Review of The Politics of Scale: A History of Range Science by Nathan Sayre

This is a book, as the title suggests, primarily concerned with the history of range science and particularly the development of range science in the USA. That said, it has much to offer Pastoralism readers as it provides fresh insights into a number of the different concepts that underlie rangeland management and assessment globally that continue to directly affect pastoral livelihoods. The book can be characterized as a social scientific analysis of range science arguing, in general, that scientific knowledge and management institutions are co-produced within a broader politicaleconomic context. The book differs from this genre by its more sophisticated engagement with the scientific understandings and logics that underlie the development of range management. In this way, the book gives agency to individual scientists and sympathetically treats those who engaged with the complexity of rangeland systems. At the same time, it critically engages with range management science as it developed in the USA and was translated into international contexts. Sayre does this by taking political economy and institutional politics seriously. In this way, the equilibrium range science paradigm, while working as a management framework in some areas of the USA, persisted where it did not (in drier areas), despite the accumulation of the scientific evidence against it, because the paradigm provided the metrics necessary for management institutions and capital investment. Sayre, one of the foremost theorists of ‘scale’ in the discipline of geography today, invokes the phrase ‘politics of