Are you Talking to us? How Subnational Governments Respond to Global Sustainable Development Governance

摘要

Subnational governments (such as provinces, states or regions) are largely ignored in international policy documents on sustainable development, and they are not recognized in multilateral decision-making. Nevertheless, many subnational governments have launched sustainable development policies. This paper examines to which extent they take global sustainable development governance into account when doing so. A theoretical framework is used that builds upon the literature of policy convergence. Two mechanisms of policy convergence are studied (international harmonization and transnational communication) and their theoretical insights are complemented with insights from regime theory and globalization scholars. That framework is then applied on a comparative policy analysis of five subnational governments: North Holland (the Netherlands), North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), Wallonia (Belgium), Flanders (Belgium) and Quebec (Canada). The findings show that subnational governments with a distinct territorial identity react differently on international impulses than other subnational governments. Flanders and Quebec, the cases that have such an identity, follow the rules and decision-making procedures of the international sustainable development regime, and they translate the norms and principles into their policies. The paper also finds that the influence of international policies is determined by the active participation of subnational governments in multilateral decision-making. Finally, it is argued that the legitimacy pressures exerted by international organizations on lower-level governments to adopt certain policies, have a varying impact on subnational governments which depends on their domestic context.