Deliberatie transnationalism — Transnational governance, public participation and expert deliberation

Transboundary governance is increasingly characterized by the disentanglement from traditional state-centric institutions and the emergence of non-hierarchical and dialogue-oriented governance modes. Within the Great Lakes-regime between the USA and Canada, a form of transnational governance has been evolved, which produces democratic legitimacy and effectiveness through public participation and expert deliberation in argumentative procedures aiming at factual and common good oriented problem solving. The paper develops categories of participatory and deliberative democracy theory for transnational governance to conceptualize deliberative transnationalism and to identify and measure the deliberative quality in the Great Lakes-regime. Such categories are fair chances of access and influence in political processes, dialogue-oriented participation forms and collective problem solving capability. They serve as normative-analytical framework to appraise the potential of democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in transnational governance.