This article examines regional environmental governance (REG) through the lens of human geography theory on scale. Drawing on a case study of the Micronesia Challenge, a regional conservation commitment among five Pacific islands, I advance a critical theory of REG as a scaling process and tool of politics through which regions are (re)made and mobilized in support of diverse agendas. Results highlight understudied dimensions of REG, including: motivations for scaling environmental governance to regions; the co-production of regional and global environmental governance; the mutable expression of regionality within REG; and the ways in which REG is leveraged for resource mobilization, global visibility and influence, and conservation. The potential for REG to empower subaltern groups while advancing conservation is promising, and an important area for future research. The overall contribution of this article is a more complex, politicized understanding of REG that complicates a scholarly search for its inherent characteristics.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) continues to promote marine protected areas (MPAs) as a preferred tool for marine biodiversity conservation, in spite of concerns over their effectiveness and equity. However, explanations for this consensus on the utility of MPAs focus primarily on their measurability and ignore the ways in which they are conceptualized through ongoing governance processes. Drawing on the results of collaborative event ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the CBD, this paper adopts the concepts of boundary objects and scalar narratives to analyze the ways in which consensus on MPAs is produced, in spite of conflicting understandings of MPA forms and functions. Both a local narrative of participatory MPAs and a global narrative of science driven high seas conservation articulate a regional scale as ideal for MPA governance, although with different priorities. Ultimately, consensus at the CBD is enabled only by accommodating competing visions of MPAs.