Contested terrains: Politics of scale, the national state and struggles for the control over nature

The scale debate has significantly enhanced our understanding of the spatial dimensions of the transformations of statehood. Its crucial merit lies in a process-based understanding of scale which helps to overcome the limitations of more static concepts like multi-level governance. More recently, the usefulness of the scale concept, as well as the relationship between scale and other spatial categories, has been increasingly discussed. This paper aims to contribute to these discussions from the perspective of a materialist state theory. The paper's argument is that the scale concept needs further clarification with respect to its understanding of hegemony, the national state and societal relations with nature. It elaborates this argument by analyzing the rescaling of the protection of intellectual property rights on genetic resources, with particular reference to the WTO-TRIPs Agreement. The paper concludes by stating that the production of new spatial scales of the state can be an important element in the reorganization of control over nature. However, the strong structural selectivities in favor of dominant social and political forces which characterize international state apparatuses negatively affect their hegemonic capacity. Thus, the role of national states in the regulation of contradictory social forces remains crucial and may even be strengthened by processes of rescaling.