Multi-level (or multilevel) governance is a term used to describe the way power is spread vertically between many levels of government and horizontally across multiple quasi-government and non-governmental organizations and actors. This situation develops because many countries have multiple levels of government including local, regional, state, national or federal, and many other organisations with interests in policy decisions and outcomes. International governance also operates based on multi-level governance principles. Multi-level governance can be distinguished from multi-level government which is when different levels of government share or transfer responsibility amongst each other. Whereas multi-level governance analyses the relationship of different state levels and interaction with different types of actors.'
Origins and significance of the concept of Multi-level governance
Multi-level governance is an approach in political science and public administration theory that originated from studies on European integration. Political scientists Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks developed the concept of multi-level governance in the early 1990s and have continuously been contributing to the research program in a series of articles (see Bibliography). Their theory resulted from the study of the new structures that were put in place by the EU (Maastricht Treaty) in 1992. Multi-level governance gives expression to the idea that there are many interacting authority structures at work in the emergent global political economy. It "illuminates the intimate entanglement between the domestic and international levels of authority".
Multi-level governance' is a recent concept, having first entered the lexicon of political science around fifteen years ago as comparativists became re-acquainted with European integration and discovered that authority was shifting not only from central states up to Europe, but also down to subnational authorities. The first efforts to understand this were descriptive, spawning concepts that have generated an extensive literature. Multi-level, polycentric, and multi-layered governance emphasize the dispersion of decision making from the local to the global level. In recent years these concepts have cross-pollinated subfields of political science including European studies and decentralization, federalism and international organization, public policy (e.g. environmental policy, health policy) and public-private governance, local governance and transnational governance.
The authors of a recent survey of the literature on the structure of government conclude that 'We attribute many of the recent "cutting-edge" theoretical contributions in political science to studies of "multi-level governance"’ and they note that although students of federalism 'considered the current subject matter of their field to be based on well-defined, well rooted and broadly accepted ideas, they were nevertheless open to a new flowering of federal theory as a result of fertilization by these new MLG theoretical developments'. However, there is nothing entirely new under the sun. Though scarcely recognized at the time, this research revives a rich tradition in political science represented by Karl Deutsch (1966) on the effect of societal transactions on government structure, Robert Dahl (1973) on the virtues and vices of multilevel democracy, and Stein Rokkan (1983) on identity and territorial politics.
Application of the concept
Multi-level governance and the European Union
The study of the European Union has been characterized by two different theoretical phases. The first phase was dominated by studies from the field of international relations; in the second phase these studies were revised and insights from among others, public policy were added. The most straightforward way of understanding this theoretical shift is to see it as a move away from treating the EU as an international organisation similar to others (e.g. NATO) to seeing it as something unique among international organisations. The uniqueness of the EU relates both to the nature and to the extent of its development. This means that in some areas of activity the EU displays more properties related to national political systems than to those of international organisations.