Governance, Multilevel

Historical and Theoretical Context

The intellectual origins of multilevel governance can be found in the study of the EU. Influenced by the emerging perspective of the EU as a distinct political system, the term was first used by Gary Marks in 1992 to capture developments in European policy making. Prior to the 1980s, the study of the EU and the process of European integration were dominated by approaches that were influenced by the field of international relations (IR). Drawing on the tradition of pluralism within IR studies, the neo-functionalist approach, which prevailed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggested that despite their initiation of the integration process, national governments were increasingly losing control in a complex network of state and nonstate actors. The neo-functionalist perspective was not unanimously accepted and was countered [Page 1022]by the intergovernmentalist approach, which drew on the realist approaches in IR to stress the ongoing dominance of national governments within European structures. Its assumptions were strengthened by the reassertion of national authority and the continuance of national veto across the majority of policy areas, and the intergovernmentalist approach emerged as the dominant approach to EU studies from the 1960s onward. However, by the mid-1980s, the structures of the EU had begun to undergo a series of significant reforms, including the creation of a single market (the common market) following the 1986 Single European Act and the continued extension of qualified majority voting across a range of policy areas, which in turn reduced the scope of national veto. In particular, the ongoing shift toward qualified majority voting influenced new perspectives regarding the EU, wherein the EU was perceived as a distinct political system, with parallels to domestic political institutions, rather than simply as a vehicle, or process, of integration. In turn, greater attention was given to the role of subnational and supranational actors within EU policy making, which led to a reappraisal of traditional conceptions of center–periphery relationships. It was against this theoretical and empirical backdrop that Marks sought to move away from a two-dimensional analysis, centered on the upward flow of power from national to supranational actors, in order to highlight the effects of the downward seepage of power to sub-national actors and their resultant impact on the policy process. He also drew on ideas regarding fragmentation, policy networks, and the role of nonstate actors to indicate the horizontal, as well as the vertical, flows of power.

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