Sustainable Development and Transnational Communication: Assessing the International Influence on Subnational Policies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sustainable development needs to be tackled at different levels of governance. An important role is put aside for subnational entities (such as provinces, states or regions), because of their often large implementation responsibilities. Sustainable development is to a large extent decided in multilateral organizations, such as the UN, the OECD or the EU. Yet unlike nation-states, subnational governments are not formally bound by international commitments. This article uses the concept of transnational communication as a perspective to examine the extent to which international policy and decision-making resonates at the subnational level. Building on the tradition of policy convergence studies, theoretical and methodological refinements are made to explore how the concept can be applied to sustainable development and to subnational governments. Subsequently, the results are presented of a comparative analysis investigating how international initiatives have triggered and shaped sustainable development policies in Quebec (Canada), North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and Flanders (Belgium). The findings suggest that international events play a key role in triggering sustainable development policies at the subnational level, but that their impact on policy content is not uniform. It is also stated that political will is needed for sustainable development initiatives to gain ground and that the presence of a strong identity determines whether or not subnational governments are receptive to international influences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".