Conceptual Combinations: Multilevel Governance and Policy Networks

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In this chapter I consider two recent additions to the EU scholar’s analytical toolkit: the concepts of multilevel governance and policy networks. I seek to explain the meaning of these concepts and to set out their respective uses for advancing our theoretical understanding of the EU. I argue that the two concepts are of greatest utility when they are used together rather than separately, hence reference in the chapter title to ‘conceptual combinations’. I argue this because multilevel governance is a concept which helps us understand the kind of polity that the EU has become and how it is currently evolving, whereas policy network analysis helps us understand the complex processes of alliance construction, bargaining and deliberation through which EU public policy is actually produced. In other words, when taken together, the two concepts can give EU scholars a workable understanding of the nature of the EU system and how it works. We can thus go some way — but not all the way — towards filling the ‘grand theory-shaped hole’ (Warleigh, 2000a, 173) that has been present in recent EU theory, and combine insights from different approaches more successfully than in the past.