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

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 article examines to what extent they take global sustainable development governance into account when doing so. The theoretical framework presents two mechanisms of international influence, building mostly upon the policy convergence literature. 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 trends from other subnational governments. Flanders and Quebec, which 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 article 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 dependent on their domestic context. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.