Nevertheless, Cox’s approach does allow us to think about how different social actors may be dependent upon particular spaces yet may seek to engage with other social actors operating within their own, quite different, spaces of dependence. For Cox, then, the production of scale is conceptualized as emerging out of the ways in which actors build spaces of engagement to link the various spaces upon which they, or those with whom they must deal, are dependent, such that moving from the local to the global scale ‘is not a movement from one discrete arena to another’ (Cox, 1998a: 20), but a process of developing networks of associations that allow actors to shift between various spaces of engagement.