Bulletin n. 1/2015
June 2015
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Perrier Benjamin, Levrat Nicholas
    Melting law: Learning from practice in transboundary mountain regions
    in Environmental Science & Policy , Volume 48, Frames on the move: Regional governance in mountain areas, May ,  2015 ,  32-44
    Transboundary mountain regions in Europe emerge as normative spaces at the intersection of territorial and environmental governance. Constituting a meeting point of different national legal orders under the umbrella of international regimes, they have become natural laboratories for the development of cross-border law. The objective of this article is to examine the nature and normative dimension of such legal environments. To this end, we introduce the concept of ‘melting law’ as a means to assess the re-combination of different modes of conventional, national, international, supranational and/or interregional normativities. Hard (national) laws melt within the framework of transboundary mountain regions as a legal category, based on a mixture of national, international (or EU) and interregional norms, each combining with the other by softening their usual normative impact. Building on a review of legal approaches to mountains and cross-border cooperation practices, we trace the development of “melting law” and “melted law” through a discussion of the legal framework for and the impact of “working communities” and the “European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation” (EGTC). The discussion mobilizes a global approach with a view to generate new insights into the legal challenges facing transboundary mountain governance in Europe.
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