Configurations Dynamics And Mechanisms Of Multilevel Governance

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics and mechanisms related to governing in multilevel systems.

Public management increasingly takes place in multilevel settings, since most countries are decentralized to one degree or another and most problems transcend and cut across administrative and geographical borders. A collaboration of scholars in the Transnational Initiative on Governance Research and Education (TIGRE Net), Making Multilevel Public Management Work: Stories of Success and Failure from Europe and North America brings together two strands of literature—multilevel governance and public management—and draws conclusions on practices of public management in multilevel governance settings. The book focuses on how to make multilevel public management work. Using an inductive logic, the editors study a particular case or a few selected cases, highlight lessons learned and implications, and identify trends and concerns. The book underscores factors essential to making multilevel public management work, namely coordination and collaboration, and new skills and leadership capacities. It discusses the pitfalls of creating networks instead of managing them and the importance of finding the right leadership skills, institutional design, and network management mechanisms to avoid deadlock and manage conflict effectively. Multilevel public management creates multiple opportunities and their accompanying challenges. By bringing together case studies in Europe and North America, this book identifies conditions for success and those under which such governance arrangements fail. Demonstrating the insights gained by the cross-fertilization of ideas, the book has also been strengthened by the participation of researchers from various disciplines, including public management, political science and international relations, economics, as well as administrative law. The interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship provides a complete and compelling portrait of multilevel public management as practiced and studied on two continents. The book opens the debate on what is needed to make it work

This Research Agenda provides a broad and comprehensive overview of the field of multilevel governance. Illustrating theoretical and normative approaches and identifying prevailing gaps in research, it offers a cutting-edge agenda for future investigations.

Multilevel governance divides powers, includes many veto players and requires extensive policy coordination among different jurisdictions. Under these conditions, innovative policies or institutional reforms seem difficult to achieve. However, while multilevel systems establish obstructive barriers to change, they also provide spaces for creative and experimental policies, incentives for learning, and ways to circumvent resistance against change. As the book explains, appropriate patterns of multilevel governance linking diverse policy arenas to a loosely coupled structure are conducive to policy innovation.

This book examines the nexus between City Networks, multilevel governance and migration policy. Examining several City Networks operating in the European Union and the United States of America’s multilevel political settings, it brings migration research into conversation with both policy studies and political science. One of the first comparative studies of City Networks and migration, the book argues that multilevel governance is the result of a contingent process of converging interests and views between leaders in network organisations and national governments, the latter continuing to play a key gatekeeping role on this topical issue even in the supranational EU system.

This book examines the rise and agency of International Organizations (IOs) and their bureaucratic bodies— the International Public Administrations (IPAs)— as a reflection of an ongoing transfer of political authority and power from the domestic to the international level. It shows that IPAs represent actors per se, with autonomy and resources that allow them to exert an independent influence on global policy-making processes and outputs. Providing a combination of novel conceptual lenses and research design to capture IPAs as an empirical phenomenon, the book takes an open, theoretically and methodologically diverse approach to show that IPAs are far from being negligible actors in global public policy and must be taken seriously as actors in policy-making beyond the nation-state. This book will be of key interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in Public Policy and Public Administration, International Relations, International Political Economy, as well as Organizational Studies.

Applying an innovative approach to capture varieties and dynamics of federal democracies, this collection examines the conditions, mechanisms and practices that make federal democracies work.

The European Union is facing today the greatest crisis since its creation. Brexit could mean not only the reversal of its steady enlargement—from 6 to 28 member states—but also the beginning of an inexorable decline leading to its disintegration. However, few today seem to recollect that it was precisely the British who were the first to promulgate the political culture which inspired the European Union’s construction—democracy and federalism—and the first who tried to realise, in June 1940, a European federation on the basis of an Anglo-French union. This volume traces the fundamental stages of the European unification process, placing it in relation to the wider process of world economic and political integration. In particular, it analyses the historical significance of the European Revolution, which is identified in the overcoming of the nation state—namely the modern political formula which institutionalised the political division of mankind—and the birth of the first truly international state. The universal historical significance of the European Revolution lies in its exportability—as for the other great European revolutions—and, therefore, its potential as progressively extensible to all the states of the planet. Europe was indeed the first region of the world where the barriers between national states fell, and a post-national political identity emerged, complementary to national political identities. It is, in fact, in the context of the European Union that democracy beyond the borders of the nation state has first been realized, constituting a guiding principle for global governance.