尺度政治理论产生于生产方式的变革与全球化的深入发展、新自由主义的兴起与治理方式的转型以及西方人文地理学的尺度转向等实践和理论背景中。其研究经历了由重点关注尺度的政治建构到重点关注行动者的话语和实践的转变。以此为基础,从结构-行为-行动者视角可以总结出尺度政治研究的三个方向:作为政治过程的尺度结构转变、跨尺度的政治行为与策略以及跨尺度的政治行动者联系网络。随后,本文回顾了当前研究中的三个案例以进一步阐明尺度政治理论的实践应用以及上述三个方向之间的区别与联系。最后,基于国内语境,本文从理论和实证两方面出发初步探讨了国内下一步研究应重点关注的问题。

With the transformation of mode of production and further development of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism and the reform of governance, as well as the "scalar turn" of human geography, politics of scale has become one of the most significant themes of scale study. As scale has been more viewed as an epistemology and "representational trope" than an ontology and social constructed entity, the focus of research on politics of scale has changed from the political construction and reconstruction of scale to the discourses and other strategies deployed by social actors in 1990s. Moreover, effort has been made to integrate different strands of research on politics of scale into a study on "scalar politics". In order to further sort out the above mentioned literature, a framework of "structure-act-actor" has been developed in this paper, which highlights the interplay between scalar structures and the political actors operating in, making use of, and reconstructing these structures or configurations. Based on the framework, three dimensions or strands of current research can be distinguished as follows:1) the political construction and transformation of scalar structures, which focuses on the relativization of scale, the construction of new state space and other rescaling processes; 2) political acts and strategies across scales, which focuses on specific strategies such as jumping scales and scale frames deployed by political actors; and 3) networks of association across scales, which focuses on relations and networks among political actors. In order to further illustrate the relationships and differences among these dimensions, and to reify the above mentioned theories of politics of scale, three case studies from current literature, which include the institutionalization of river basin management in Mongolia, the controversy over environmental justice in St. James, US, and the political initiatives and networks of Norwegian Gas Forum, are chosen and described briefly.