National Systems and Multi-Level Governance: Convergence through Compliance?

A SHIFT towards interest-driven, opportunity-based and more voluntary actions by combining bottom-up with top-down elements (Falkner, 2016).Interactive learning and experimentation at different levels of global governance have become highly important, and these complex global interactions are increasingly regarded not as obstacles but as opportunities for innovation and interactive learning (Sovacool, 2011).Global climate governance relates not only to the legal system of the climate regime but also to various public and private initiatives at different scales and across sectors.Scholars studying the complex multi-actor and multi-sector characteristics of the system have therefore begun to conceptualize global multi-level climate governance as an opportunity structure for the generation and diffusion of climate-related innovation.The topic of this special issues is climate governance within a multi-level and multi-sectoral global system.The work argues that global climate governance today aims essentially to activate the dynamic potential of each level of the global governance system, the level of world regions as well as the level of provinces and local communities.Horizontal peer-to-peer learning between countries, cities and regions, as well as vertical up-scaling of best practice, has created a dynamic of change.The cross-sectoral approach has become important as far as the mobilizing of economic interests (e.g. in the construction sector) and the use of co-benefits is concerned.This special issue intends to offer a better understanding of the nature and variety of, and linkages between, initiatives taken and governance functions delivered within the broader 'climate governance landscape ' (Betsill et al., 2015).It analyses various climate governance activities in the European Union (EU), India and China through a systemic perspective.The EU may be regarded as the strongest regional sub-system of the global system, although the BRICS countries of China and India play a comparable role, as countries both with a similar scope and with explicit multi-level climate policy activities.The systematic dimension of global climate governance is described in the introductory article 'Multi-level climate governance as a global system' by Martin Jnicke.The author analyses the potential of the global climate governance system, which is characterized by a multiplicity of access points and incentives for innovation and interactive learning.It is regarded as a 'multi-impulse-system', where the sum of even weak impulses from different parts of the system can play the role of a strong instrument.The global multi-level climate governance structure is also characterized by a specific global knowledge base and a global policy arena, allowing for climate-related agenda-setting and the mobilization of interests at each level.It is taken as an opportunity structure for ambitious innovation-based climate strategies based on interactive lesson-drawing from best practice.The lesson to be learned at all levels of the system is the potential for economic co-benefits related to the socio-technical system of clean-energy innovation and the global clean-energy market.The following article, 'The EU system of multi-level climate governance', by Martin Jnicke and Rainer Quitzow provides an overview of the regional structure of the global climate governance system.The authors understand the EU as a system where 'multi-level reinforcement' has been observed several times and which can be considered as a leader by example in global climate governance.They point to the fact that the EU has the world's highest share of green electricity and since 1990 has made the largest reduction to its greenhouse gas emissions.They attribute the EU's relatively successful performance in climate and energy governance to two main factors: (1) multi-level reinforcement and (2) the mobilization of economic interests at different levels of governance through low-carbon industrial policy.While the multi-impulse system has fostered

Following the June 2010 elections, Belgium was left for more than a year without a full government, as negotiations about constitutional reform dragged on. In this article, I investigate why this interregnum did not have any fatal consequences for Belgian governance and society. On a formal level, the Belgian constitution allows a caretaker government to take all necessary steps to ensure continuity, thus avoiding government deadlock. From a political science perspective it can be noted that in a system of multi-level governance, other levels typically step in if one level fails. This is especially the case in a country like Belgium with a strong pro-European consensus, where European Union (EU)-interference is considered as legitimate. The theoretical relevance is that multi-level governance can be seen as a safeguard against government failure.

The negative and neutral developmental experiences of the Windhoek and Walvis Bay local authorities (LAs) with facilitating foreign direct investment (FDI) are disconcerting and contradict the bottom-up development approach in Namibia. The objective of this study is to analyse the legislative scope of LAs in facilitating and influencing FDI sustainability. A qualitative research method was followed by analysing secondary data and interviewing purposely selected key respondents. The thematic analysis of data was guided by two independent variables of interest: (1) decentralised functions of FDI facilitation in a multi-level governance (MLG) system; and (2) policy and legislative harmonisation in an MLG system. The key findings of this study indicate that the current scope of Namibian LA FDI facilitation functions are insufficient for influencing FDI sustainability for local development. The theoretical implications of this study are that it contributes to the sustenance of the MLG theory—which is inept at explaining the dynamics LAs experience in MLG systems. In the absence of an enabling legislative framework, the current study suggests the following practical implications: (1) bottom-up development using FDI cannot be achieved; (2) LAs cannot influence the sustainability of FDI for local development impact; and (3) LAs cannot protect local communities against the capitalist wrath and exploitative tendencies of FDI.

The EU Response to COVID-19: From Reactive Policies to Strategic Decision-Making.

This article examines the potential political influences on European Union (EU) external trade policymaking. Given the EU's volume of international trade and its extensive involvement in bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements, a better understanding of how the EU makes external trade policy is increasingly important. It is an extremely complex process—involving the EU public, the 25 member states' parliaments and governments, and the institutions of the EU, including the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. It is a system of multilevel governance with overlapping jurisdictions with numerous potential access points for societal interests to influence European external trade policy. In this article, we evaluate the probable political channels that societal interests could use to influence EU external trade policy. We employ the principal–agent (P–A) framework to examine five of the more important P–A relationships that are likely to influence EU external trade policymaking. We conclude that EU policymaking as it pertains to external trade is quite insulated from general public pressures. The primary institutions involved in external trade policymaking are the EU Council of Ministers and the Commission—both of which are largely insulated from the public. Future empirical work should focus on this relationship between the Council of Ministers and the Commission.

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) aims to protect and improve water quality across Europe through an integrative and multi-level water governance approach. The goal is to ensure that water quality in Europe meets good ecological status by 2027. Whilst the WFD has been hailed as a cornerstone for governance innovation in water management, most EU member states (MS) still struggle to achieve good ecological status of their waters. The realignment to a multi-level governance structure under the WFD is discretionary, and has generated diversity in WFD multi-level governance implementation approaches and final governance arrangements across MS. This diversity may contribute to low goal achievement and weak compliance. This paper investigates how visual impressions of legislative structure across nine MS can illustrate and contribute to understanding the differences in multi-level implementation of WFD and associated water protection directives. We explore, in-depth, the drivers of visual differences in Portugal, Germany (Lower Saxony) and France. We hypothesise that many of the challenges of WFD implementation, and resulting governance arrangements can be explained in terms of the legacy effects of previous water governance choices. With this conceptual framework of investigating the history and legacy, we found the three in depth studies have had different starting points, paths, and end points in their water governance, with sticking points influencing the decision-making processes and compliance required by the WFD. Sticking points include the complexity of existing water governance structures, lobbying by different sectors, and the mandatory WFD timeline for implementation. Portugal had to resolve its focus on water infrastructure and engineering to enable a re-focus on water quality. France and Portugal experienced 'top down' governance at different points in time, slowing the shift to a multi-level governance system. Lower Saxony, representing just one of 16 federal state systems in Germany, highlighted the complex historic governance structures which cannot easily be restructured, generating a layering effect where new governance systems are fitted to old governance systems. We conclude that there is a need to implement a hybrid approach to water governance and WFD implementation including decentralisation (discretionary) to ensure collaboration and engagement of stakeholders at the local level. This hybrid governance system should run in parallel with a centralised (mandatory) governance and regulatory system to enable national environmental standards to be set and enforced. Such systems may provide the best of both worlds (bottom-up involvement of stakeholders meeting top-down goal achievements) and is worthy of further research.

Multilevel governance is theorized to facilitate effective policy implementation by encouraging the use of local knowledge and expertise, enabling the participation of non‐government actors, and capitalizing on the coordinating and sanctioning authority of centralized governments. Whether a particular multilevel governance arrangement achieves this, however, depends in part on the degree to which it enables coordination among governmental and non‐governmental actors representing different levels and jurisdictions. Using a comparative case study of education governance reform in the United States, this study investigates how differences in state policy implementation approach impact the structure and mode of coordination in multilevel governance systems and considers the effects this has on policy implementation processes. The results indicate that a state's implementation approach impacts coordination by structuring how different levels of government interact, share information, and influence policy. Specifically, variation in the structure of the central governing agency directly enables or restricts the influence of bottom‐up coordination from lower levels of government. The results also highlight the theoretical limitations of current binary structure models of multilevel governance (i.e., centralized vs. decentralized, top‐down vs. bottom‐up, hierarchy vs. network) for capturing important nuances in policy coordination. These findings advance the understanding of policy coordination in multilevel governance systems and inform the design of institutional arrangements that balance trade‐offs in centralization and the delegation of authority across governance systems during policy implementation.

Much ink has flowed on the question of the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism. There is still, however, no definitive answer. So the debate goes on. Is regionalism a substitute or a complement to multilateralism? Put another way, is regionalism a building block or a stumbling block to multilateralism? The re-invigoration of regionalism in developing countries over the past decade has given a new twist to the old debate. Developing countries are increasingly turning to regionalism as a strategy for development (UNCTAD, 2005). But their regionalism is part of a multilevel strategy which needs to be synchronised with their national development plans aswell as their efforts to achieve development friendlymultilateral trade rules in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Developing countries are increasingly concerned about how to achieve coherence between development, regionalism andmultilateralism. Themultilateral trade system (MTS) is currently in a state of flux as the outcome of the Doha DevelopmentAgenda is yet unknown. Nevertheless, the regional trade agreements (RTAs) that are currently being negotiated all depend on WTO rules. Moreover, the policy space that developing countries need to carry out their national development plans, is increasingly determined by the market access rules of the WTO. In short, developing countries are faced with an increasingly complex, multilevel process in which they are trying to combine trade and development (Abbugatas, 2004). The concept ofmultilevel governance (Marks et al., 1996) emerged in the European Union (EU) where it was used to explain the increasing complexity of policy making in the 1990s. It was a period of upheaval resulting from the far reaching structural change that was uprooting many traditional policy practices across Europe. As a consequence of that change a new model of multilevel governance (MLG) began to take shape that challenged the traditional state-centric model. Has the experience of the EU generated a hypothesis that could be generalised to other systems of governance? That question has received growing interest in the academic literature. “Is there Room for the Multilateral in Multilevel Governance?” McGowan (2001) asked, and explored the emergence of multilevel governance in three sectors of the new trade agenda. The conference on “Globalisation, Multilevel Governance andDemocracy”, held at Queen’s University in Canada (2002), explored comparative aspects of MLG in regional and global governance. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has worked extensively on regulatory reform since the 1990s, has now produced a study onMultilevel Regulatory Governance that for the first time concentrates on the

Students of European integration have come to argue that the European Union (EU) is a system of ‘compounded’ or ‘mixed’ representation characterized by the presence of different forms and styles of political representation which reflect the ideas and strategic interests of various groups of actors and institutions. The EU's system of representation did not come about by fiat. Among the founders of Europe's first supranational community, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), ideas about appropriate institutional mechanisms to represent different sets of interests were hotly contested. This article traces the origins of the EU's system of representation by sketching the answers given by the ‘founding fathers’ of the ECSC to questions about which interests should be represented in the nascent ECSC and how the representation of these interests should be institutionally manifested. It also takes issue with the current debate about the ‘democratic challenge’ faced by the EU's system of representation and offers a set of research questions which could help to advance the research agenda.

The European Union (EU) is a multilevel governance whose dynamics of change cannot be understood outside the perspective of each member state. France has contributed to the politics and policies of the EU, but the EU has also had an impact on French domestic politics and policies. As a founding member state of the European Communities (EC), France has played since the 1950s a major role in the development of European institutions, policies, and reforms leading to the EU. France has also, however, always had a paradoxical position regarding the institutional design of the EU. On one side, France has supported the principle of supranationality in the economic areas of EU integration (market and monetary policy). On the other side, it has preferred the intergovernmental method for foreign policy and defense. France’s influence in the EU was for a long time exercised in co-leadership with Germany. The return of Germany to full sovereignty after its reunification, the enlargements of the EU toward the East, and a growing asymmetry between French and German economies made the Franco-German partnership less central in the 1990s. France’s influence on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has diminished to the benefit of Germany, while it has remained central for the definition of a EU foreign and security policy. Like most of the EU member states, France has also to cope domestically with a growing politicization of the EU issue in the domestic context since the middle of the 1990s. Opposition to the EU has arisen among French public opinion and has restrained the autonomy of the French executive (president of the republic and government) in the EU negotiations. The dominant narrative in France about EU membership has four main components: being a founding member state, being a big member state, co-leading the EU with Germany, and making sure that the EU maximizes the French national interest. The relationships of the main French institutional actors with the EU focus on the president of the Republic, the prime minister, and the National Parliament, as well as major national courts and interest groups. The political debates on the EU in the French public sphere involve the mainstream political parties, the rise of Euroskepticism, the referendum campaigns on EU issues, and general trends in the public opinion. France’s contributions to the main EU policies include membership in the EMU, the commitment to the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the attitudes toward the enlargement processes, and the future of the EU institutional reforms.

The expansion of European foreign and security policy co-operation since the 1970s imposes unique requirements on European Union (EU) member states, and the co- ordination of these various obligations presents a major challenge to the EU's pursuit of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP). However, the past decade has also seen significant progress toward the multi-level governance of EU foreign policy, particularly when compared to the limited policy co-ordination of the 1970s and 1980s. This article examines the relationship between institutional development and the multi-level governance of EU foreign policy, as represented by the CFSP. In particular, it explores: (1) the extent to which the CFSP policy space can be described in terms of multi-level governance; (2) the processes by which governance mechanisms influence the domestic foreign policy cultures of EU member states; and (3) how the interaction of domestic politics and governance mechanisms produces specific policy outcomes.

This chapter discusses the multilevel institutional governance of banks in the European Union (EU). It begins by looking at the theories behind institutional governance of banks in the EU. The chapter then presents the different levels of EU institutional governance, examining the main actors of EU decision-making and their internal bodies and rules of functioning. The European Banking Union is the most important framework, in which the European Central Bank and the Single Resolution Board play a key role. Meanwhile, there are mainly three institutional actors at the international level: the G-20, the Financial Stability Board, and the Bank of International Settlement, where the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has the most relevant role for banking regulation. There are also other EU institutions, agencies, and bodies that play a key role in EU banking regulation and supervision, having certain tasks and powers impacting the supranational framework.

Adopting a ‘multilevel’ governance system and environmental prioritization for the Rural Development Policy (RDP) in Europe are key actions recommended by the European Commission. Member States can decide how and to what extent these actions are incorporated into their RDP design. Through 61 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with institutional stakeholders, this study assesses the application of these recommendations in RDP in Scotland. The findings indicate that many barriers to effective implementation and environmental prioritization exist due to rigid centralized policy controls. A lack of regionalized autonomy has hindered the ability of regional actors to effectively prioritize local needs. For future policy design, a successful multilevel governance system will require a clearer link between central regulatory requirements and how these link to practical policy implementation. In addition, recognizing an emphasis on ‘policy process’ there will be trade‐offs in effectiveness by outweighing consideration of actual policy outcomes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Foundations for convergence: Sub-national collaboration at the nexus of climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and land restoration under multi-level governance in Kenya

This chapter clarifies why adult education is the most complex segment of lifelong learning markets on which policy can intervene, thus the difficulty of regulating it within multi-level governance systems like the European Union (EU). Summarising the main results of the empirical studies presented in this volume, this chapter argues that regulatory politics and wealth redistribution are central for the EU to influence national lifelong learning markets through strategic policy coordination. Although the evidence brought together point to a hybrid compensation-comprehensive strategy affecting the development of (at least some segments of) national lifelong learning markets, the chapter concludes that more research is needed on the effects of particular governance mechanisms and policy instruments to fully appreciate how EU institutions contribute to lifelong learning markets development.