Multi-level Governance - Consequences and Practical Relevance of Multi-level Governance

Consequences and Practical Relevance of Multi-level Governance

There has been an intensification of research on the consequences as well as the character of multilevel governance. The concept was developed as a tool of pure research, but it now motivates policy makers. From the late 1990s the European Commission began to refer to its own mission as one of achieving multilevel governance, especially in cohesion policy. In 2001, the Commission set up a committee on multilevel governance to contribute to its White Paper on governance. José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, claims that ‘the multilevel system of governance on which our European regional policy is based provides a key boost to the Union’s competitive edge’ and that, in the current economic crisis, ‘multilevel governance must be a priority’. In an October 2008 resolution, the European Parliament called on the member states ‘to develop as quickly as possible the practical measures set out in the First Action Programme . . . with a view to strengthening multilevel governance’. In 2009, 344 representatives of elected regional and local authorities across the EU approved a resolution on a ‘European Union Charter for Multilevel Governance’, which would bring localities and regions into European democratic decision making.

This theme has been taken up by several political parties including the European Peoples Party, representing Christian democratic parties in the European Parliament, which recently stated that ‘multilevel governance should be one of the guiding principles of the EU, an integral part of any European strategy or policy where local and regional authorities are widely implicated, and monitored closely to ensure that it is indeed being put into practice on the ground’.

International organizations have also taken positions on the issue. In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme released a report, ‘Delivering Human Security through Multilevel Governance’, which argued that ‘the two-level approach to international relations . . . is being replaced by a much more complex multilevel system of governance that also involves local, sub-national providers of public goods as well as regional governance actors acting at a supranational but not a global level’. The World Bank has commissioned a series of studies examining multilevel governance; the United Nations has a research and training institute on comparative regional integration that studies ‘multilevel regulatory processes and the relations between sub- and supra-national regional governance’, and the OECD has created a directorate on multilevel governance.

However, the consequences of multilevel governance are debated. In the eyes of its detractors, multilevel governance exacerbates corruption (Treisman 2000), leads to gridlock (Scharpf 2007), engenders moral hazard (Rodden 2006), constrains redistribution (Obinger, Castles, Leibfried 2005), obfuscates accountability (Peters & Pierre 2004), and wastes money (Berry 2009). Research on both causes and consequences of multi-level governance is ongoing and more and more information about the subnational as well as the international dimension of multi-level governance is available in the context of larger data sets.