The increasing transboundary nature of many environmental problems has not only elevated the importance of international environmental governance it has also contributed to shifts in the scales at which these problems are addressed and at which environmental programmes are implemented. The result is that environmental governance is experiencing rescaling which often involves a combination of changes including shifts in powers to other layers of decision‐making, the emergence of new scales of policy intervention and alternative forms of intervention, and the appearance of new actor constellations. The emergence of ‘soft’ policy and programming spaces – multi‐area sub‐regions in which strategy is being made between or alongside formal institutions and decision‐making processes – is another phenomena associated with rescaling. This paper charts the rescaling of environmental governance in part of Europe – the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) – and examines the influence of European macro‐regional cooperation initiatives on the changing nature of environmental governance in the region. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment