Melting law: Learning from practice in transboundary mountain regions

•Transboundary mountain regions in Europe emerge as normative spaces at the intersection of territorial and environmental governance. Constituting a meeting point of different national legal orders under the umbrella of international regimes, they have become natural laboratories for the development of cross-border law.•Europe is home to numerous transboundary regional initiatives and many of these have focused on mountain regions (massifs).•The EGTC is an European legal instrument designed to facilitate and promote cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation.

Transboundary mountain regions in Europe emerge as normative spaces at the intersection of territorial and environmental governance. Constituting a meeting point of different national legal orders under the umbrella of international regimes, they have become natural laboratories for the development of cross-border law. The objective of this article is to examine the nature and normative dimension of such legal environments. To this end, we introduce the concept of ‘melting law’ as a means to assess the re-combination of different modes of conventional, national, international, supranational and/or interregional normativities. Hard (national) laws melt within the framework of transboundary mountain regions as a legal category, based on a mixture of national, international (or EU) and interregional norms, each combining with the other by softening their usual normative impact. Building on a review of legal approaches to mountains and cross-border cooperation practices, we trace the development of “melting law” and “melted law” through a discussion of the legal framework for and the impact of “working communities” and the “European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation” (EGTC). The discussion mobilizes a global approach with a view to generate new insights into the legal challenges facing transboundary mountain governance in Europe.