Canadian-U.S. Environmental Cooperation: Climate Change Networks and Regional Action

Canadian-U.S. environmental relations manifest a growing importance of transborder state and provincial cooperation and policy-making. This trend is clear in North American climate change action. Though the Canadian and American federal governments have adopted diverging positions on climate change policy, extensive sub-national climate change action across the Canadian-U.S. border is developing in northeast North America. In this region, Canadian provinces and U.S. states forge ahead with climate change action beyond requirements mandated by their federal governments. This collective effort includes the six New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) and five Eastern Canadian provinces (Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Quebec). This article draws insights from the literatures on regionalis m and networks to examine growing Canadian provincial and U.S. state level environmental cooperation with a case study of the regional NEG-ECP climate change action. The authors attended multiple regional meetings and workshops with public, private, and civil society participants, conducted a large series of semi-structured and open-ended interviews with stakeholders and experts, and reviewed a multitude of climate change documents and reports. We begin by discussing central aspects of regionalism and networks as tools for analyzing NEG-ECP policy-making and implementation. Next, we examine regional NEG-ECP climate change policy and implementation and discuss potential avenues through which developments in northeast North America may influence national climate change debates in the U.S. and Canada.