Playing the scales: The story of the Pelješac LEADER initiative

This study contributes to the literature on resistance movements by describing the strategic action local actors engage in across spatial scales when faced with hegemonic processes. Through an innovative longitudinal approach, this study examines how local actors organized against a new, state-imposed, and EU-framed regulation that threatened local forms of livelihood on the Croatian peninsula of Pelješac. Based on lived experience and multiple data sources, the study finds that appropriation of dominant organizational logic allows the local actors to play the scales, i.e., accomplish the trans-scalar protection of the local scale through time. They do so by constructing a (1) translocal alliance that will grab different elements from different scales to build a (2) trans-scalar strategy which becomes central to the evolution of spatial scales. The findings suggest that the capacity to play the scales derives from how the dominant organizational logic is repurposed. This implies that local actors protect their political scale from broader hegemonic diffusion by appropriating dominant organizational logic to their own advantage.