Scaling responsibility: Navigating scale challenges in agricultural biosecurity

There is growing recognition that agricultural biosecurity requires broadening of responsibility beyond governments. In Australia, this has led to the implementation of a shared responsibility approach that disperses biosecurity activity across public and private actors. Drawing on a qualitative study of 89 participants, we investigate scale challenges that emerged from participant reports of working within a shared responsibility framework and introduce the concept of scale work to reflect the strategies actors developed to navigate these challenges. In doing so, we address two questions: What scale challenges are constructed by participants engaging in biosecurity work within a shared responsibility framework? What forms of scale work do biosecurity actors engage in to negotiate these challenges? Participants identified jurisdictional and role scale challenges as arising from conflicting regulatory frameworks and ambiguities surrounding roles and responsibilities, both of which have the potential to undermine shared biosecurity efforts. Rather than viewing these tensions as evidence of policy failure, we argue that they are a natural consequence of multi-actor governance arrangements that actors negotiate through scale work such as workarounds and coalition building. These examples reflect two forms of scale work: adaptive scale work to align conflicting regulatory frameworks, and integrative scale work to align actors across scales to facilitate collaborative approaches to biosecurity. In examining scale work, we argue that the shared responsibility approach to biosecurity in Australia is sustained through trust-based relational practices and rendered workable through actors' continual efforts to negotiate the scale challenges that arise within such governance arrangements.