The Theory of Multi-Level Governance PDF

T H E T H E O RY O F M ULTI - L EV E L GOV E R NA N C E This page intentionally left blank The Theory of Multi-level Governance Conceptual, Empirical, and Normative Challenges SIMONA PIATTONI 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Simona Piattoni 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2009942582 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–956292–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Preface I stumbled upon the concept of Multi-level Governance (MLG) fresh out of my graduate studies, when my interest in regional development led me to learn more about cohesion policy. The concept appeared immediately intriguing and chal- lenging. I decided that I would try to clarify for myself what it was really about— whether it was a new theory of European integration, an apt description of EU governance, or a normative ideal for post-parliamentary, post-national, post- Westphalian polities. The more I learnt about it, the more I felt that if I wanted to really understand what it stood for, I needed to delve into new ﬁelds of study such as international relations, constitutionalism, normative theory—an exciting, but also potentially endless endeavor. And yet, reconnaissance of this varied terrain seemed absolutely imperative. Studying the European Union, I had come to realize that as a comparativist I could not safely ignore the production of international relations colleagues, nor that I could neglect the work of legal scholars and political theorists. Multi-disciplinary reﬂection in EU studies is the order of the day. The expansion of the horizon that ensues is as breathtaking as it is mesmerizing. Yet, after a while, new landscapes start to look familiar and it becomes possible to reconnect past memories with new discoveries. This book, then, started as a house-cleaning exercise. As is typical of these (exhausting) activities, I found myself looking into increasingly distant quarters of my disciplinary abode, until I felt that I had left almost no corner untouched. Retracing my steps backwards and tidying things up was more demanding than I had anticipated, in part because the treasures that I had discovered in the process made me feel like not rushing the task, and in part because I had perhaps at times come to lose sight of the speciﬁc purpose of my endeavors. At the end of this enterprise, I believe that I have been enormously enriched personally and I hope that I have also made some real progress on a number of issues. If I wanted to do justice to all the people that helped me along the way, this preface would certainly exceed conventional dimensions, as I have many people to thank for directing my attention to yet unexplored ﬁelds or for rescuing me when I seemed to disappear under too much stuff. As far as I can remember, a few people have been my interlocutors in many conferences and workshops exploring the contours of multi-level governance: Ian Bache, Thomas Christiansen, Chris Deschouwer, Liesbet Hooghe, Charlie Jeffery, Michael Keating, John Loughlin, Gary Marks, Stijn Smismans, and many others who have, on different occasions, shared their thoughts and comments. These colleagues have collectively acted as a real community of scholars, without which I would not have conceived and written this book. They have all, in one capacity or another, enormously enriched me. In my perusals, I have been greatly stimulated by participation in several collaborative projects. Initially, in order to better familiarize myself (and my vi Preface students) with what appeared to be a fascinating debate and a booming literature, I ran a Jean Monnet Module in “Multi-Level Governance” from 2003–4 to 2007–8. This gave me the opportunity to invite to Trento many colleagues who were studying different aspects of MLG and to conclude with a double conference on the same topic, the ﬁrst in Trento in May 2007 and the second in Brussels in January 2008. Meanwhile, I have been involved in several research projects on the theme of “governance,” from a Framework Programme 5 (FPV) project on “Infor- mal Governance in the EU—IGEU” (with Thomas Christiansen), to a FPVI project, “Civil Society in European Governance—CIVGOV” (coordinated by Carlo Ruzza), within which I steered a research team on structural policy in some 30 EU regions. Both projects gave me the opportunity to investigate the many formal and informal links between regional authorities and their respective societies, to probe how strong and vital these links are, and to assess whether or not they help the process of governance. More recently, I have brought this long-term interest to bear in the analysis of the enlarged Union, thanks to my involvement in an FPVII “Wider Europe, Deeper Integration” (EU-CONSENT) Network of Excel- lence (coordinated by Wolfgang Wessels), in which I coordinated a team that dealt with “The institutionalization of access for civil society” (in practice, the Commit- tee of the Regions, the Economic and Social Committee, and the Social Dialogue). Interactions with the many colleagues whom I met thanks to these projects have given me more stimuli than I could probably retain. I was also involved in the ﬁrst stocktaking exercise organized by the Committee of the Regions in the fall of 2008 on MLG (CoR Ateliers on Multi-Level Governance), for which I thank the Head of the Forward Studies Unit, Mme Taulegne. My gratitude goes also to two fantastic institutions: the University of Trento and the University of California, Berkeley. In Trento, I work with a group of very stimulating and supportive colleagues, without whose help—for example, by taking on my teaching duties during my sabbatical year in 2008–9!—I could not have written this book. I would like to mention them individually: Roberto Belloni, Marco Brunazzo, Vincent della Sala, Alessia Donà, Sergio Fabbrini, Gaspare Nevola, Daniela Sicurelli. In particular, I owe to Sergio the idea of a book on MLG and it is due to his constant encouragement that I actually put it into practice. Roberto and Vincent also read part of the manuscript and directed me to important references. Milena Bigatto and Emanuela Bozzini participated in research connected with this book, suggested references that I would have missed, and read and commented on parts of the manuscript. In Berkeley, I spent two wonderful summers as guest of the Institute for Governmental Studies, that provided me with the quiet and the facilities that allowed me to, ﬁrst, conceptu- alize my approach to MLG and, later, to write two chapters of the book. My thanks go to the Directors of the Institute for Governmental Studies (IGS), Bruce Cain (in 2005) and Jack Citrin (in 2008), and to IGS Managing Director, Liz Wiener, for their hospitality and collegiality. In Trento and in Berkeley, moreover, I had the immense pleasure of chatting, over lunch or dinner, with two Emeriti who were kind enough to share their thoughts and food with me: to Gianfranco Poggi and Giuseppe di Palma, my heartfelt thanks. Preface vii I also want to thank the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and particu- larly Andrew Martin, for organizing a presentation of the ﬁrst sketch of this work in April 2008 and Jonas Tallberg (and other attendees) for taking the trouble to comment on it. Thanks too to the European Union Center of Excellence— European Studies Center of the University of Pittsburgh, and particularly its Director Alberta Sbragia, for giving me the opportunity to present my ideas there in April 2008. Finally, I would like to thank Dominic Byatt of Oxford University Press for believing in this project from the start and for patiently waiting while I added “the last touches” to the manuscript. But my passion for and commitment to the discipline has been inspired during these many years by three senior colleagues, whom I consider my real mentors in this enterprise. They have been perhaps only tangentially involved in this project—and certainly do not carry any responsibility for the outcome!—but they have been a constant source of inspiration: Suzanne Berger, Beate Kohler- Koch, and Alberta Sbragia. Thanks to them, I became convinced that it was indeed possible to be, at the same time, a scholar and a mother. While every effort was made to contact copyright holders of material in this book, in some cases we were unable to do so. If the copyright holders contact the author or publisher, we will be pleased to rectify any omission at the earliest opportunity. Simona Piattoni University of Trento [email protected] This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures x List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 PA RT I : T H E T H E O R E T I C A L C H AL L E N G E 1. Conceptual Analysis 17 2. Center versus Periphery 32 3. Domestic versus International 51 4. State versus Society 65 PA RT I I : TH E E M P I R I C A L CH A L L E N G E 5. Empirical Analysis 83 6. Cohesion Policy 102 7. Environmental Policy 133 8. Higher Education Policy 151 PA RT I I I : T H E N O R M AT I V E CH A L LE NG E 9. Normative Analysis 177 10. Input Legitimacy 192 11. Output Legitimacy 210 12. Democracy 228 Conclusion 249 Bibliography 261 Index 293 List of Figures 1.1. MLG’s analytical space 27 2.1. The ﬁrst axis: the center-periphery dimension 37 3.1. The second axis: the national-international dimension 53 4.1. The third axis: the state-society dimension 69 6.1. Cohesion policy 103 7.1. Environmental policy 141 8.1. The MLG space of higher education policy 153 List of Abbreviations AER Assembly of European Regions AR Akkreditierungsrat BAT best available technology BATNEEC BAT without excessive economic cost BEI Bank of European Investment BFUG Bologna Follow-Up Group CCC Coalﬁelds Community Campaign CCRLA Consultative Council of Regional and Local Authorities CEC Commission of the European Communities Cedefop European Center for the Development of Vocational Training CEECs Central and Eastern European Countries CEMR Council for European Municipalities and Regions CoR Committee of the Regions COMETT Community Program for Education and Training in Technology COREPER Committee of the Permanent Representatives CORINE Coordinated Information on the Environment CPMR Council of Peripheral and Maritime Regions CRE Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Conferences CSO civil society organization CSR Conferenza Stato-Regioni CVCP Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals DAAD Deutscher Akademisher Austauschdienst DATAR Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale DG Directorate-General EAC Education and Culture EAGGF European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund EAP Environment Action Program ECAS European Citizen Action Service ECJ European Court of Justice ECRML European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages ECSC European Community of Coal and Steel xii Abbreviations ECTS European credit transfer system EEA European Environmental Agency EEB European Environmental Bureau EEC European Economic Communities EHEA European Higher Education Area EIA Environmental Impact Assessment ELVs end-of-life vehicles ENIC European Network of Information Centers on academic recognition and mobility ENQA European Network for Quality Assurance EP European Parliament ERDF European Regional Development Fund ERDP European Regional Development Policy ESC Economic and Social Committee ESF European Social Fund ESIB European Union International Board ETF European Training Foundation EU European Union EUA European Universities Associations EURASHE European Association of Institutions in Higher Education FDI foreign direct investment FIFG Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance FPV Framework Program Five FPVI Framework Program Six FPVII Framework Program VII GDP gross domestic product HE Higher Education HEI higher education institution HEQC Higher Education Quality Council HLPF High Level Policy Forum Hp hypothesis HRK Hochschulrektorconferenz IGO intergovernmental organization IMPEL Implementation and Enforcement of Environmental Law IR international relations KMK Kulturministerkonferenz Abbreviations xiii LI liberal intergovernmentalism LLP Lifelong Learning Program MAI multilateral agreement on investment MEP Member of the European Parliament MPIfG Max-Planck Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung MLG multi-level governance NARIC Network of National Academic Recognition Information Centers NF neo-functionalism NGO non-governmental organization NUM National Union of Mineworkers NUTS Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OMC Open Method of Coordination POS political opportunity structures PPP public private partnerships PR proportional representation QAA Quality Assurance Agency QAD Quality Assessment Division QMV qualiﬁed majority voting RIO Regional Information Ofﬁce ROPs Rahmenprüfungordnungen RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds SEA Strategic Environmental Assessment SEM Single European Market SFs Structural Funds SGIB Standing Group on Indicators and Benchmarks SMO social movement organization SNA subnational authority TEU Treaty on the European Union TBR Trade Barrier Regulation UNESCO United Nations Educational Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organization WHO World Health Organization WR Wissenschaftsrat WTO World Trade Organization WWF World Wildlife Fund for Nature This page intentionally left blank Introduction MLG has become the most omnipresent and acceptable label that one can stick on the contemporary EU. Even its own politicians use it! My hunch is that its popularity among theories can be attributable to its descriptive neutrality and, hence, its putative compatibility with virtually any of the institutionalist theories and even several of their more extreme predecessors. (Schmitter 2004: 49) M U LT I - L EV E L G OV E R NA N C E : T H E P U Z Z L E Multi-level governance (MLG) is a rather popular term, widely used by students of European integration and international relations (IR) as well as by commen- tators and practitioners. It evokes the idea of increasingly complex arrangements for arriving at authoritative decisions in increasingly dense networks of public and private, individual and collective actors. In particular, it is deemed to capture important features of how binding decisions are arrived at in the European Union. Yet, MLG is not just a convenient description of political mobilization leading to European policy-making, it also points to fundamental changes in contemporary rule. As such, it suggests that structural transformations are taking place in contemporary European states under the impact of the process of European integration. Finally, MLG prompts reconsideration of what constitutes legitimate rule (in both state and non-state contexts), and therefore invites normative reﬂection on the conditions under which binding decisions gain widespread acceptance and bestow legitimacy on the institutions that produce them. Many different agendas are encompassed under the deceivingly simple label of MLG, and some of these agendas are pursued also under different labels. Descrip- tions of the European Union abound, each emphasizing a different characteristic aspect. The EU has been described as “less than a federation, more than a regime” (Wallace 1983: 403), “neither a state nor an international organization” (Sbragia 1992: 257), a “regulatory state” (Majone 1996), a “fused polity” (Wessels 1997), a “post-national state” (Caporaso 2000b), a “composite polity” (Tarrow 2001), a “compound polity” (Fabbrini 2007)—just to name a few of the labels that have gained wider currency. How does the notion of MLG relate to these other concepts? Are the labels totally interchangeable, or do they point to signiﬁcantly 2 Introduction different phenomena within European and EU rule? Do they all apply at the same analytical level or do they pertain to different planes of political interaction? Like other popular concepts, MLG runs the risk of becoming an umbrella under which many disparate phenomena are subsumed, to the point that it may lose all denotative precision and become “over-stretched” (Sartori 1970, 1984). Necessary characteristics get mixed up with accessory features, with the conse- quence that empirical referents become fuzzy and over-inclusive, making MLG certainly a “compelling metaphor” (Rosamund 2000: 110), but also a “(dis-) ordering framework” that makes “‘grand-theorizing’ difﬁcult” (Rosamund 2000: 111). Phenomena that would best be captured by other conceptual labels end up being subsumed under MLG, to the point that it loses its capacity to explain which phenomena are not encompassed within this concept (Sartori’s minimal test of negative denotational power). In reality, a wide array of theoretical, empirical, and normative issues are encompassed under this deceivingly simple label, which deserve to be fully discussed. The ﬁrst aspect of MLG that must be discussed is the theoretical (ontological) one. What is the deﬁnition of MLG, that is, what are the necessary features that uniquely deﬁne it and set it apart from other cognate concepts? For example, what is the difference between multi-level governance and governance tout court (or network governance, just to mention another widely used term)? What is the nature of the levels that must enter the deﬁnition of multi-level governance? Are they territorial, functional, or purely analytical levels? Do they direct our atten- tion towards new forms of government, new forms of state, or new forms of rule? Do they represent a challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state: its unity, autonomy, and distinctiveness? From the answers to these questions follow different denotations of MLG, that is, different empirical referents that are denoted by the connotational features of the concept. The second aspect is clearly analytical (epistemological). How do we recognize instances of MLG or how do we know that something like MLG does indeed exist? What is the characteristic realm of application of MLG: individual nation- states, the European Union, or the entire world? Is MLG a process (trend) or a situation (state)? Clearly these queries are closely related to the ﬁrst, but they force us to get down to earth and to describe and discuss discrete and concrete instances of MLG and to highlight those unique events which could not be captured by any other concept. If it is true that all empirical concepts contain, in a nutshell, empirically testable propositions, then we must be able to tease them out and subject them to empirical test. These questions are epistemological because they determine the kind of evidence that we need to produce if we want to make a case for the existence of MLG. The third aspect of MLG is normative and is related to the desirability of MLG and its outcomes, should this concept prove to be sufﬁciently relevant (have sufﬁcient connotational clarity) and signiﬁcant (have clear denotational scope). Here we ask under what conditions decisions made through MLG arrangements are more, less, or equally legitimate and effective than decisions arrived at through other arrangements, and why. Clearly, if MLG arrangements prove Introduction 3 both legitimate and efﬁcient, then there would be grounds for extending their range of application. Should they instead prove only dimly legitimate and hardly efﬁcient, then there would be reason to oppose their diffusion. In other words, is MLG a providential solution to current problems of conventional rule or is it in fact an inevitable development (Schmitter 2004)? Should we encourage more MLG or should we rather restrict it? Normative questions should not be kept separate from a theoretical and empirical investigation, because the eventual legitimacy enjoyed by governance arrangements may facilitate their deployment just as their patent illegitimacy might lead to a reaction against them (the conditional is mandatory). Hence, normative considerations cannot be expunged from a positive analysis. This book will deal with these concerns: it will discuss the origin and evolution of MLG and it will carry out a conceptual analysis of this term. It will also explore concrete instances of MLG arrangements and discuss their desirability. It will emerge that MLG is sometimes employed as a new buzz-word for rather old concerns and debates, but that it does point to genuinely new developments that could not be captured, or only less clearly, by other terms. Perhaps, the simplest way of justifying interest in MLG is to say that it is a wonderful pretext for embarking upon a fascinating theoretical, empirical, and normative journey through the “business of rule,” as it is powerfully shaped by historical occur- rences, domestic dynamics, European integration, and global developments. The next sections will argue in greater detail that is very much worth our while undertaking this journey, by recalling in broad outline some of the postwar developments that shaped the emergence of MLG. T H E R E D E S I G N O F S TAT E S OV E R E I G N T Y The ﬁrst set of arguments that should convince us of the value of an exploration of MLG regards the transformation of the national state, both in terms of its territorial articulation and in terms of its authoritative decision-making arrange- ments. Already some thirty years ago, British political scientist Laurence J. Sharpe (1979, 1993) drew attention to the trend towards territorial disarticulation of central states that was clearly observable throughout Europe. This trend assumed different forms and names in different national contexts—deconcentration, regionalization, devolution, federalization—but in all cases it challenged the centralized nature of unitary states and the established division of competences in decentralized states. Another British scholar, R. A. W. Rhodes (1988, 1997), drew attention to the increasing involvement of private or semi-public actors in much policy-making activity—from decision to implementation and evaluation— and the devolution to them of a share of authoritative decision-making. Obviously, private involvement in private policy-making was nothing new, but it had been theorized mainly within corporatist and neo-corporatist approaches (Schmitter 1977; Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982; Streeck and Schmitter 1985b). What was 4 Introduction new was that it began to appear as a regular feature also in a unitary state like Britain that had theorized and practiced the sovereignty of Parliament in policy- making. These trends signaled new mobilization dynamics and new patterns of policy-making, but, more fundamentally, they called into question both the form and the functioning of the European nation-state. Since the French Revolution, the unitary state has been both a formidable instrument of rule and a guarantor of the equality of treatment of all citizens in a given territory. In addition, it has been a powerful creator and enforcer of markets and a determined promoter of growth. As such, it has been one of those “institutional innovations” which sometimes mark the history of political thought and practice. The state that emerged from the French Revolution was meant to eliminate all those intermediary powers that stood between citizens and state authorities, getting rid of those ancien régime social formations that had obtained remarkable privileges for themselves by serving the sovereign in some capacity or another. The idea that democracy implies popular sovereignty and equality of access and treatment for all citizens—regardless of whether it really provides it or whether it is even theoretically possible to provide it—was then introduced. As a system of domestic rule, this model was adopted by many other European states, from those that imported it willingly (Spain, Portugal, Hungary) to those on which it was imposed after the Napoleonic conquests (the Nether- lands, Belgium, and Italy) and spread throughout continental Europe (Loughlin et al. forthcoming). The centralized unitary state was the hallmark of modernity. As a system of external defense and internal protection, this model retained all the advantages associated with centralized control of the territory and the ensuing efﬁciency gains, particularly in times of war. Control of (possibly contiguous) territories had been the driving objective of the sovereigns of Europe since the demise of the Holy Roman Empire. The “feudal solution”—control of the territory thanks to a web of personal bonds of loyalty among feudal lords— proved to be inefﬁcient and progressively gave way to the “state solution” (Poggi 1978). From this secure power base, the state could launch military and diplo- matic campaigns for the conquest of ever larger markets and the accumulation of ever larger resources, thus pulling in its train the nascent forces of capitalism that would ﬁnd in national markets, currencies, and tribunals the institutional frame- work for their expansion. The process of state creation was long and difﬁcult, involving the weeding-out of many potential state-building centers and leaving in place only a handful of such formations (Tilly 1975). Although the end-date for this process is conventionally placed between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the mid-nineteenth century—by which time a system of sovereign states had been created in Europe—a few additional reconﬁgurations occurred after this date (from the creation of Italy and Germany to the separation of Belgium from the Netherlands, from the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire to the separation of Norway from the union with Sweden, from the dismemberment and reconstitu- tion of Poland to the creation and demise of the Third German Reich—to name but the most relevant developments until World War II). Most of these new states, with the notable exceptions of Germany, Austria, and much later Belgium, Introduction 5 adopted a centralized solution to the business of rule, such that the unitary, sovereign, centralized state became the “standard model” throughout Europe. Even in the UK, which from the historical record appears to have been an ideal candidate for a federal solution, the unitary solution had won out. The end of World War II represents in many ways the zero hour for the whole continent, not just for Germany. In many ways, the seeds of the transformation of state rule, sown during the 1930s, began to sprout at that point. The system of international relations created at Westphalia had shown its most dramatic im- plications: the sovereign states had failed to secure peace through diplomatic bilateral relations, just as they had failed to open ever-growing markets for domestic manufacturing and commercial interests by relying uniquely on bilat- eral agreements (or unilateral conquests). These lessons were learnt the hard way in Europe, and motivated a handful of political leaders to overcome the system of the past and base the future on a new system of shared sovereignty. These, in a nutshell, were the motivating forces behind the creation of the European Com- munity, at least according to the ofﬁcial version. Although there is nothing necessary about the creation and subsequent development of the EC into what it is today, nevertheless it has certainly not been an instance of pure happenstance. A healthy sense of the inescapable interdependence of formally sovereign states had by then been injected into national leaders. In the words of John Ruggie, “the institutional, juridical, and spatial complexes associated with the community may constitute nothing less than the emergence of the ﬁrst truly postmodern international political force” (Ruggie 1993: 140; emphasis added). T H E RE D E FI N I TI ON O F NAT I ONA L S OL I DA RI T Y Among the early states, nation-building followed state formation as a way of securing obedience from a populace that often perceived state structures as foreign and incomprehensible (Weber 1976) without having to resort to force and repression. In a few latecomer states (such as Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Norway), the romantic ideal of a national community that conquers a territory for itself among ﬁerce opponents was the driving force behind the process of state formation, yet even in these states the job of forging a “community of destiny” was far from complete even after the achievement of territorial unity and political independence. Throughout Europe, the expediency of appealing to a feeling of belonging in order to secure citizens’ compliance with the laws of the state, as well as the need to buffer economic interests from the social displacements caused by their activity, drove the progressive concession of economic, political, and social citizenship rights (Marshall 1992), which had to be equally distributed if the national community “ﬁction” (Anderson 1983) was to have any real selling power. This myth had further implications in terms of the increasingly necessary balance that had somehow to be struck, particularly after World War II, between the sacriﬁces demanded from citizens (taxes and conscription) and the rewards 6 Introduction that the state distributed to them (protection and services). After World War II, states turned to domestic preoccupations, driven by the need to repair war damage and reconstruct shattered systems of national solidarity upon new bases. The assumption, since the 1950s, of increasing numbers of tasks that the acknowledgment of citizenship rights entailed led to the creation of “welfare states” (or, to use a more sophisticated expression, the performance of “social eudaemonic” functions on the part of the state; Poggi 1978: 134). As the number of services and the complexity of their delivery increased, citizens, politicians, and scholars began to question the “balance” between rights and duties and to reassess decision-making and delivery arrangements. Even where the neo-liberal critique of the welfare state failed to gain real ground, as in the Scandinavian states and in most European continental states (Pierson 1996), reconsideration of the ways in which services were delivered began in earnest. The complaint was that the welfare state had become too expensive and intrusive and that personal services (health, housing, education, etc.) had become excessively bureaucratized and citizens felt increasingly “alienated” from the state agencies that delivered them. Issues of “ownership” and “participation” were partly related to the territorial distribution of state services, but had partly to do with the ﬂexibility of service provision and the general responsiveness and accessibility of state agencies. Issues connected with the “quality of democracy,” rather than the “quantum of democ- racy,” started to emerge and the need for more authentic, grass-roots participa- tion was expressed by both political parties and social movements. In addition to the “right to participation,” people started to clamour for the “right to roots.” In some countries, these concerns got channelled through new parties, such as Mogens Gilstrups’s Danish Progress Party,1 Anders Lange’s Party in Norway,2 D66 in the Netherlands,3 the Greens in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.4 Elsewhere, they were expressed as a “backlash” against the welfare state, programs for redeploying people from welfare to workfare, and a neo-liberal critique of an all-invasive and ineffective state (Pierson 2000). In other countries, still, they took the form of a resurgence of regional and minority-language identities, particularly in the “Celtic periphery” (Keating 1988, 1998). Implicit in the regional nationalist movement was a critique of the way in which the system of national solidarity had been articulated. Whether it took the form of an explicit attack on the “cultural division of labour” (cf. Gramsci 1966; Hechter 1975) that several nation-states had put in place, relegat- 1 Mogens Gilstrups Fremskridtspartiet (The Progress party of Mogens Gilstrup) was founded in 1972 but made its electoral mark in the 1973 elections on a program of reduction of the state’s taxing and spending powers. 2 Anders Langes Parti til sterk nedsettelse av skatter, avgifter og offentlige inngrep (The party of Anders Lange for the strong reduction of taxes, excises, and public intervention) was founded in 1973 following the Danish example. After Carl I. Hagen took over the leadership, he changed its name into Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party). 3 D66, or Demokraten 66, was founded in 1966 in the Netherlands by Hans van Mierlo on a program requesting increased citizen participation in political decisions. 4 Die Grünen (the Greens or the Green Alternative), the ﬁrst environmental parties of Europe, were founded in Switzerland in 1971, in Germany in 1979, and in Austria in 1986. Introduction 7 ing the peripheries to the role of prime materials providers and “expropriating” them of their natural resources to enrich the core areas or whether it manifested itself as cultural opposition to hegemonic cultures and languages that debased the peripheral cultures and languages as backward and pre-modern (Rokkan and Urwin 1982, 1983; De Winter and Türsan 1998), the questioning of the national state was often coupled with a questioning of the centralized state. Issues of subsidiarity became paramount, in the sense of both giving back to society the power to decide for itself and of giving back to sub-state nations the right to decide for themselves. The concerns connected with the transformation of the nation-state model then involved both the format of the decision-making pro- cesses, and therefore state-society relations, and the territorial structure of the state, and therefore center-periphery relations. T H E T R A N S F O R M AT I O N O F T E R R I TO R I A L S T RU C T U R E Towards the end of the 1960s, several centralized states began to alter their territorial articulation, creating levels of government between the central level (the national government and its peripheral articulation) and the local level (self- governing municipalities). This “meso-level” took a different form in different countries (Sharpe 1979; Dente and Kjellberg 1988), but everywhere a need was felt for a more articulated structure of political participation and service delivery. The trend towards decentralization (or regionalization from the top) coincided with the surge of minority languages and cultures that began in the 1960s (or regionalism from the bottom). Sub-state nationalisms emerged in the UK (the Celtic fringe represented by Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), France (Brittany, Provence, and Corsica), Belgium (a mix of territorial and linguistic divisions led to the increasing separation of Flanders from Wallonia, the creation of three language communities, and the Brussels capital region), Italy (autono- mist claims by South Tyrol, ﬁrst, and Lombardy, Venetia, and Piedmont, later), Spain (the disquiet in the “historical regions” of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia), Sweden, Finland, and Norway (the Finnish-speaking minority in the former, the Swedish-speaking minority in the latter, and the Sami minority in all three), Portugal (the Azores), and the list could go on. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the picture has become even more complicated, particularly after the separation between the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the break-up of the former republic of Yugoslavia into six independent (or semi-independent) enti- ties (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Mace- donia, Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, and Slovenia), and the corresponding formation of minority nationalisms wherever the division could not neatly separate ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups that had been forced to live together under Communist rule. More generally, it has become more acceptable everywhere to profess a minority national identity based on historical, cultural, linguistic, religious, or other traits. Indeed, the postwar period has witnessed only 8 Introduction one major reuniﬁcation, that of western and eastern Germany, marked by the difﬁculty of reviving a common cultural and political identity. The European Union looms much larger in this broad-brush picture than would appear at ﬁrst sight. Although not directly responsible, at least in the beginning, either for the decentralization trends in centralized states or for the resurgence of sub-state nationalisms in national states, the European Community has offered a context of peace, stability, and openness within which even the more disruptive regionalist movements could safely express their requests. Indeed, it has added a momentum of its own to these developments, particularly thanks to the direct involvement of the regional authorities that the European Regional Development Policy, later Cohesion policy, has encouraged, at least since the mid-1980s. In 1986, the signing of the Single European Act had already revealed an oppor- tunity to increase the amount of resources to be distributed to European regions in order to compensate those that were lagging behind or de-industrializing for their greater vulnerability in the larger and more competitive market that was being created. Indeed, the prospect of becoming net receivers of development funds did much to quell the anxiety of the “historical” regions of Spain that, having played a crucial role in the return of that country to democracy, were weary of the (still) centralistic tendencies of the Spanish state. The reform of Cohesion policy in 1986 entailed the direct involvement of regional authorities in the determination and implementation of the Structural Funds, thus implicitly pushing for the creation of (at a minimum, statistical and administrative) regions even in states where none existed. The Commission stopped short of requesting the creation everywhere of new tiers of legislative regions, but the pressure towards decentrali- zation increased throughout Europe through the lever of the Structural Funds (Hughes et al. 2007; Bache 2008). Since the signing of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe, a new emphasis was placed on the great (and increasing) cultural and linguistic diversity of the Union, within which minority languages received ofﬁcial recognition and protection.5 These trends have accelerated further since the 2004–7 enlargement. The process of European integration, then, has reinforced and accelerated developments that were already at work domestically through secular trends related to the increased cultural awareness of European societies since the 1960s. The proponents of MLG highlight the speciﬁc contribution of the process of European integration to these developments and, indeed, propose to see the very process of European integration as the creation of a multi-level system of 5 The Charter was adopted as a convention on 25 June 1992 by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, and was opened for signature in Strasbourg on 5 November 1992. It entered into force on 1 March 1998. The text is available on the Council of Europe web-page:. Introduction 9 governance. In what follows, I will analyze in greater detail the nature of these developments and of the challenges that they pose to the European nation-state, and discuss both the ontology and the epistemology of the complex phenomena that are currently grouped under the label of MLG. The goal is to move from mere description of these phenomena to the formulation of more encompassing theories establishing causal connections susceptible to empirical testing. T R E S PA S S I N G S TAT E B O UN DA R I E S What I have outlined above are fairly uncontested transformations in the “busi- ness of rule” (Poggi 1978). They entail aspects of political mobilization, authori- tative decision-making, and institutional articulation; in other words, they operate in the politics, policy, and polity dimensions. Taking MLG seriously means disentangling how these three conceptual planes intersect and deciding how they are related to one another. It also implies tackling the theoretical, empirical, and normative implications of MLG. In this book, I investigate each of these planes according to each of these criteria, but I then bring the several threads together to discuss whether the novel forms of political mobilization and the peculiar modes of policy-making that we observe in the European Union add up to a transformation of legitimate rule. We know that the nation-state is under pressure from many directions and that it is undergoing radical transformation (Strange 1996); whether this implies the demise of the European nation-state, as we have known it, remains to be seen. The ﬁrst pressure comes from above. Irrespective of whether the European Union simply exists in order to allow the member-states to reach policy goals that they would be incapable of attaining in isolation, as an intergovernmental account would suggest, or is causing a veritable shift in loyalties from the individual states to the supranational polity, as ﬁrst argued by neo-functionalism, it is clear that the EU has engendered a transfer of power and a pooling of sovereignty from the member-states to the Union. When the supranational institutions of the EU constrain domestic policy-making or impose sanctions on irregular state behavior, it is clear that certain powers have been shifted onto the supranational level. A vast literature looks at these transformations, debating whether the European nation-state is being transcended or, indeed, rescued (Bartolini 2005; Milward 1992). While these statements represent extreme posi- tions that admit just about any other intermediate position, no one by now denies that the state is at least challenged from above. The second pressure comes from below. The central state is induced to relin- quish decision-making powers to levels of government that lie at, or close to, the periphery. Regardless of whether this pressure is created by sub-state nationalisms (regionalism) or rather by the willingness of the central state to ofﬂoad some of the burdensome tasks taken up during the heyday of the welfare state (regionali- zation), throughout Europe we witness a trend towards the devolution of certain 10 Introduction functions to intermediate levels of government (or administration) that lie between the center (the national government) and the periphery (municipal governments). Centralized states create administrative regions; regionalized states increase the competences of already existing regions; federal states redeﬁne the division of labor between the state and the national governments. The centralized, unitary state seems to be declining in Europe (Loughlin 2001). Lastly, the third pressure, comes from within. The blurring of the conven- tional distinction between state and society is normally blamed on globalization and European integration. Yet, even before these developments captured scholars’ attention, states had started to relinquish some of the tasks that they had taken upon themselves during the postwar period and to reduce that “overload” that they had experienced since the 1970s in the heyday of Keynes- ianism and the welfare state. The result has been a scaling down of state competencies, particularly in welfare-related ﬁelds, and a retrenchment of public administrations into the role of facilitators and regulators rather than producers and deliverers (Peters 2000: Pierre and Peters 2000). The tasks thus relinquished have been taken up by (more or less organized and autonomous, for proﬁt or non-proﬁt) expressions of civil society; hence we have witnessed trends towards devolution and delegation in much of Western Europe. Some- times, such services have been simply abandoned (as according to the stern creed of liberal self-help); sometimes they have been handed over to market- oriented agencies; sometimes they have been taken up by voluntary non- governmental organizations (NGOs). At all events, the boundaries between state and society have been shifted, trespassed, or blurred. THE PLAN OF THE BOOK If these are the pressures, how have European states reacted to them? Multi-level governance is supposed to provide an answer, but in order to determine whether the answer takes the form of new patterns of political mobilization, new modes of policy-making, or new structures of authoritative rule we need to look at all three levels of political interaction: politics, policy, and polity. And we must meet head- on three challenges of a theoretical, empirical, and normative nature. This is what the present volume purports to do, with each of its three parts dedicated to one of these challenges. Part I addresses the theoretical challenge that stems from a conceptual and historical analysis of multi-level governance. This analysis, contained in Chapter 1, shows that MLG, like other theories of governance, questions the continued existence of the unitary, autonomous, sovereign state, yet it does so by drawing special attention to the relevance that territorial jurisdictions enjoy within contemporary rule. Against the backdrop of other theories of governance that emphasize the ubiquity of networks, the role of committees, and independent administrative agencies, and the spread of new modes of governance based on “soft law,” MLG stubbornly Introduction 11 reminds us that territorial jurisdictions are not about to disappear even though they are undergoing powerful transformations and even though non-territorial jurisdictions are becoming ever more relevant. Unearthing the causes for this transformation of the state and its expected consequences are the goals of the theoretical chapters contained in the ﬁrst part. MLG is thus considered to be more than just a “compelling metaphor,” but an empirical concept that contains, at least in nuce, a causal explanation. Extracting the theoretical implications contained in the concept of MLG implies crossing three analytical boundaries. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the questioning of the center–periphery divide. It looks in particular at the postwar “invention of the Regions” (Anderson 1994) and at their new assertiveness vis-à-vis the unitary state. It avoids embracing the prevalent view that sees this development as responding to functional imperatives and rather draws attention to the political visions and entrepreneurship that are frequently associated with the claim for greater institutional powers on the part of regional authorities. Chapter 3 records the unraveling of the sovereign state and the challenging of the domestic-international divide by venturing into recent developments in international relations theory. The aim of the chapter is to extract from recent IR theories a fundamental insight for MLG: namely new forms of governance appear to “work” because they accommodate emerging factual and normative assumptions. Chapter 4 turns to the trespassing of the third boundary, that between state and society. The boundaries of the political have been shifting for many decades (Maier 1987), but perhaps as never before, the two spheres have begun to blur into one another. Territorial and functional interests have always stood in an uneasy relationship with one another, but now start to look suspiciously similar in kind. Subnational interests are represented by institutional and non-institutional actors just as functional interests are promoted by governmental and non-governmental orga- nizations. The legal and normative divide between state and society that has characterized the European state tradition is disappearing and the prospects for self- or co-governance are spreading. This ﬁrst part then discusses how these three developments are part and parcel of the concept of multi-level governance and asserts the analytical relevance of MLG. Part II faces the empirical challenge by testing the applicability of MLG in three policy settings. These policies rank differently in terms of the a priori plausibility of being convincingly described as cases of MLG. The idea, elaborated in Chapter 5, is to subject MLG to a “most dissimilar cases” strategy and check whether it retains its explanatory power in all of them. Cohesion policy (Chapter 6) is certainly the “most likely” case, having been the policy area within which MLG was ﬁrst theorized. The expectations generated by the theoretical discussion of the concept—that subnational governments will mobilize around cohesion issues, that they will challenge the gate-keeping capacities of their state, that they will forge cross-border linkages with other subnational governments in order to solve problems that exceed their individual jurisdictional reach, and that they will join forces with civil society organizations; indeed, that they will act through such 12 Introduction organizations in order to achieve their goals—must be tested. In the process, the naı̈ve version of the “Europe of the Regions” thesis will be criticized only to uphold a more sophisticated version of the same. Chapter 7 is dedicated to environmental policy. This is the case of a policy that, although clearly relevant from a territorial point of view, was originally conceived in non-territorial terms: witness the mobilization of social movements and environmental groups. However, these latter, much as in the previous case, often join forces with subnational authorities in order to challenge the authority of central states that prefer to ignore the more stringent regulations (subsidiari- ty). Alliances were forged between the supra- and the subnational levels—some- times represented by civil society organizations—in order to enforce environmental standards and implement product and process regulations. Final- ly, higher education policy is the object of Chapter 8. A “least likely case” for MLG, higher education also shows the empirical relevance of this concept of governance. In this case, the difﬁculties encountered by national education ministries in implementing the Bologna Process—in some cases, due to the federal nature of the state, which impeded the national ministry from imposing its views on state ministries—induced them to concede greater autonomy to individual institutions of learning, thus unleashing energies for increasing differentiation and marketization of higher education degrees that have been picked up increasingly also by SNAs. As competition clearly exceeds the bound- aries of any national education system, international lobbies and quality assur- ance agencies quickly acquire greater policy centrality than national ministries. The chapters of the second part, then, conﬁrm the empirical relevance of MLG. Finally, Part III takes on the normative challenge and discusses the legitimacy of MLG arrangements and decisions. This is an exercise that cannot be avoided, not only because the “normative turn” in EU studies has even surpassed the “governance turn,” but because the political plausibility of MLG arrangements are directly correlated with their delivering legitimate decisions and activating legitimate structures. The democratic temper of the EU is ultimately at stake (Chapter 9). The normative assessment of MLG arrangements proceeds by taking two by now staple criteria—input and output legitimacy—and by discussing whether and how they contribute to or detract from EU democracy. Input legitimacy is analyzed in Chapter 10 by looking at three components: authorization, representation, and participation. The importance of securing ample input into authoritative decision-making lies both in the better quality of the ﬁnal decision and in the legitimating effect that participation in the decision-making process confers on the ﬁnal decisions, even in the eyes of those groups that may “lose” from the decisions. The goal of this chapter is to check whether the manner in which governmental and non-governmental actors are authorized to participate in MLG arrangements, the interests that they therein represent, and the ways in which they participate in the policy-making process make MLG decisions more input legitimate. Chapter 11 looks at output legitimacy, analyzed in terms of transparency, responsiveness, and accountability. Given the difﬁculty of assessing the quality Introduction 13 and effectiveness of policy outcomes, output legitimacy is interpreted as an assessment of the quality of input-providing on the part of the actors involved in MLG arrangements. The questions that animate this chapter are whether MLG arrangements secure enough transparency to allow an assessment of such input- providing exercises, whether they allow subnational authorities, social partners, and civil society organizations to be responsive towards their constituencies, and whether they allow these constituencies and other “forums” to hold these actors to account. The complex interrelationship between too much and too little responsiveness and the consequent potential impossibility of holding actors to account leads to a discussion of how MLG arrangements may avoid the “joint decision trap” thanks to their “loosely coupled” structure. Chapter 12 wraps up this discussion by analyzing how MLG arrangements contribute to the overall democracy of the European Union. While the debate is still too open to draw any ﬁrm conclusion on the matter, it would appear that a diffusion and generalization of MLG structures would eventually lead to the creation of some type of “federal state” or “compound polity” that might provide a sufﬁciently solid yet malleable constitutional structure to accommodate terri- torial and functional jurisdictions, the coexistence of several levels of govern- ment, and the possibility for experimentation and diffusion of policy solutions. The concluding chapter picks up where this introductory chapter leaves off in speculating on the evolution of the European state. Along the way a few points will have been acquired. First, the European state is indeed being transformed and challenged along the three dimensions identiﬁed in this book. It is becoming less unitary, less autonomous, and less distinctive in its mode of action. Second, the territorial dimension cannot be ignored. There is no future solely made of multiple functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions on the horizon: posi- tive and negative externalities will still need to be tackled at the territorial level, both on expediency and on normative grounds. Third, in a supranational polity like the EU, subnational authorities will become increasingly more similar to social groups and lobbies; however, the values that they mobilize within the political cultures of the respective state traditions will prevent them from being completely assimilated into these a-territorial formations. Fourth, governance will be all the more effective, the greater the cooperation between territorial and non-territorial jurisdictions, as is revealed by the performance of those territorial authorities in which the welding of subnational governments with their respective civil societies has already occurred. Fifth, MLG does indeed capture a signiﬁcant number of policy processes, forms of political mobilization, and trends towards polity restructuring to warrant its continued use in the future. This page intentionally left blank Part I The Theoretical Challenge This page intentionally left blank 1 Conceptual Analysis Instead of the advent of some new political order, however distant, one ﬁnds an emerging political disorder; instead of a neat, two-sided process involving member-states and Community institutions, one ﬁnds a complex multi- layered, decision-making process stretching beneath the state, as well as above it; instead of a consistent pattern of policymaking across policy areas, one ﬁnds extremely wide and persistent variations. In short, the European Community seems to be part of a new political (dis)order that is multilayered, constitutionally open-ended, and programmatically diverse. (Marks 1992: 221) I N T RO D U C T I O N The debate on multi-level governance (MLG) spans at least ﬁfteen years, since the seminal article by Gary Marks (1992), who ﬁrst proposed it as a useful concept for understanding some of the decision-making dynamics of the European Union. Until then, the ﬁeld of EU studies in political science had been dominated by the theories of neo-functionalism and intergovernmentalism, which purported to explain not only how the European Union had come about, but also how it functioned. It was generally assumed that the same forces which explained the creation and evolution of the European Union would also explain its functioning. Whether the fundamental unit of analysis was states defending and promoting their national interests in an intergovernmental arena or market forces which inevitably drew individuals, groups, and ﬁrms towards the supranational level, the forces of integration also explained the functioning of the integrated entity. Marks (1992) had the merit of calling into question this dichotomous view of European integration and of inserting a conceptual wedge between the two theoretical poles. By highlighting the lack of attention of both theories to “ﬂesh-and blood” actors—whether because trapped in their institutional roles and therefore always promoting the interest of the institutions they represented, as with intergovernmentalism, or because moved by the powerful economic and social forces of the market, as with neo-functionalism—he drew attention to phenomena that could not easily be accommodated by either theory. In order to avoid the Scylla of the raison d’état and the Charybdis of impersonal forces, Marks (1993, 1996) introduced the visions, passions, and interests of real life 18 The Theoretical Challenge individuals and asserted the autonomous explanatory force of a third paradigm, that of multi-level governance. MLG quickly became a catch-all phrase that indicated phenomena taking place at three different analytical levels: that of political mobilization (politics), that of policy-making arrangements (policy), and that of state structures (polity).1 M LG A S PO L I T I C A L M O B I L I Z AT I O N The ﬁrst, and for a long time only, application of MLG “theory” was in the realm of cohesion policy, as it was in this realm that unconventional mobilization dynamics and decision-making patterns were most apparent (Hooghe 1995, 1996b; Hooghe and Marks 1996; Marks et al. 1996; Keating and Hooghe 1996; Jeffery 2000; Le Galès and Lequesne 2002). Other applications were later devel- oped for different EU policy ﬁelds, such as environmental policy (Jordan 1998), as well as in non-EU settings (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). Since then, the concept has caught on and there has been a veritable explosion in the number of scholars using it. In a direct confrontation with intergovernmental state-centrism, including its liberal version (Moravcsik 1993, 1998), MLG challenged the contention that non- state interests could aspire to make an impression on EU policy-making only by operating through state representatives, that is, that they could not successfully challenge the “gate-keeping” capacity of the central state. There were three main contentions of liberal intergovernmentalism: (1) that governments could effec- tively control the center-periphery gates (thus deciding which subnational forma- tions could be given the right to represent themselves in the political process as carriers of legitimately distinct interests); (2) that they could control the state- society gates (thus retaining the power to select and prioritize societal demands into a “national interest”); and (3) that they could keep the domestic-foreign gates (thus functioning as the sole legitimate representatives of domestic interests, whatever their level and nature). Marks et al. (1996) drew attention to the roles that non-national state authorities and non-governmental organizations played in the daily politics of the European Union and therefore to their capacity to be present in the European and international arenas without the gatekeepers’ permission. The debate, in the ﬁeld of regional or cohesion policy, boiled down to decid- ing whether subnational authorities were willing and capable of contributing to the policy-making process without the supervision of the central national governments. Their formal or informal involvement in European regional policy 1 A political economy reading of the political implications of European integration is suggested in Marks and Hooghe (1997). Conceptual Analysis 19 gave them an additional argument in their struggle with their central govern- ments for larger devolutionary powers and fanned regionalist aspirations for autonomy (Bourne 2003; Jeffery 1997a, 1997b; Jones and Keating 1995; Keating and Jones 1985; Piattoni 2003a; Rhodes 1995). Involvement of the regional level in cohesion policy had also potentially signiﬁcant polity implications: if regions were deemed essential for the success of structural policy, then also those states which lacked a “third” level were expected to create it (Bullmann 1994; Jeffery 1997b). Hopes were raised for an upcoming “Europe of the Regions” (Anderson 1991; Christiansen 1996; Jeffery 1997a; Loughlin 1996; see also Elias 2008a). Far from functioning as vigilant keepers of the territorial gates, national governments were unaware that the fences were being torn down. At a minimum, Marks et al. (1996) had drawn attention to the capacity of non- central state authorities to open, or even remove, the center-periphery gate and to cross the domestic-foreign gate without laissez-passer (this is the “multi-level” aspect of MLG). Moreover, they had also drawn or reawakened people’s attention to the forays that non-governmental organizations made into the daily politics of the European Union, thus marauding past the state-society gate (and this is the “governance” aspect of MLG). MLG was thus meant to draw attention precisely to the fact that the relevant levels of the “EU game” were not only the national and the supranational (as in the famous two-level theorization by Putnam (1988) so eagerly utilized by liberal-intergovernmentalism proponents), but that there were other levels which mattered as well. The point of departure for this multi-level governance is the existence of overlapping competencies among multiple levels of governments and the interaction of political actors across those levels.... Instead of the two level game assumptions adopted by state centrists, MLG theorists posit a set of overarching, multi-level policy networks.... The presumption of multi-level governance is that these actors participate in diverse policy networks and this may involve subnational actors—interest groups and subnational govern- ments—dealing directly with supranational actors. (Marks et al. 1996: 167) In this attempt to ﬂesh out the potential of MLG theory, Marks’s agenda was usefully complemented and strengthened by that of Liesbet Hooghe, who had autonomously pursued an interest in regional mobilization for quite some time (Hooghe 1995, 1996a), thus tapping into the abundant resources of a different type of literature: that on sub-state nationalism (Keating and Jones 1985; Jones and Keating 1995; Keating and Loughlin 1997). Transformations that were taking place at the EU level, and seemed uniquely determined by inter-institutional dynamics within the EU, revealed interesting parallels with developments that had their roots in regional mobilization and were therefore external, and initially perhaps even hostile, to the EU but internal to the member-states. In its turn, the literature on sub-state nationalism was part of a larger literature on the reawa- kening of political contention in Europe (McAdam et al. 2001; Imig and Tarrow 2001; Tarrow and Della Porta 2004; Tarrow 2005; Tilly and Tarrow 2007), and on new social movements (Della Porta and Diani 2006; Diani and McAdam 2003), 20 The Theoretical Challenge which supposedly had their roots in the emergence of post-materialist values in the late 1960s and 1970s. The works of Marks and McAdam (1996) and Marks et al. (1996) testify to this convergence. Even though some of the empirically oriented literature on “Europe and the regions” often concluded that the regions which best promoted their interests at the EU level did so by working through their national governments (cf. Hooghe 1996b, Hooghe and Keating 1994; Jeffery 2000), the essence of the MLG view necessarily pointed in the direction of a confusion (con-fusion) of established processes and hierarchies and the emergence of new conﬁgurations of powers and competences. The “actor-centeredness” of MLG emphasized how the different levels were traversed and linked by actors moving rather freely across formally still existent levels of government and spheres of authority. The new processes were, therefore, not just multi-level, but also multi-actor—meaning that different types of actors linked different governmental levels and populated the policy networks thus formed. However, by challenging the gate-keeping capacity of the state, Marks et al. (1996) were implicitly also calling attention to the changing nature of the state in Europe, hence inviting reﬂection on the polity dimension. M LG A S P O L I C Y- M A K I N G Once asserted, MLG theory began to be applied to the exploration of the arrangements for the production of EU policies and, more generally, to the overall functioning of the EU. This is by now generally referred to as the “post- ontological” phase in EU studies (Jachtenfuchs 1995; Caporaso 1996; Wiener and Diez 2004). Having momentarily shelved the existential (ontological) question of what forces were driving European integration and what kind of political con- struct it would eventually become, scholars began to direct their attention to the ways in which the EU actually functions and produces authoritative decisions. Scholars were also reacting to objective developments in the European Union. The completion of the Single Market and the creation of the Economic and Monetary Union signaled the completion of economic integration. The Union was by now a powerful machine producing regulation, disbursing funds, pro- moting competition. This “governance turn” was shared by other approaches: three strands of literature are deﬁnitely worth mentioning as they amount to a veritable “Copernican revolution” in EU studies: namely network governance, committee governance, and new modes of governance. “Network governance” (Peterson 1995a, 1995b; Dehousse 1997; Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999, to name just a few) addresses many of the same empirical developments as MLG, focussing on the discrete networks that emerge in the EU around single policy areas and sometimes around single policy issues. There are two main questions. The ﬁrst question, posed particularly by Kohler-Koch (1999c), is whether it is possible to extrapolate from the diverse variety of networks a speciﬁc EU mode of governance which cuts across and encompasses Conceptual Analysis 21 all different networks. The second question is whether and how such a structure gets transposed onto the different member-states’ own modes of governance and what difﬁculties and resistance such an operation encounters. In this case too, the reﬂection quickly (and self-consciously) broadens from an analysis of policy- making to an analysis of (the patterns of) political mobilization and state-society relations. Kohler-Koch’s contention is that EU networks conﬁgure the relations between public institutions and private interests in ways that defy the conven- tional notions used by political scientists to describe state-society relations such as statism, liberalism, and corporatism2 and constitute a fourth ideal-type in its own right. The second strand in the governance literature is on “committee governance” (Joerges and Neyer 1997; Joerges and Vos 1998; Christiansen and Kirchner 2000; Christiansen and Larsson 2008), produced by those scholars who study the many committees that are created to deal with those “details” of European policy- making that exceed the Council’s attention and the Commission’s knowledge. Since committees are a form of network, the two approaches overlap in part. However, while networks normally emerge spontaneously and are only later “sanctioned” by the recognition of national and supranational authorities, com- mittees are carefully crafted by supranational and national authorities to address some of the co-management problems that they face in their daily tasks. The main problems are twofold (Majone 2001; Pollack 2003b). On the one hand, the Council wants to supervise the Commission activity, particularly when it is entrusted with the implementation of Council decisions that cannot, by their very nature, be sufﬁciently detailed to exclude any kind of “drift.” On the other hand, the Commission needs the knowledge of experts dispersed across different institutional and non-institutional levels in the member-states in order to carry out its tasks. According to some, committees that were originally set up as a way for the principals (the member-states) to monitor their agent (the Commission) have turned into the agent’s way of shaping policy frames and creating networks of experts and stakeholders intimately connected with the policy in question (Wessels 1998). Interestingly, therefore, in their actual operation, these commit- tees tend to acquire traits that make them similar to self-crafted networks as they tend to act like small communities generating speciﬁc worldviews, specialized languages, approved argumentative styles, standard procedures (Quaglia et al. 2008). The typology of committees is very wide, as they serve different purposes (intelligence gathering, solution ﬁnding, implementation monitoring, outcome evaluation) without (yet) conﬁguring any overarching structure that may prove technically unviable and politically awkward if extended over too many areas and too many issues. 2 A line of reﬂection with roots in Lijphart (1977, 1999), directly quoted by the author, as well as in Streeck and Schmitter (1985b). 22 The Theoretical Challenge The third strand is the “new modes of governance” literature which expands its focus to embrace all those arrangements that have been devised since the Treaty of Maastricht to arrive at minimally binding agreements without issuing formal regulations (overviews are contained in Eberlein and Kerwer 2002, 2004; Knill and Lenschow 2003; Citi and Rhodes 2007). Open Method of Coordination (OMC), soft law, dialogues—these are the ways in which the EU has tried to secure coordination among and convergence towards desired ends in the absence of sufﬁcient consensus to legislate change. These new modes are premised on the self-steering capacity of actors who jointly establish the goals to be achieved as well as the roadmap for their achievement. These actors realize that in order to achieve commonly desired policy results, they need to negotiate a ﬂexible approach tailored to the pace and difﬁculties of each partner. Public authorities are part of these arrangements, either as mere actors or as facilitators or as supervisors—hence the perception that these new modes of governance unfold in the “shadow of hierarchy” (Héritier and Eckert 2008). However, also in this case we witness a certain ﬂattening of hierarchies and blurring of boundaries that was detected also by the other two strands. The new modes of governance literature share with the other governance approaches an appreciation of the self-constituting capacity of these arrangements and ample recourse to good arguments in order to ﬁnd commonly satisfactory solutions as suggested by the discursive approach to politics (Drycek 1990; Wæver 2004). Other scholars have called these methods “democratic experimentalism” (Dorf and Sabel 1998) or “experimentalist governance” (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008) and the structures that result are described as “directly deliberative polyarchy” (Cohen and Sabel 1997). M LG A S PO L I T Y- S T RU C T U R I N G The MLG perspective—like that of network governance, committee governance, and the new modes of governance—almost inevitably ends up analyzing all three aspects of state-society interactions: political mobilization, policy-making, and state structuring. Trying to conﬁne the analysis of MLG to only one of these analytical planes would be futile and deprive the concept of its main source of interest and fertility. MLG is interesting precisely because it spans different analytical levels—hence the maddening task of devising a “multi-level framework for analysis” (Citi and Rhodes 2007) to study multi-level governance!—and because it points to inherently dynamic arrangements. The step from describing policy-making processes and patterns of political mobilization to theorizing about how individual member-states and the EU polity are being restructured is as inevitable as it is demanding. It means engaging with portentous issues (the structuring of the political space) and mammoth literatures (on state formation, different state forms, different models of democracy, etc.) in their own right. As the theorists of MLG themselves acknowledged, proper theorization on how the new type of mobilization and policy-making was redeﬁning the state—that is, the Conceptual Analysis 23 institutional structures of center-periphery, state-society, and domestic-foreign relations—was, at the time of their writing, still out of sight. However, MLG theorists have not framed clear expectations about the dy- namics of this polity. If, as these theorists claim, competencies have slipped away from central states both up to the supranational level and down to the sub-national level, then, ceteris paribus, one would expect greater interaction among actors at these levels. But the details remain murky and, apart from a generalized presumption of increasing mobilization across levels, they pro- vide no systematic set of expectations about which actors should mobilize and why. (Marks et al. 1996: 167) In reality, the “destructive part” (pars destruens) of the original Marks argument was stronger than its “constructive part” (pars construens). The weapon that had allowed him to create a conceptual space for MLG (i.e. to say what MLG was not), that is, its “actor-centeredness,” was not as useful in erecting the MLG construc- tion (i.e. to say what MLG was), although stimulating and suggestive of other types of investigation that could depart from this (see e.g. the attempt to explore the personalistic, informal component of many governance arrangements pur- sued by Christiansen and Piattoni 2003; Stacey and Rittberger 2003; Mak and van Tatenhove 2006). Indeed, MLG theory-building proved to be a much harder and as yet uncompleted task, to which other scholars also contributed. The third phase in MLG studies, then, increasingly concentrated precisely on the process of constructing a multi-level polity and on its expected features. In many ways, this marks a return to the original ontological agenda of integration studies, somehow closing the analytical circle. Scholars were by now suggesting that MLG referred to processes that, through the slow accumulation of policy decisions and political mobilization, were transforming the political structure of the European Union, the structures of the individual European member-states and, perhaps through similar dynamics elsewhere, the structures of the state tout court. This line of inquiry has its roots in the attempts of scholars who sought to explain real-life developments, while studying changes in the public administra- tion and territorial articulation of national states. Two notable examples will sufﬁce. R. A. W. Rhodes (1988, 1996, 1997) analyzed the disaggregation of British governmental and territorial structure; Fritz Scharpf (1988, 1994a, 1994b, 1997a, 2000a) investigated the aggregation and coordination of diverse policy prefer- ences in Europe. Though taking concrete territorial entities as their point of departure, in both cases MLG was approached as a quintessentially theoretical problem. MLG studies thus acquired an increasingly more abstract and authenti- cally theoretical overtone and produced attempts at general theorizations. To begin with, Marks and Hooghe audaciously sought to use the concept not just to describe a peculiar type of decision-making arrangement (policy) or a new pattern of political mobilization (politics), but also as a novel development in state restructuring (polity) (Hooghe and Marks 2002, 2003; Marks and Hooghe 2004). Building on ideas ﬁrst propounded by economists (Frey and Eichenberger 1999), in numerous contributions Marks and Hooghe developed two ideal-types 24 The Theoretical Challenge of MLG, in an attempt to deﬁne the theoretical space within which empirical instances of intergovernmental relations, which were emerging, for example, in cohesion policy, could be located. Their goal was to theorize the “unravelling of the state” (Hooghe and Marks 2003) and the emergence of new patterns of relations between different levels of government that had traditionally been conceived as hierarchically ordered, or at least nested within one another, and that were now challenging or bypassing these established relations without, however, completely superseding them. According to Marks and Hooghe, (ideal)Type I MLG resembles more conven- tional federal systems, which establish a stable division of labor across a limited number of levels of government with general jurisdiction over a given territory or a given set of issues and mutually exclusive membership. (Ideal)Type II MLG, for the moment still lacking a well-identiﬁed “real-life” referent, appears as an anarchical, ﬂuctuating superimposition of single-purpose jurisdictions with overlapping memberships. In an attempt to distill theoretically typical modes of action from different governance systems, Marks and Hooghe argued that differ- ent types of mobilization can be associated with these two MLG ideal-types: a “voice” type of action in Type I MLG systems and an “exit” type of action in Type II MLG systems, as one would logically expect from actors trapped in fairly stable and ordered systems of governance and actors free to move easily across numer- ous and unconnected systems of governance, respectively. Chris Skelcher (2005) advanced this line of thinking by elaborating a general theory of how systems of governance develop “jurisdictional integrity.” Also according to Skelcher, Type I MLG is the type we (think we) know better because it is “the predominant mode within national polities” (Skelcher 2005: 94). The process of state-building imposed order on surrounding territories by asserting the exclusive jurisdiction of national centers over competing would-be national centers and creating a “hierarchically ordered system of multi-purpose governments” (Skelcher 2005: 94). Type II governance tends to ﬂourish speciﬁcally when there is a need for a tailored governmental body to address an issue that is not susceptible to policy action by a Type I organization, for example, in the international arena and when there are particular functional governance problems. The empirical data... show that Type II governance occurs extensively in settings where the high boundary integrity of Type I governmental systems produces a competency constraint, in other words where mainstream governmental organizations are unable to respond ﬂexibly to policy issues that intersect their jurisdictions. (Skelcher 2005: 94) Type II governance normally coexists with Type I governance in the same overarching polity it is embedded in (Hooghe and Marks 2003: 238). Typically, in contemporary societies, Type II jurisdictions get superimposed onto one another in a disorderly fashion and onto Type I jurisdictions. We often observe overlaps between both jurisdictional types, among which, in case of conﬂict, it may be difﬁcult to adjudicate. In this case, according to Skelcher’s terminology, we have “polycentric governance.” Challenges to jurisdictional integrity (hence Conceptual Analysis 25 confusion and overlap) may come from above or below, when super- or subordi- nate jurisdictions step forward to manage more effectively given policy issues (thus fanning integrative or devolutionary processes). Alternatively, they may come from the side, when same-level jurisdictions trespass across jurisdictional boundaries (thus triggering aggregative processes). Interestingly, and in accor- dance with an actor-centered approach to MLG, Skelcher observes how “The boundary spanning behavior of individuals operating at the margins of their jurisdictions embodies a deeper motivation to challenge and recast the existing patterns of governmental authority” (Skelcher 2005: 96). Moreover, relational integrity is more complicated for Type II than Type I governance. Type I governance, in practice, is nothing more nor less than the conventional nation-state: Type I bodies are constructed, discursively in terms of their formal authority, as the government for that community of citizens. The body is embedded in a political process that makes it the focus of the expression and allocation of community values. There is an infrastructure of democratic rule by elected representatives that provides symbolic and substantive means for securing legitimacy, consensus and accountability. Type II bodies, by contrast, have properties that lead to weak “democratic anchorage.” (Skelcher 2005: 96) So, while the conceptual dichotomy between Type I and Type II governance is clear, it is less simple to devise concrete modes of boundary regulation (processes) and less easy to build institutions for their regulation and adjudication (structures). Type II MLG structures borrow some of their legitimacy, consensus, and account- ability from Type I governance structures, but they also attempt to create mechan- isms of their own. Generally speaking, though, they exist in an “institutional void” and must rely on the force of interpersonal relations for their continuing existence. Normally speaking, the legitimacy of Type I MLG structures derives from the procedures by which they are regulated (rules, roles, and norms), while the legitimacy of Type II MLG structure depends on their effectiveness and on the “navigational skills” of their management. Clearly, these are two distinct normative planes, and yet these two types of governance coexist in contemporary democracies and characterize the European polity, in particular. According to Pierre and Peters (2000), these two types of governance coexist in a “negotiated order” typical of situations in which the new institutional level, in this case the European Union, is trying to get institution- alized in a context which is still dominated by existing institutions. Bache (2008) and Conzelmann and Smith (2008) understand these two Types in a rather straightforward way, as different ways of organizing the delivery of speciﬁc services in modern democracies. In this sense, Type II jurisdictions may also be non-territorial and get superimposed on Type I jurisdictions. Fairly common examples—which feature in abundance in every European member- state—are national health units, school districts, industrial consortia, and so on. If, however, we take these two MLG Types as “ideal-types,” then it becomes more difﬁcult and problematic to conceive a modern polity as consisting mostly or exclusively of non-territorial jurisdictions that only claim functional allegiance 26 The Theoretical Challenge from their members and offer them only limited opportunities to express their desires and grievances. In many ways, this would amount to a major restructuring of the European state, and one which would seem hard to accept normatively. The contrast and inherent tension between these two types of MLG was reformulated by Scharpf in terms of the search for the “optimal scale of govern- ment,” that is, that level of government which is both effective in securing solutions to collective problems, because it operates on a sufﬁciently large scale to obtain technically superior solutions, and democratic, because it remains on a sufﬁciently small scale not to involve any signiﬁcant sacriﬁce of individual preferences (Scharpf 1988: 239). Like Bartolini (1998) and Skelcher (2005), Scharpf believes that the balance between governmental levels accomplished by the national state in the eighteenth century has been progressively called into question by states’ inability to prevent external threats (negative externalities) that pitted them against each other (read: wars) and by their inability to fully reap the proﬁts (positive externalities) that monetary and real ﬂows on a continental scale could generate (read: single market). From the realization of the inability of national states to prevent wars and reap proﬁts supposedly comes their resolution to equip themselves with supranational structures of government (read: the European Union). And yet, as many scholars acknowledge, the apparent inefﬁciency of a given level of government does not immediately entail its willingness to divest itself of its powers in favor of another level of government. The new order presupposes the weakening and the overcoming of the old order, and yet governmental institutions live well past the reasons for their coming into being, partly because they manage to mobilize a wealth of expectations, myths, and loyalties that, by shaping individual behavior, tend to grant them staying power (cf. Jachtenfuchs 1997). But these are questions that will be taken up in the third part of the book. M LG’S C ON C E P TUA L S PAC E Summarizing the conceptual history to date, the term “multi-level governance” denotes a diverse set of arrangements, a panoply of systems of coordination and negotiation among formally independent but functionally interdependent enti- ties that stand in complex relations to one another and that, through coordina- tion and negotiation, keep redeﬁning these relations. It is also itself a “multi-level concept,” because it connects different analytical planes and raises different types of questions. Let us recall the main points made in the course of the conceptual analysis carried out above. MLG is at the same time a theory of political mobilization, of policy-making, and of polity structuring, hence any theorization about MLG must be couched alternatively or simultaneously in politics, policy, or polity terms. The levels which are connected by MLG must be ﬁrst and foremost understood as territorial levels (supranational, national, subnational), each commanding a certain degree of Conceptual Analysis 27 authority over the corresponding territory and the individuals residing in it, but they may also indicate other jurisdictional levels, identiﬁed with regard to a certain function and to the constituents who are interested in the performance of that function. The challenges which they face are of an objective nature (asserting jurisdictional integrity over the selected territory or function) and of a subjective nature (securing relational integrity in terms of legitimacy, consen- sus, and accountability), hence the need to study both their empirical and normative implications. MLG thus raises theoretical, empirical, and normative questions that require commensurate answers in terms of empirically falsiﬁable propositions. I here propose a graphic elaboration (Figure 1.1) of the conceptual space within which MLG is located in order to help identify the empirical propositions to be tested. As already remarked, MLG is an inherently dynamic concept that crosses several analytical boundaries or “gates”: namely the gates between center and periphery, between the domestic and the international, and between state and society. The origin of the axes identiﬁes the (ideal-typical) sovereign state, as it has been theorized since the seventeenth century: a territorial system endowed with high boundary and relational integrity (Skelcher 2005; Bartolini 2005). The ﬁrst axis (X1) indicates movements away from the unitary state towards decen- tralized, devolved, and federal conﬁgurations along a formal power dimension (center v. periphery), as theorized by regionalism. We know that what makes the federated units strong vis-à-vis the center are both formal attributes (e.g. legisla- tive and ﬁscal competences) as well as less formal, but nevertheless crucial, characteristics (such as cultural distinctiveness and administrative capacities): X2 Europe and (“of” or Theories of “with”) the regions European integration O X1 Type I MLG Regionalism Type II MLG X3 Fig. 1.1. MLG’s analytical space Notes: X1 ¼ center-periphery dimension; X2 ¼ domestic-international dimension; X3 ¼ state-society dimension; O ¼ the sovereign state. 28 The Theoretical Challenge the ﬁrst axis can be thought of as measuring primarily the former but as being sensitive also to the latter. The second axis (X2) indicates movements away from the autonomous state towards increasingly structured modes of international cooperation and regulation, as theorized by intergovernmentalism. International regimes subject (albeit willing) sovereign states to their disciplining rule, thus limiting and constraining the autonomy of the individual states. International relations thus increasingly shed their purely anarchic character and acquire the traits of regulated regimes. The third axis (X3) portrays movements away from the clear-cut distinction between the public and the private, between state and society, between lex and jus. Movements away from the origin show increasing degrees of involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) in authoritative decision-making, policy imple- mentation, monitoring, and evaluation, as theorized by functionalism. Three intersecting planes and a three-dimensional space are thus formed. The ﬁrst plane, delimited by X1 and X2, is the one travelled mostly by the literature on “Europe and the Regions”: comparative studies on devolutionary trends in Europe or on the emergence of a “third level” in Europe typically connect changes in center-periphery relations with the stimuli (various push and pull factors) coming from the international context (because of the heightened competition sparked by globalization, because of the regulatory osmosis encouraged by Europeanization, or simply because of cross-national emulation). Similarly, the “Europe of the regions” hypothesis postulated a causal correlation between growing Europeanization and the strengthening of regional identities, whereas the literature on “Europe with the regions” reduced the causal claim to a mere correlation, with the European Union simply acting as an additional structure of political opportunities that only some regions were willing and able to effectively exploit. Again, on this plane, we would ﬁnd studies of the ingenious ways in which regional authorities use their manifold (particularly social, economic, and cultural) resources to conduct their own brand of foreign diplomacy (para- diplomacy), establishing regional ofﬁces in Brussels, opening up to cultural exchanges, entering cross-border cooperation agreements, engaging in twinning exercises, lending assistance to their “co-regionals” living abroad, and so on (Keating and Aldecoa 1999). The varied literature on regional mobilization in Brussels and elsewhere belongs, in other words, to this plane. The second plane is the one described by the X2 and X3 axes: on this plane, we can locate the vast literature that tries to chart the mobilization of transnational groups, such as international social movements and advocacy coalitions. The mobilization of these new global actors has been studied independently by sociologis

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