Combining Harvey's view of relational space with legal affordances allows us to speak also to the continuing tradition of scholarship on the legal foundations of capitalism (Commons, 1924; Pistor, 2019; Robé, 2011). From this perspective NAPFs are vanguards in how the economic geography of firm activity is tied to the use of the law as a device to place the managers of the firm at distance from responsibility.

NAPFs are able to strategically locate corporate entities, placing their intellectual property, payment and bookkeeping entities, and operational entities in the jurisdictions that offer the greatest advantages, including opacity in revealing their actual behavior. Equally, legal treatments at one scale can be played off against legal treatments at another, leading to prolonged legal battles, that can in turn and over time be displaced from one scale to another.

Legal affordances arise from relations within and between bodies of law at different scales, where questions of definition, jurisdiction and applicability configure the legal space of NAPFs’ strategy and the physical space of operations. We highlight how a focus on legal affordances as comprised of absences, ambiguity and arbitrage allows us to see how NAPFs use legal and spatial scaling to connect the local to the transnational. We also suggest that social activism concerned with property, labor, and public thoroughfare rights can challenge legal affordances. These challenges can then be pushed at different scales where adjudication may be on offer, but are also limited given that NAPFs have considerable resources to spend in fending off legal challenges.

NAPFs combine the opportunistic use of bodies of law, the spatial demarcation of the firm's corporate structure, and economic activities occurring in bounded local spaces. These firms do not use bodies of law as external resources, but integrate legal and spatial scaling into their everyday operations. Legal affordances are a privilege supported by a transnational interpretative community of professionals that promotes their widespread recognition through “embedded spaces of social practice” (Faulconbridge, 2007; Harrington and Seabrooke 2020). Legal affordance differs from legal provision, which is a granted right and commonly viewed as fixed and static external resources. As we clarify below, NAPFs use legal affordances to construct what David Harvey (1973, 2006) referred to as relational space that empowers their capacity to exploit other people's assets and avoid regulatory burdens.

‘networked accumulation’ platform firms (hereafter NAPFs) rely on existing or easily replaceable assets with minimal infrastructure, as distinct to platform firm models that extend or complement transport and accommodation infrastructures through the acquisition of their own fleets of vehicles or suites of properties (Stehlin et al., 2020). NAPFs typically launch local services under a cloud of ‘regulatory indeterminacy’ (Stehlin et al., 2020, 1256), relying on being “simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate” (Graham, 2020, 454)

communal wastes and forests, a certain form of labor independence—contained a nascent worldview too, but one that envisioned a radical alter-native to what has now come to pass in our “planet of slums.”

My own treatment of enclosure and its aftermath asrepresented in nineteenth- century realist fiction likewise hopes to lookboth backward and into the future and to unearth in the wake of the en-closure movement and its destruction of the literal commons the imag-ined alternatives found in British realism’s invocations to the common.

event is seen “as a coming-forth (and etymology supports this conceptequally),” however, “the event comes to us as much more a thing untoitself, a newborn necessarily dependent on its parentage but still instinctwith promise for the future.”

he downscaling process should not focus on constraining the boundaries, that derive from physical thresholds, within political borders. Instead, we suggest calculating the boundaries for each ecosystem and only then applying them at a country level. This would require a lot of work because meaningful ecosystem boundaries should be set first, but it could be a way to overcome the mismatch between the physical and the political dimensions. With this approach, biophysical thresholds and changes in resilience are investigated, and a boundary can be established with a scientific criterion. Then, using the results of this global exercise, national boundaries for each ecosystem within the country can be set, making them operational where political decisions are being made. National boundaries set in this way could help to establish local policies that aim to preserve global boundaries but that, at the same time, are focussed on the peculiarities of the country itself. This would also make all the national versions of the Planetary Boundaries directly comparable to one another

With ecosystem accounting, socio-economic aspects are considered and an SJOS is defined and addressed in a practical way, where a trade-off exists between the use of ecosystem services and their future availability, but with consideration of global sustainability provided by the Planetary Boundaries framework.

as the Doughnut concept was developed in 2012, it responded to the fact that no plan was present at the time to put in practice the Sustainable Development Goals (the SDGs were defined only three years later, in 2015). The Doughnut and the Planetary Boundaries, although not mentioned directly, have been influential in shaping the SDGs, which include all the aspects of the social foundation and of the Planetary Boundaries, either as a goal or as a target within the goal.

Discussion on how to downscale the climate change boundary has now become a political and equity issue more than a scientific issue. For example, how does one decide the allocation of the CO2 emissions? Should the past emissions be considered? Should the amount of emissions account for the current welfare of the countries, allowing less developed countries to emit more? Or, is it sufficient to calculate a global per capita value that is the same everywhere?

With an ecosystem focus, the boundaries are manageable (see also Section 3) because processes and feedback are better known. In this regard, the “Regime Shift Database” (https://www.regimeshifts.org/) is a very useful tool. It collects many regime shifts documented in socio-ecological systems and those that affect ecosystem services and human wellbeing, at different scales (global, sub-global/regional, local/landscape). This database contains information about drivers, feedback, ecosystem services involved, temporal and spatial scale, reversibility and confidence related to each observed regime shift.

Studies published so far either use a per-capita approach that assigns a value derived from the global threshold, whether it can have consequences on the stability of the Earth System or not, or they calculate a local boundary that ignores the global relevance of the concept. Only Zipper et al. (2020) have developed a framework for the regional application of the freshwater Planetary Boundary. This framework is able to combine both a fair share based on the global boundary and a local safe operating space based on locally relevant control and response variables. They divided the water Planetary Boundary into six sub-boundaries as per Gleeson et al. (2020), which reflect the different functions of water within the Earth System, and represent five different stores of water (atmospheric water, soil moisture, surface water, groundwater and frozen water). Each store of water can either have a boundary only at the global/local level, in which case only the relevant boundary will be used, or it can be relevant at both scales. In this case, if the control variable of the boundary is different for the global and the local scale, two boundaries will result, with two different control variables. If the control variable is the same, the more conservative boundary will be

The review is organized around three key questions:1-How can one downscale a global concept (with physical borders) for operability for a country (within political borders)? (Section 2).2-What is the role of interactions among different boundaries? (Section 3).3-Can the concept of ecosystem services help to downscale the Doughnut and define the life within the SJOS? (Section 4).