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This article argues that although globalization can benefit both exporters and importers of regulation in absolute terms, it may turn the globalization of regulation into a game with relative winners and losers. Using the EU REACH Regulation of chemicals as a case study, it explores the normative, social, economic, and strategic reasons that push the EU to promote the global adoption of REACH. Notwithstanding its attractions, rules globalization may result in a mismatch between global norms and local priorities, particularly for developing countries. It reduces regulatory diversity, and amplifies the strengths but equally the weaknesses of the dominant regulatory framework. While it can foster international trade through mutual recognition of regulatory decisions and the development of transnational regulatory frameworks, it increases the likelihood of conflict and trade flow desequilibria. The article calls for further careful consideration of rules globalization, so that harmonization does not come at the expense of local interests and values.

This article argues that the ascent of climate change on the EU regulatory agenda signals a new era of risk regulation and calls for the establishment of a new paradigm for risk regulation. Climate change is altering the EU's conception of environmental risks and its design of regulatory responses. In contrast to conventional risk regulation, climate change regulation must prioritise the risks of business-as-usual over the risks of change, must target systemic change instead of stability, and must favour the virtues of integration and orchestration over those of individualisation and compartmentalisation.There is an important role for risk regulation scholarship to analyse this shift and its consequences for regulation, such as the relocation of legitimacy needs and the emergence of new risks of regulatory failure. Such an enterprise would both reinvigorate risk regulation scholarship and offer a vital contribution to the European Union as it tackles the momentous challenge of climate change governance.

This article asks whether the Covenant of Mayorsa transnational network that aims to reduce CO2 emissions in European towns and cities -amounts to transnational environmental regulation. It answers in the affirmative. The relevance of treating the Covenant of Mayors as transnational environmental regulation is that this triggers qualitative expectations about how decision-making power will be wielded within the network. The article indicates that the Covenant is likely to clear some of these qualitative hurdles, but may struggle with others. This calls for further deliberation on how to bolster the legitimacy of transnational environmental regulation without forsaking its flexibility and innovative drive. Considering that the outlook for the swift, successful adoption of a global, binding regulatory regime for climate change is bleak, the world will likely remain dependent on alternative, transnational initiatives as drivers for change. The ramifications of this debate therefore considerably exceed the scope of the Covenant of Mayors itself.

This article argues that the rise of transnational regulation has a transformative impact on law. It examines the field of transnational environmental regulation to show that its proliferation challenges the continued appropriateness of representations of law as (i) territorial, (ii) emanating from the state, (iii) composed of a public and private sphere, (iv) constitutive and regulatory in function, and (v) cohesive and regimented. Instead, law is increasingly perceived as (i) delocalized, (ii) flowing from a plurality of sources, (iii) organizationally inchoate, (iv) reflexive and coordinating in function, and (v) polycentric. Together, these shifts in perception amount to a transformation that the article identifies as the transnationalization of law. The article then explores three responses to the transnationalization of law. It distinguishes responses motivated by a desire to reclaim the traditional conception of law from those that seek to reconstruct law at the transnational level and responses that advocate a contextresponsive reconceptualization of law. Each response, it will be shown, creates a different set of opportunities for, and challenges to, the relevance of law for transnational regulation.

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