["Environmental Policy and Governance, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study employs a scalar politics framework to unpack how participatory rhetoric operates statecraft in a post‐authoritarian context, thereby illuminating hybrid‐regime behavior along a continuum of environmental governance. An examination of the environmental governance of an ecotourism project in South Korea is performed using ethnographic methods over an 18‐month period in 2011–2013. The results reveal that the state has actively deployed participatory rhetoric and purportedly maintained a passive stance in managing and promoting an ecotourism project, while actively reconfiguring institutional arrangements to reinforce state authority. The findings present a range of a decentralized state's paradoxical stance toward scalar politics. This study demonstrates a “passive” scalecraft in environmental governance as a gradual and nuanced form of authoritarian innovation in a post‐authoritarian country.\n"]