 2001). Within the context of the spatial and temporal, scale in geography and ecology has generally been conceptualized in terms of size, level, and relation (Castree, 2024; Sayre, 2005). Size entails separation and categorization into standardized units (Rykiel, 1998). Size, for instance, can refer to a population size, as in the numbers of people living in a given place or that make up part of an urban or rural population. Scaling can also refer to a process of resizing, down-scaling from a forest to a tree or up-scaling, meaning to expand in size (Castree, 2024). Level can refer to hierarchical forms of organization across biophysical and social worlds and their functional relations (Allen and Starr, 2019). Level can indicate the various forms of government and governance actors that matter for a specific process or across geographical boundaries. Within this special issue, this includes actors that are formally part of the Chinese government, as well as corporations, civil society actors, and everyday citizens engaged in environmental processes. Relation can refer to the geographical linkages and interconnections that cross boundaries, levels of governance, populations, and biomes.

Each of these renderings of scale can be thought of and engaged with spatially and temporally. In human geography more specifically, common geographical scales include, in ascending spatial order, bodies, households, neighborhoods, cities, metropolitan areas, states or provinces, nation-states, international or bilateral relations, multilateral relations, continents, and the Earth (Sayre, 2005; Sheppard and McMaster, 2008). Human geographical works also invite us to consider an expanded sense of scale beyond the dimensions of space and time (Castree, 2024). In this special issue, KuoRay Mao and Yue Xu (2026) bring attention to the relational aspects of scale and spatiotemporal dimensions of China's grassland governance. They do so by analyzing how specific spatiotemporal relations and bureaucratic functions can inadvertently lead to institutional lock-ins. Furthermore, they investigate how conflicting policy objectives across levels of governance generate climate vulnerability and affect shifts in adaptive behaviors, resource allocation, and risk management among pastoral communities. In doing so, they bring attention to each of the different geographical and ecological scalar modalities. Likewise, analyzing cases of flood risks in China's southwest, Ai et al.'s (2025) contribution to this special issue reveals the importance of local environmental managers in the “before”, “during”, and “after” temporalities of floods.

Scale has likewise been discussed in the solutions space in regard to environmental governance and social power (Bulkeley, 2005; Norman et al., 2012; Swyngedouw, 1996; Swyngedouw and Cox, 1997). Swyngedouw and Cox (1997) theorize the politics of scale in relation to how power and policies are organized, contested, and reconfigured across different levels (local, regional, national, global). Aboubakar and Gohli (2025), in this special issue, analyze relational interplays between international and domestic environmental policies as an exchange between different levels of governance. Ai et al.'s (2026) study also offers insights into the dynamic nature of interactions between various actors, challenging prevailing binary constructions of state and society as opposing ends and offering much-needed insights on mixed forms of climate adaptation (both autonomous and planned adaptation). The papers included in this special issue examine how various scales come to matter in analyses of specific socio-ecological processes using sociological, geographical, and ecological scalar lenses. In doing so, they center scale in ways that provide novel directions for studying China and the environment.

Conclusion: Toward a politics of scale as method

The arguments presented here underscore the multifaceted nature of studies on China and the environment. Such studies, we contend, can be deepened and extended through greater attention to the politics of scale and (re)scaling. Scale serves as both a categorial tool and method for examining different dimensions of environmental problems and underlying social orders (Herod, 2025). In this context, sociological scales reflect upon what actors do across micro, meso, and macro levels. Analyzing them in ways congruent with geographical and ecological scales—including size, level, and relation in space and time—is instrumental to circumventing contradictions embedded in common narratives of China and the environment, including narratives that posit either degradation or resilience, as well those oriented around Chinese particularism or challenging Chinese exceptionalism. Further, a politics of scale as method can bring focus to and unpack the layers of climate risks and structural inequalities. In this, we call for explicit attention to the multi-scalar processes and relations across space and time in future research on China and the environment, which can account for uneven power dynamics, historical context, and socio-ecological relations across geographical scales.

Foregrounding the politics of scale can serve as a method for analyzing socio-ecological power dynamics embedded in relationships between China and the environment. Relations of power and inequality are not only shaped by scalar relations but also appear differently from different scalar vantage points. As such, there is ample room for engaging with the politics of scale in future research and practice. Engaging with the politics of scale, particularly through critical comparative approaches drawing on political economy and historical materialist perspectives, will further illuminate how scale is critical to understanding various dimensions of human–environment relations.