摘要：Any present day approach of the world's most pressing environmental problems involvesboth scale and governance issues. After all, current local events might have long-term global consequences(the scale issue) and solving complex environmental problems requires policy makers to think and governbeyond generally used time-space scales (the governance issue). To an increasing extent, the variousscientists in these fields have used concepts like social-ecological systems, hierarchies, scales and levelsto understand and explain the "complex cross-scale dynamics" of issues like climate change. A large partof this work manifests a realist paradigm: the scales and levels, either in ecological processes or ingovernance systems, are considered as "real". However, various scholars question this position and claimthat scales and levels are continuously (re)constructed in the interfaces of science, society, politics andnature. Some of these critics even prefer to adopt a non-scalar approach, doing away with notions such ashierarchy, scale and level. Here we take another route, however. We try to overcome the realist-constructionist dualism by advocating a dialogue between them on the basis of exchanging and reflectingon different knowledge claims in transdisciplinary arenas. We describe two important developments, onein the ecological scaling literature and the other in the governance literature, which we consider to providea basis for such a dialogue. We will argue that scale issues, governance practices as well as their mutualinterdependencies should be considered as human constructs, although dialectically related to nature'smateriality, and therefore as contested processes, requiring intensive and continuous dialogue andcooperation among natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers and citizens alike. They also requirecritical reflection on scientists' roles and on academic practices in general. Acknowledging knowledgeclaims provides a common ground and point of departure for such cooperation, something we think is notyet sufficiently happening, but which is essential in addressing today's environmental problems
