Community initiatives are often charged with scaling-up: growing, deepening their impacts, and seeding off new projects. The desire to scale-up comes from both within the community initiatives themselves, and is also encouraged by all levels of policy, from local government, to national and international frameworks such as the IPCC. This paper adds to critiques of this agenda, by leaning on human geography writings on scale, and introducing the concept of ‘vicarious scale’. This concept is drawn from empirical work which highlights the double move of scaling-up. This double move, first, restricts and contains community within a local, small, or narrow limit. Then, concurrently, expects this restricted community to have displaced effects: at a higher scale, or a distant point in time. It argues that the scaling-up expectations are both placed onto community initiatives and emerge from within them, and that these expectations are both counterproductive to realizing the full potential of community, and accompany an insertion of instrumental logic onto and into these community initiatives. Appreciating vicarious scale also has important practical implications for communities—not least being wary of the counterproductive and corrosive effects a will-to-grow can have.

社区倡议通常负责扩大规模：扩大、加深影响并启动新项目。扩大规模的愿望来自社区倡议本身，也受到各级政策的鼓励，从地方政府到国家和国际框架，如 IPCC。本文通过在尺度上借鉴人文地理著作，并引入“替代尺度”的概念，增加了对这一议程的批评。这个概念是从强调扩大规模的双重举措的经验工作中得出的。这一双重举措首先将社区限制在一个地方的、小的或狭窄的范围内。然后，同时，预计这个受限制的社区会产生流离失所的影响：在更高的规模或遥远的时间点。它认为，扩大的期望既被置于社区倡议上，又从社区倡议中产生，这些期望既不利于实现社区的全部潜力，又伴随着将工具逻辑插入到这些社区倡议中。欣赏替代规模对社区也有重要的实际意义——尤其要警惕增长意愿可能产生的适得其反和腐蚀作用。