Subnational Involvement in EU Policy-Making - The Case of Scottish Flood Risk Management

In the early 1990s, gary marks defined multi-level governance as ‘a system of continuous negotiation among nested governments at several territorial tiers’ (marks 1993: 392). Sustainable development with its global, regional, national and subnational1 dimensions provides ample scope for the study of such multi-level interactions. Yet, while the topic is usually associated with broad strategies and goals, this chapter will concentrate on the negotiation of sustainable development policies, that is, the often-narrow policies that translate the broader strategies into practice. In particular, it will study the participation of scotland in the negotiation of the european union (eu) flood risk management directive, which touches upon sus-tainability questions such as the protection of human life and economic activity in the context of longterm environmental changes as a result of climate change. Unlike the other examples in the second part of this book, the flood risk management directive is a ‘hard’, binding law being passed at a supranational level that has to be transposed by national and subnational actors under the watchful eye of the european commission. It is representative of the eu’s far-reaching competencies in the area of environmental policy, a prime example of multi-level governance from the point of view of strong legislative regions due to the overlapping of sub-national, national and supranational competencies in the field (cairney 2006: 430).keywordseuropean unionflood riskflood risk managementscottish executivemultilevel governancethese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.