______________________ _____________________________ Scale, Sovereignty, and Strategy in Environmental Governance James McCarthy Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA; jpm23@psu.edu Close examination of the scalar politics of environmental organizations engaged in contesting the terms of neoliberal globalization highlights four limitations of current theorizations of scale in radical geography. First, this body of work has paid little attention to environmental NGOs and movements as important actors in scalar politics. This is not only an empirical gap, but a theoretical one: taking environmental actors and issues into account requires rethinking the ontologies and dynamics in scale theory. Second, recent attention to social reproduction in scale debates must be extended to the reproduction of environmental conditions. Third, sharp analytical distinctions between scalar structuration and the production of nature are untenable and reproduce a culture/nature dualism. Fourth, sharp distinctions between politics within or about established scales, versus politics among scales, are unstable and miss the precise strategies pursued in some politics of scale. These arguments are illustrated and explored via case material drawn from current struggles over efforts to define environmental governance as a form of regulatory expropriation in international trade agreements. Introduction Writing in the New Left Review on the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Michael Hardt (2002) suggests that ‘‘anti-globalization’’ acti- vists there articulated and chose between two strategies: defending national sovereignty on the one hand, and working for democratiza- tion of international institutions on the other. Further, he argues with evident dismay that the official representatives of political parties and centralized campaigns at Porto Alegre overwhelmingly inclined towards the former, more conservative option, while the headless ‘‘multitude’’—the grassroots members of parties and organizations, horizontal networks of movements without designated leaders, and so on—favored the latter, more radical strategy. Hardt’s overall argu- ment purports to be an attempt to move beyond such formulations: he argues that any, ‘‘ideological confrontation between the two positions’’ was impossible and probably irrelevant, because, ‘‘[p]olitical struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way’’ (2002:116, 117). Yet, while he claims to see this binary formulation as outdated, his discussion of the two alternatives strongly reinstanti- ates it, by defining each side of the binary anew and then privileging one strategy and set of associated actors over the other. I argue here Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA