The Limits of Traditional Approaches to Public Policy Most academic discussion of the public policy process treats the inter national and global of analysis as exogenous. This reflects a gen eral tendency in social science to see domestic political systems as the paramount playing fields where political actors interact and pursue their goals. This bias is reinforced by the study of international relations, which generally treats domestic actors as subsumed into reified states, deemed to be unit actors. A levels of analysis distinction is thereby built into the basic analytical frameworks of social science. This image of policymaking processes as being constituted predominantly through endogenous variables?the image of the inside?is less and less valid. In this process, the has dramatically changed too. However, because this evolution has been extremely uneven, it has not been at all clear how these complex linkages should be treated in policy analysis. Indeed, given the democratic deficit of global governance?and despite the growing institutionalization of transnational decisionmaking processes both public and private1?the analytical predominance of the inside continues to be underpinned and reinforced by democratic notions of bottom-up legitimacy, however frayed.2 Today, however, inside and outside form a complex, uneven, and asymmetric set of multilayered cross-cutting processes and nodes of in teraction. Different economic sectors?not just firms or markets but economic activities producing distinct types of goods through distinct asset structures?are now organized formally and informally across bor ders. Collective goods too must increasingly be provided in a trans national context.3 At the same time, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)?that is, transnational interest or pressure groups?have be come much more central to processes of change in a range of issue areas.4 Finally, government agencies and state actors are increasingly