摘要：One of the main unresolved problems in policy making is the step from scale issues toeffective governance. What is appropriate for a lower level, such as a region or location, might be consideredundesirable at a global scale. Linking scaling to governance is an important issue for the improvement ofcurrent environmental management and policies. Whereas social–ecological science tends to focus onadaptive behavior and aspects of spatial ecological data, new institutional economics focuses more onlevels in institutional scales and temporal dimensions. Consequently, both disciplines perceive differentscaling challenges while aiming at a similar improvement of effective governance. We propose that futureresearch needs to focus on four themes: (1) How to combine spatial properties such as extent and grainwith the economic units of market and agent; (2) How to combine the different governance instrumentsproposed by both perspectives; (3) How to communicate the different scaling perspectives (hierarchy vs.no hierarchy) and meanings to policy makers and other stakeholders; and (4) How to deal with the non-equilibrium conditions in the real world and the disciplinary perspectives. Here, we hypothesize that acombined system perspective of both disciplines will improve our understanding of the missing link betweenscaling and governance
关键词：combined system perspective; governance; new institutional economics; scaling; social–;ecological sciences
