Scale limits to sustainability: Transdisciplinary evidence from three Danish cases

Scale has risen to greater prominence in the study of sustainable transitions, as efforts to understand the diffusion of innovation seeks to take account of place-specific effects. Long a contested concept in geography, a transdisciplinary account of scale focuses greater attention on ways in which conditions emerge as limits to transitions when considered vertically. This article advances such an account and demonstrates the importance of the approach through three case studies in Denmark: the municipality and island of Samsø, Copenhagen, and the Danish nation as a whole. The rise of these locales as global leaders in environmentalism obscures unsolved problems and under-emphasized caveats that in some instances appear intractable. Individually, these cases raise a number of factors representing insights from different disciplinary concerns; together, the cases suggest that scale effects impose more severe constraints and even limits on the development of sustainability transitions.