ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to produce a critical mapping of analytical frameworks using multiscale analysis. It examines the economists, is organized around an agent-based model and its reframing in the common pool resource analysis. The chapter explores the analysis of the institutional design of efficient organizations and resource regimes for natural resources and the environment based on political sociology and international relations perspectives. It presents the question of knowledge and was one of the main outputs of the broad social science perspective of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The chapter concerns the politics of scale developed by critical geography. All approaches have cross-references but no single approach fits with the multiple scale issue. The chapter presents a necessary practical method and a huge epistemological problem. The scalar issue is also a major epistemological/methodological issue in the social sciences. The social sciences, including economics, have been shaken by these new issues and by the new cognitive arrangements arising from global environmental questions.
