Deliberative Politics in Transnational spaces - legitimacy and effectiveness in cross-border environmental policy between Canada and USA

The article addresses new, horizontal and dialogue-oriented forms of political governance in transnational spaces. A normative-analytical model of deliberative governance will be developed to appraise the democratic potential of transnational structures and actions. The research is guided by the observation that the North American Great Lakes Regime reveals a high democratic-deliberative quality whereas international governance rather tends to de-democratization. This raises a challenging research question: To what extent does the deliberative governance of the Great Lakes Regime provide a model case, which allows drawing conclusions on institutional prerequisites and means how to "democratize" governance in similar issue areas.