Does the territorial state organisation matter for effective policy making, and if so, in what way? So far, we know relatively little about its effects on policy making and policy outputs. Starting from the hypothesis that decentralised policy making has positive effects whereas federalism has a slightly negative impact on policy performance, this book systematically tests the independent and interdependent effects of different combinations of federal/unitary and decentralised/centralised structures of decision making and implementation. Based on a mixed methods design it first quantitatively tests the relationships for the OECD countries in cross-sectional as well as panel designs. In a second step, qualitative case studies are conducted for four countries: federal-centralised Austria, federal-decentralised Switzerland, unitary-decentralised Denmark, and unitary-centralised Ireland. The authors study two space-related policy areas, both with regard to the decision making and the implementation stage of the policy-making process: regional policy and transport policy.

An examination of trends towards increasing state-society partnerships and intergovernmental collaboration in the face of global economic restructuring.

Multilevel governance divides powers, includes many veto players and requires extensive policy coordination among different jurisdictions. Under these conditions, innovative policies or institutional reforms seem difficult to achieve. However, while multilevel systems establish obstructive barriers to change, they also provide spaces for creative and experimental policies, incentives for learning, and ways to circumvent resistance against change. As the book explains, appropriate patterns of multilevel governance linking diverse policy arenas to a loosely coupled structure are conducive to policy innovation.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics and mechanisms related to governing in multilevel systems.

Trade Policy in Multilevel Government investigates how multilevel polities organize openness in a globalizing political and economic environment. In recent years, the multilevel politics of trade caught a broader public's attention, not least due to the Wallonian regional parliament's initial rejection of the EU-Canada trade deal in 2016. In all multilevel polities, competencies held by states and regions have increasingly become the subject of international rule-setting. This is particularly so in the field of trade which has progressively targeted so-called 'behind the border' regulatory barriers. In their reaction to this 'deep trade' agenda, constituent units in different multilevel polities have shown widely varying degrees of openness to liberalizing their markets. Why is that? This book argues that domestic institutions and procedures of intergovernmental relations are the decisive factor. Countering a widely-held belief among practitioners and analysts of trade policy that involving subcentral actors complicates trade negotiations, it demonstrates that the more voice a multilevel polity affords its constituent units in trade policy-making, the less the latter have an incentive to eventually exit from emerging trade deals. While in shared rule systems constituent unit governments are directly represented along the entirety of the policy cycle, in self-rule systems territorial representation is achieved merely indirectly. Shared rule systems are hence more effective than self-rule systems in organizing openness to trade. The book tests its theory's explanatory power on the understudied case of international procurement liberalization in extensive studies of three systems of multilevel government: Canada, the European Union, and the United States.

This comprehensive volume studies the vices and virtues of regionalisation in comparative perspective, including countries such as Belgium, Germany, Spain, and the UK, and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. It follows the entire chain of democratic responsiveness, starting from the translation of citizen preferences into voting behaviour, up to patterns of decision-making and policy implementation. Many European democracies have experienced considerable decentralisation over the past few decades. This book explores the key virtues which may accompany this trend, such as regional-level political authorities performing better in understanding and implementing citizens’ preferences. It also examines how, on the other hand, decentralisation can come at a price, especially since the resulting multi-level structures may create several new obstacles to democratic representation, including information, responsibility and accountability problems. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal West European Politics.

Important policy problems rarely fit neatly within existing territorial boundaries. More difficult still, individual governments or government departments rarely enjoy the power, resources and governance structures required to respond effectively to policy challenges under their responsibility. These dilemmas impose the requirement to work with others from the public, private, non-governmental organisation (NGO) or community spheres, and across a range of administrative levels and sectors. But how? This book investigates the challenges—both conceptual and practical—of multi-level governance processes. It draws on a range of cases from Australian public policy, with comparisons to multi-level governance systems abroad, to understand factors behind the effective coordination and management of multi-level governance processes in different policy areas over the short and longer term. Issues such as accountability, politics and cultures of governance are investigated through policy areas including social, environmental and spatial planning policy. The authors of the volume are a range of academics and past public servants from different jurisdictions, which allows previously hidden stories and processes of multi-level governance in Australia across different periods of government to be revealed and analysed for the first time.