International agreements and region-building in the mountains of south east Europe

Abstract

The globalization of environmental issues is characterized by representations and initiatives at the global level, but it is also present in the processes of institutionalization of new local and regional scales of action. Over the past decade, and following the promotion of mountains as a global common good, growing attention has been paid to the mountain regions of South East Europe. A large number of international organizations with differing mandates embarked on a variety of initiatives using mountains for their cooperative region-building efforts. The process by which these actors identify scales of action and construct relevant regions has been studied by some scholars, but rarely for South East Europe. The first objective of this article is to follow the emergence of mountains as a growing reference for the regionalization of environmental initiatives and underline the major role played by international organizations. The second objective is to present the mountain initiatives and understand how, in relation to South East Europe, regions for environmental governance are being defined in a broader context (scaling), and for what kinds of issues (framing). Furthermore, this article shows the extent to which these initiatives refer to similar or different scaling and framing processes. © 2014 by the authors.