Multi-level Governance System Research Articles

The cultural paradiplomacy of Barcelona since the 1980s: understanding transformations in local cultural paradiplomacy

This article seeks to explain the conditions for the emergence and institutionalization of the cultural paradiplomacy of the city of Barcelona and its local effects. The recognition of the city as an active participant on the international stage is based on its evolution from an industrial to a service economy. Against this backdrop, Barcelona’s city council, in common with many other city authorities operating in the world’s metropolises during the 1980s, initiated its own cultural paradiplomacy as a strategy for attracting capital and promoting local development. This policy became established as part of a new multilevel system of governance. This article analyzes the causes of the institutionalization of this activity from an intergovernmental perspective. It concludes that in the context of economic globalization, the emergence of cities’ cultural paradiplomacy is strongly related to the restructuring of the State and its external administration and to the intensification of the ‘cultural branding’ of cities as a tool for global competition.

Managing the EU Crises: Another Way of Integration by Stealth?

Europe has been hit hard by the financial and economic crisis, and there is no fast solution in view. The problem facing the EU is a problem of governance both technically and politically. Most actors, with the possible exception of the ECB, are in disarray because they are caught between the necessity to act and the political reluctance to acknowledge fully the consequences of a multi-level governance system, notably democratic legitimacy and accountability. The discrepancy between political rhetoric and actual practices during the crisis appears as a new form of government by stealth. There is not yet an obvious way out of this morass. The first one seems the easiest as it would be nothing more than ‘muddling through’ as usual, whereas the second option, a two-speed Europe, though more politically attractive, is technically very difficult to implement institutionally. The third possible solution is paradoxically the one that surreptitiously persists at present: a ‘federalism of executives’ that is both unmanageable in the long run and unacceptable from a democratic point of view.

Scheduled Castes Policies in Interstate Perspective: Constitutional Power, Argumentative Practices, and Governance in India

The article discusses legal and administrative dimensions that are relevant for comparing development policies for the Scheduled Castes across Indian states. The policies for the Scheduled Castes are subject to more central control than several other policy domains. The article therefore highlights the logic in India’s multilevel system of governance while specifying the constitutional meaning of the Scheduled Caste category, its related terms and discursive relevance. This provides a background to outline the relevant institutional dimensions at the center of India’s political system and the level of the regional states. The article suggests that the Scheduled Castes Development Corporations provide a useful basis to develop interstate comparisons. However, the comparison of development policies for Scheduled Castes cannot be complete without acknowledging the extent to which policies are often a result of argumentative practices among Dalit movements and actors in context, since their demands may generate decisions or information about policies.

Helping Loose Ends Meet? The Judicial Acknowledgement of Soft Law as a Tool of Multi-Level Governance

In the established multi-level governance system of the European Union, the Court of Justice was instrumental in framing a supranational constitution. Over recent years, a vast variety of soft law and soft methods of governance were put in place, ‘loosely’ binding together the different layers of EU governance. While the EU Courts sometimes engage with such instruments and methods, they fail to acknowledge important consequences that soft law can have on the rights and obligations of individuals. This approach can have a negative impact on the justiciability of soft law, creating a way for a vast body of EU instruments to escape judicial control. Furthermore, in the absence of judicial recognition, soft law fails to accomplish some of its key objectives, such as fostering legal certainty, transparency, and the consistent application of rules in the EU multi-level governance system.

The Uniting of Europe by Transclusion: Understanding the Contextual Conditions of Integration Through Law

ABSTRACTPolitical science has discovered the European Court of Justice,’ as Armstrong notes in an article published 15 years ago, ‘[b]ut has it discovered law?’ Today, the answer to this question is an ambivalent one. Although political science has developed a certain sense of the structural necessities arising from the rules of law and the complexity of the judicial process in a multilevel governance system, it still lacks an approach that conceptualizes it as a self-contained framework of integration. Here, it will be argued that a contextualist approach could fill this gap in current research. From this perspective, the law itself — not, first and foremost, its most prominent actors — propels integration through a phenomenon that could be best described as a three-dimensional transclusion of the European legal order.

Участие Европейского союза в политическом управлении глобальными финансами

The article displays the ranking of the European Union, as a unique political body, in the formation of the multilevel system of global financial governance. Respective interactions of the EU with the G20, the IMF and the Financial Stability Board are explored. The notion of transnational spaces is employed to study the emergence, beyond national frameworks, of new centers of decision-making and decision-taking, in which national governments and regulators still participate. The analysis of the European institutions enhancing their standing in the world affairs by implementing global-level financial decisions completes the picture.

A Question of Time: Responsive and Responsible Democratic Politics

Since 2008, European crisis politics have thrown the importance of time in democracy into sharp relief. The need for rapid action by national authorities, the EU and international organisations conflicts with the time-consuming nature of democratic deliberation; short-term political firefighting has given little consideration to the long-term sustainability and time consistency of policies; and decentralised decisions threaten effective synchronisation within multi-level governance systems. This article suggests that democratic politics requires a balance between the temporal characteristics of responsive and responsible politics. The timeframe for responsive politics is shaped by electoral cycles that encourage speedy action; short-term lags between political choices and their effects; and temporal discretion of decision-makers. The timeframe for responsible politics is characterised by time-consuming procedures; solutions that take time to unfold and are sustainable in the longer term; and the purposive synchronisation amongst actors and across policy domains and levels of policy-making. The finely balanced temporal constitution of democracy has been challenged in two fundamental ways. First, as the ability of decision-makers to work within the time limits of their mandates and to respond to the temporal expectations of the electorate decreases, the temporal ties that ensure the responsiveness of political authority to the electorate weaken. Second, the distinct temporal qualities of majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions that encourage responsibility are called into question. Consequently, political time in Europe runs the risk of becoming both less responsive and less responsible.

Food Security and Agri‐Foreign Direct Investment in Weak States: Finding the Governance Gap to Avoid ‘Land Grab’

Food security is important. A rising world population coupled with climate change creates growing pressure on global world food supplies. States alleviate this pressure domestically by attracting agri‐foreign direct investment (agri‐FDI). This is a high‐risk strategy for weak states: the state may gain valuable foreign currency, technology and debt‐free growth; but equally, investors may fail to deliver on their commitments and exploit weak domestic legal infrastructure to ‘grab’ large areas of prime agricultural land, leaving only marginal land for domestic production. A net loss to local food security and to the national economy results. This is problematic because the state must continue to guarantee its citizens' right to food and property. Agri‐FDI needs close regulation to maximise its benefit. This article maps the multilevel system of governance covering agri‐FDI. We show how this system creates asymmetric rights in favour of the investor to the detriment of the host state's food security and how these problems might be alleviated.

Applying a Social-Ecological System Framework to the Study of the Taos Valley Irrigation System

This paper applies a social-ecological system (SES) framework to the analysis of a SES in the Taos valley of northern New Mexico. The SES analyzed is a set of interconnected irrigation communities known as acequias. These have persisted in the area for several hundred years. In this paper I combine concepts from multi-level governance, social network analysis, and interconnected action situations to diagnose the factors that have enabled the acequias to maintain the levels of cooperation needed to persist as farming communities in a high desert environment. To conduct this research, interview data were collected on-site to complement existing court testimonies and other relevant primary and secondary data. These data were analyzed via a step-wise diagnostic process that is inspired by the SES framework and used to illustrate how the acequias form a multilevel governance system via key network attributes, and how this governance structure maps onto the resource system while not overburdening the participants and providing sufficient benefits to motivate continued cooperation over time.

Watching Sausage Being Made: Lessons learned from the co-production of governance in a behavioural health system

We draw out lessons from a multi-level governance system implemented to create more consumer oversight and involvement in the governance of behavioural health services. Through two rounds of interviews, we identified key areas of design that were difficult to implement, resulting in the system continuing to operate as a top-down environment rather than a flatter arrangement. Although new governance structures can be implemented, the underlying culture of government has to shift to allow real buy-in. Until this happens, multi-level governance systems will remain single-layered and command and control systems. The patina of change will cause frustration and animosity among participants.

School decentralization as a process of differentiation, hierarchization and selection

The Austrian ‘school autonomy policy’, which allowed schools to develop specific ‘curricular profiles’, is taken as an example for discussing processes and effects of school decentralization policies. Data from school case studies (based on qualitative interviews and document analysis) are used to analyse and interpret the processes by which schools and teachers take up policy innovations and translate it into action and structures on school and classroom level. These policy changes and the resulting governance regimes are examined from a perspective on changing modes of ‘action coordination’ between actors on different levels of a school system and from an attention to processes of ‘re-contextualization’ in multi-level governance systems. The main result is that the Austrian decentralization policy – although not explicitly based on a market approach – boosted principles of competitive coordination between schools. In consequence, it resulted in processes of differentiation and hierarchization of schools and classes and offered new legitimatory and practical opportunities for student selection.

A Struggle of Multi-level Governance: Promoting Renewable Energy in Indonesia

A shift towards renewable energy is a complex, multi-dimensional policy goal that involves national and subnational actors within a multi-level governance system – especially in heavily decentralized countries like Indonesia. This leads to the following research question: How does the multi-level governance framework in a decentralized country like Indonesia affect efforts for a transition towards renewable energy? The country serves as a case study due to its highly decentralized political system. This qualitative research is especially based on interviews with relevant national and subnational stakeholders. Transition management is used as a theoretical framework. This paper concludes that weak local capacity, a lack of awareness for national intentions on subnational levels and vice versa as well as missing consultation during policy formulation are major obstacles for renewables support in Indonesia.

Wind of Change or Wind of Challenges: Implementation factors regarding wind energy development, an international perspective

Countries promoting renewable energies encounter a variety of phenomena that can challenge the implementation of further onshore wind energy development. Those challenges can be observed in many multi-level governance systems, as exhibited in the U.S., Germany, and Mexico, where various regulatory and institutional levels must agree on goals and responsibilities. This is a challenge, as both forms of governance (top-down and bottom-up dominated) are present in wind energy planning and policy. (1) Political and market phenomena, (2) siting issues, (3) the vs. dilemma, and (4) social acceptance are selected challenges within the different levels of decision-making processes in wind energy implementation. (1) Political and financial factors can influence the development by implementing incentive- and market-based policies, command-and-control policies, and feed-in tariffs. However, success of these policy designs for renewable energies is based on different political environments, and their electricity markets nationally, regionally, or statewide. (2) Spatial limitations in planning are created based on limited land availability due to conflicts with other land uses such as aviation, nature reserves, residential areas, their respective buffers. (3) The vs. green dilemma involves the incoherent relationship between policies promoting renewable energies with policies protection species and their environments, becoming a major point of concern during siting and operations of wind energy. (4) Lastly, while there is a general overall support for wind energy, social acceptance on a local level is influenced by institutional settings i.e. information availability, as well as public and stakeholder concerns. Involvement in decision-making as well as financial participation (e.g. community-ownership) affects public participation and acceptance. This paper goes into detail on these phenomena and discusses case studies in Europe and North America. Often, these challenges can enhance outlooks in policy and planning, posing solutions to wind energy challenges even in sensitive environments and triggering innovations such as adaptive management.

Why Regions Matter in Immigrant Integration Policies: North Rhine-Westphalia and Emilia-Romagna in Comparative Perspective

Immigration policies in Europe, since the late 1980s and the early 1990s, have become increasingly politicised, challenging, for example, attempts to recruit migrant labour and placing more and more emphasis on demands for immigrants to adhere to cultural, social and legal norms of the host societies. Despite these developments, however, the situation in Europe remains rather puzzling: besides the adverse political climate, certain European countries have experienced remarkable progress in promoting the integration of newcomers from non-EU member states. In order to explain the dynamics behind integration policy formation in Europe, we consider it necessary to move beyond a conceptualisation that is restricted to national politics. We link this observation to the structural changes in Europe's emerging system of multi-level governance, which has empowered sub-national levels of governance in their efforts to design and implement integration policies. Employing a political opportunity structure model, we hypothesise that the diversity of these dynamics (i.e. competition between parties and interaction with organisations within civil society) may produce different policies than those at the national level. Our argument is based on a comparative case study of Emilia-Romagna in Italy and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.

Fiscal federalism in the European Union: Evolution and future choices for EMU

In order to besustainable as a multilevel system of fiscal and economic governance, EMU faces certain challenges that are common to all federal, multilevel, or fiscally decentralized systems. This paper focuses on three such central challenges: (1) enforcing fiscal discipline; (2) addressing structural inequalities between different euro area economies; and (3) preventing and countering asymmetric shocks. The paper analyses the evolution of the EU's multilevel system of fiscal and economic governance in relation to these three challenges, showing that they have been only partially addressed. If it were to address these obstacles more fully, the EU would face a crucial choice between two ideal models of integration: The "surveillance model", where Member States maintain all taxing power and where the EU is an enforcer of discipline, and the "classic fiscal federalism" model, where the EU acquires an independent sphere of fiscal authority, and thus its own fiscal tools for macroeconomic stabilization. The paper analyses the implications of both models andargues that the surveillance model, when taken to its natural conclusion, poses as much of a threat to Member States' autonomy, and presents us with similar democratic legitimacy problems, as the classic fiscal federalism model.

Building Negotiated Agreement: The Emergence of Community-Based Tourism in Floreana (Galápagos Islands)

Community Based Tourism (CBT) is a polysemic term referring to local involvement in the planning, development, and management of tourism. While there is no direct correspondence between CBT and positive economic and conservation outcomes, CBT is a frame widely used to reconcile tourism development with social-environmental goals. Building upon the case of the island community of Floreana, within the Galápagos National Park (GNP) in Ecuador (where tourism activities have introduced major environmental problems), this paper analyzes the emergence of CBT as part of multi-level processes of institutional crafting. Efforts to develop a new model of tourism management in Galápagos, strongly shaped by a particular community, offer a quasi-experimental case of rule-crafting aimed at developing a participatory, multi-level governance system. Our approach integrates ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis with the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to identify key elements associated with the process of implementing CBT. We discuss three points of broader relevance: the inter-dependence of regional and local levels, the importance of considering worldviews and the intended outcomes envisioned by different actors, and the importance of coherence in rule-crafting (across levels and types of rules) defining control and regulation of CBT development and of tourism operations.

New Public Management Reforms and Democratic Legitimacy: Notions of Democratic Legitimacy among West European Local Councillors

The article extends the question about the notion of democracy to the concept of democratic legitimacy and distinguishes between input and output-based legitimacy. We explore local councillors' view on the two alternative notions of legitimacy. The first question is descriptive and concerns the support for alternative notions of democratic legitimacy among councillors across twelve West European countries. What notion of legitimacy receives the stronger support: input-based legitimacy, associated with representative democracy and participation, or output-based legitimacy, emphasising the performance of democratic institutions – as promoted by New Public Management reforms? The second question is explanatory and concerns whether the view held by the councillors depends on the multi-level government system in a specific country. We assume that the more responsibility for the production of welfare services held by local government, the more support output-oriented legitimacy measures is likely to receive. We find that our measures of input-based legitimacy receive more widespread support than the measures of output-based legitimacy. As regards the impact of local government systems and responsibilities held by local governments our main hypothesis does gain some support, but the results are not significant. A reasonable interpretation of the fairly weak findings at this point is that local government in all European countries has a strong political foundation. Despite system differences and NPM reforms, European councillors appear to be strongly attached to their traditional representative role.

Multiple levels and multiple challenges for measurement, reporting and verification of REDD+

REDD+ is a multilevel endeavour. Global demands, national and subnational structures and local people’s needs and aspirations must all be linked in efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. We use Brockhaus and Angelsen’s (2012) framework of Institutions, Interests, Information and Ideas (4Is) to analyse the multilevel governance of REDD+ through one of its core elements: measurement, reporting and verification. We present the multilevel dimensions of REDD+ and the risks if they are disregarded. We analyse the flow and interplay of information, institutions and interests across levels in REDD+ measurement, reporting and verification and examine which multilevel governance mechanisms enable this flow. To support our analysis, we provide anecdotal evidence of challenges and opportunities from three countries: Brazil, Vietnam and Indonesia. Our analysis shows that it is essential to enhance and harmonize information flows between local and national levels for measurement, reporting and verification to be accountable. Furthermore, sound information flows between levels can increase the negotiation power of disadvantaged groups and ensure a more effective, efficient and equitable REDD+. To reduce the risk of conflict, REDD+ multilevel governance systems must match incentives and interests with transparent institutions. Effective multilevel governance mechanisms, such as novel cross-scale institutional arrangements, uniform regulations on the rights, responsibilities and procedures for monitoring information flows, and participation across levels, will provide tools for both information flow and greater matching of different interests across levels.

Multiple levels and multiple challenges for measurement, reporting and verification of REDD+

REDD+ is a multilevel endeavour. Global demands, national and subnational structures and local people’s needs and aspirations must all be linked in efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. We use Brockhaus and Angelsen’s (2012) framework of Institutions, Interests, Information and Ideas (4Is) to analyse the multilevel governance of REDD+ through one of its core elements: measurement, reporting and verification. We present the multilevel dimensions of REDD+ and the risks if they are disregarded. We analyse the flow and interplay of information, institutions and interests across levels in REDD+ measurement, reporting and verification and examine which multilevel governance mechanisms enable this flow. To support our analysis, we provide anecdotal evidence of challenges and opportunities from three countries: Brazil, Vietnam and Indonesia. Our analysis shows that it is essential to enhance and harmonize information flows between local and national levels for measurement, reporting and verification to be accountable. Furthermore, sound information flows between levels can increase the negotiation power of disadvantaged groups and ensure a more effective, efficient and equitable REDD+. To reduce the risk of conflict, REDD+ multilevel governance systems must match incentives and interests with transparent institutions. Effective multilevel governance mechanisms, such as novel cross-scale institutional arrangements, uniform regulations on the rights, responsibilities and procedures for monitoring information flows, and participation across levels, will provide tools for both information flow and greater matching of different interests across levels.

The Interplay of Urban Energy Policy and Socio-technical Transitions: The Eco-cities of Graz and Freiburg in Retrospect

The cities of Graz in Austria and Freiburg in Germany have been perceived as ecological model cities since the late 1980s.This is shown by various international awards, press coverage and many visitors from other municipal administrations. Both cities have been well known for their attempts to bring about transitions towards more sustainable and low-carbon energy systems. The comparison of Graz and Freiburg over a period of two decades enables us to study how differing contexts, actor constellations and historic developments shape the transformation of energy systems towards greater sustainability. It is argued that understanding the role of cities for energy transitions requires a detailed examination of the coupled dynamics of socio-technical interactions across the levels of niches, regimes and landscapes on the one hand, and multilevel systems of governance on the other. At these intersections new, although spatially confined, socio-technical constellations of sustainable energy provision may emerge and be stabilised. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that it is misleading to conclude that true socio-technical transitions are taking place in these cities, even though a number of foundations for long-term change processes have been laid.