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ECPR

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Re-scaling Regional Environmental Governance in the Mediterranean: The Case of the EU Macro-regional Strategy for the Adriatic Ionian Area (EUSAIR)

European Union
Governance
Institutions
Regionalism

Abstract

Macro-regional strategies can contribute to the rescaling of environmental governance, proposing a new scale of policy intervention, but also a new way to articulate coordinated interventions at regional (at supranational and transnational) level. As such, Macro-regional strategies give rise to new “actor constellations”, altering multilevel relations among actors at vertical and horizontal level. In this field macro-regional strategies have not appeared in a vacuum. Environmental governance is already affected by global agreements, international treaties, by international and intergovernmental frameworks established at regional level (ex. Barcelona Convention). With few exceptions in the case of the Baltic, the literature has not devoted enough attention to understand macro-regional strategies’ added value vis-à-vis existing governance frameworks in the environmental field. This paper will contribute to fill this gap, by focusing on the case of the Mediterranean basin, with particular regards to the Adriatic-Ionian sub-regional area. In particular, this paper will aim to specify the evolution and main features of environmental governance in the Mediterranean and to analyze the implications of environmental governance setting in the Mediterranean in terms of spatial rescaling. It will specify the geographical level of intervention of the different initiatives in place, the main issues addressed to tackle environmental challenges in the Mediterranean; the type of actors involved. Moreover, this paper will aim to explore the inter-linkage and existing interaction between the different initiatives in place in order to identify the level of cooperation and coherence and the limitations of the environmental governance in the Mediterranean.