摘要：Policies have many unforeseen impacts on social-ecological systems at different levels ofspatial and temporal scales. Partly because of this, both scale and governance have been and continue tobe hotly debated and studied topics within many scientific disciplines. Although there are two distinctvocabularies, both communities seem to be struggling to come to terms with a shift that has commonelements. This special feature has two types of contributions, three scoping papers, providing a state-of-the-art overview of the conceptual discussion, and six case study papers that set out to deal with thepracticalities of combining scale and governance. The scoping papers strongly indicate that using the notionof complex systems, specifically the social-ecological system, is needed to improve the understanding ofscale and governance. They furthermore confirm that both communities are shifting. Additionally, thepapers show several promising ways forward to link scale and governance, even though they differ in theirsuggestions on most important courses of action and research agendas. The case study papers show thatconceptual advances have not been taken up to their full extent in practice. Importantly, none of the papersis being very specific on the definition of the term governance. Additionally, most attention is given tospatial, temporal, and jurisdictional scales, largely ignoring, for example, network and knowledge scales.What is urgently needed are more case study papers that explicitly make use of the conceptual literatureand through that attempt to link scale and governance. Ultimately, there is a challenge to more effectivelyinclude nonscientists in the debate. A transdisciplinary arena is required where the concepts of scale andgovernance are framed such that a broad variety of stakeholders can join the debate and/or the decisionmaking process
