Why Another Book on Multilevel Governance?
The notion of multilevel governance (MLG) has gained immense popularity over the past 20 years, pervading large parts of the academic literature (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Bache and Flinders 2004, 2015; Benz 2007; Enderlein et al. 2010; Piattoni 2010). MLG, or the concept of governance at all for that matter, is, however, not just a fashionable catch-all expression among political scientists (see, e.g., for a critical review Offe 2009). On the contrary, the emergence and permeation of MLG are warranted for a number of reasons. Among other things, it captures several fundamental insights about the institutional structures and policy-making processes of modern democratic states.
The first part of the notion, ‘multilevel’, acknowledges that the vertical division of power between levels of government with some degree of authority is no longer an exclusive feature of federal states (Hooghe et al. 2016). Rather, processes of authority migration (Gerber and Kollman 2004) beyond and below the level of the nation-state have propelled the development of multilevel architectures, inspiring scholarly research to discover patterns and regularities but also challenges to conventional forms and practices of democratic legitimacy under conditions of growing complexity. Consequently, MLG encompasses intra-, trans- and supranational processes and, frequently, their conjunction. Most prominent cases of new multilevel architectures are devolved states, e.g. the UK and Spain, and, of course, the European Union, the former representing “holding together federalism” dynamics and the latter a new type of “coming-together federalism” (Stepan 1999). The second part of the notion, ‘governance’, acknowledges how processes of political decision- and policy-making have long transcended the exclusive ambit of ‘the state’. Hierarchical decisions taken by parliament and government and implemented by the administration in a top-down manner are today the exception rather than the rule, for multiple reasons. Those reasons include the interdependence of modern political structures, the high complexity of most policies involving spill-overs and incalculable externalities and, coinciding with these, the need for broad involvement of stakeholders in the policy-making process.
Against this backdrop, it is not the theoretical ambition of this book to offer yet another theory of MLG. Rather, it aims to link different strands of recent research on (multilevel) governance, thus highlighting the potential for mutual learning and conceptual spill-overs. First, with the conceptual triad of ‘configurations’, ‘dynamics’, and ‘mechanisms’, we capture the better part of recent developments in MLG research. Configurational analyses aim at making sense of constellations of actors, situational incentives and constraints and ensuing strategies of actors for accomplishing their goals. In their eminent book, Hooghe and Marks (2016) emphasized the duality of space and society as a relevant heuristic for studying configurations of MLG. A dynamic perspective on processes in MLG or on configurational and institutional changes has emerged only recently (Benz and Broschek 2013a; Behnke and Kropp 2018), developing concepts such as ‘authority migration’ (Gerber and Kollman 2004) for studying dynamics of multilevel power allocation or investigating the effect of asymmetry for territorial dynamics (Hombrado 2011; Petersohn et al. 2015). In terms of mechanisms, historical institutionalist scholarship provided helpful heuristics, such as layering of institutional changes (Orren and Skoworonek 1994; Broschek 2011) for making sense of seemingly incompatible developments in multilevel architectures.
Second, the contributions in this volume emphasize different strands of governance research, but which are linked conceptually. Assembling them in one volume allows for exploring potential for synergy and mutual learning. The first part is anchored in the Public Administration perspective grasping the changing nature of State-Society and State-Economy relations by using governance and network concepts; the second part comprises research based on the Comparative Federalism perspective analysing institutions, processes and dynamics of vertical authority migration in multilevel political systems; in the third part, research contributions from the Theory of Democracy perspective tackle the specific interdependency of multilevel (vertical) and democratic (horizontal) decision making in terms of separation and sharing of powers; the fourth part is dedicated to concluding perspectives on analysing conditions and variations of multilevel continuity and change.
Situating Multilevel Governance: Configurations, Dynamics, Mechanisms
Multilevel Governance: A Configuration
How to conceive multilevel governance configurations lies at the heart of the question of what MLG actually is. One “axis of ambiguity” in the current debate identified by Tortola (2017) relates to the open question of whether MLG should primarily be perceived as a structure or a process. We suggest that it comprises both, structural and procedural features. However, we likewise agree on the necessity to demarcate the conceptual boundaries of MLG more clearly. MLG denotes a distinct pattern of political decision-making marked by several typical features: Processes of decision-making tend to be organized sequentially, taking place across several levels of a polity, whereby the territorial or spatial dimension is relevant in a horizontal as well as a vertical direction. Actors involved represent formal political authorities as well as often quasi-governmental or even non-governmental actors representing society-based interests. Accordingly, MLG is broader in scope than federalism as it transcends the unitary-federal dichotomy (Hooghe and Marks 2016). Instances of MLG exist within federal states, unitary states or beyond the realm of the nation-state. Thus MLG allows us to capture multifarious configurations of political decision-making and policy-making processes as well as other patterns of producing ‘common goods’ (see, e.g., Héritier 2002) transcending different forms or constitutions of political systems (spanning various multilevel polities).
MLG configurations emerge and persist in different world regions and different contexts. In this regard, another “axis of ambiguity” concerned with the applicability of MLG beyond the context of European Union politics, or even cohesion policy (Tortola 2017), is increasingly becoming obsolete. For some time, it was altogether sensible to link MLG with the peculiarities of the EU-system as a complex order defying categorization as either an international organization or a state (Jordan 2001). However, such self-limitation is at least outdated, if not analytically distorting given the diffusion of MLG configurations in a multitude of national, sub-, trans- and international settings (Kersbergen and Waarden 2004).
Empirical research highlighted and categorized a broad variety of MLG configurations. Such configurations emerge within specific policy domains, in the sense of Lowi’s (1964) famous verdict that policies make politics. Alternatively, they may also take shape through more formalized rules and requirements, as in case of intergovernmental relations. An encompassing effort to map instances of MLG across time and space has been presented by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (Hooghe et al. 2016). Framing it as regional instead of MLG, Hooghe and Marks track the institutional evolution of multilevel configurations in 81 countries from all world regions over 60 years. The focus of their ambitious study lies on the creation and empowerment of sub-level political units in nation-states. While this also includes formal federations such as Germany or the United States, for the most part authority has migrated from central governments to non-federal sub-state units. Another recent strand of scholarship, advanced primarily by Canadian scholars such as Chris Alcantara and Martin Papillon, explores MLG configurations in settler societies (Alcantara et al. 2016; Papillon 2012; Papillon and Juneau 2016). These scholars have deployed MLG to capture the negotiation of land claim agreements or the emergence of different forms of self-government arrangements for Indigenous peoples since the 1970s. This new approach sets itself apart from traditional scholarship in this area, which analysed the growing complexity of state-Indigenous relationships through a lens of “treaty federalism” (Hueglin 2000, 2013; White 2002). This does not mean that federalism has become obsolete, but it appears as an in...