Interconnected multilevel governance: Regional governments in Europe and beyond

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue on the rise of substate regional governments within and beyond Europe. Drawing on the Regioznal Authority Index (RAI) and the Measure of International Authority (MIA), we trace the increase in authority ‘above and below’ the state and argue that it is important to study the differential impacts – as well as the interconnectedness – of the main sub-dimensions of regional (i.e. self-rule and shared rule) and international authority (i.e. delegation and pooling). Turning from the empirical to the conceptual, we also critically examine Multilevel Governance (MLG) as a framework that can be applied to the global south. While MLG helps to illuminate the often non-formal and non-hierarchical nature of territorial politics and the key role of supranational actors in the global south, other factors may limit its applicability including capacity deficits, institutional instability, and conflictual dynamics between levels of government.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilevel governance
• regional governments
• Europe
• global south
• Regional Authority Index

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at Regional & Federal Studies who helped us improve this introductory essay, to our contributors for their constructive feedback, and to Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks for organizing the May 2019 conference on ‘The Effects of Multilevel Governance’ at the European University Institute in Florence at which the articles in this special issue originated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We emphasize that these conditions do not uniformly hold across the global south, and that they could also characterize parts of Europe itself, including countries in East and Central Europe.

2 America (N = 29): Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Asia-Pacific (N = 24): Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and Timor Leste. Europe (N = 40): Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North-Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

3 RAI-country scores do not have a theoretical maximum because they sum RAI-region scores which vary between 0 and 30 in case a country has more than one regional tier and/or has one or more regions which receive a different score such as asymmetric and autonomous regions. More detail is provided in the appendix.

4 Population data is retrieved from the World bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

5 A dataset and sources (websites) can be retrieved upon request. We excluded Kosovo and Taiwan because they are not recognized by some of the other countries included in the dataset.

6 More detail on the MIA is provided in the appendix.

7 We only track the policy scope of IOs that have at least one member state among the 93 countries for which we have RAI-scores.

8 The 93 countries included in the analysis have more than 5.8 billion inhabitants which is almost 78 per cent of the total world population in 2017.

9 More detail on the sub-indicators of the RAI and MIA are provided in the appendix.

10 More detail on the delegation and pooling indicators as well as how we constructed cumulative average scores is provided in the appendix.

11 In 1950, the average pooling score for the then 22 existing IOs was 0.30 in Europe, 0.26 in America, and 0.27 in Asia-Pacific. These averages decreased to respectively 0.23, 0.20 and 0.20 for 60 IOs in 2010. Average IO delegation scores also decreased from 0.16 (in 1950) to 0.13 (in 2010) in Europe, from 0.14 to 0.10 in America, and from 0.15 to 0.11 in Asia-Pacific.

12 Keyword searches in social science article databases using the term ‘multilevel governance’ yield only a scattering of articles on countries in the global south, mostly written from the perspective of public (especially environmental) policy and law rather than political science. Searches of this kind also reveal disparities in the use of the term across regions; scholars working on Latin American and Asian cases have begun to use it more than is the case in the literature on territorial politics in Africa (which is also not included in the RAI).

13 For an account of how collaborations between regional governments and NGOs can be characterized by either partnership or outsourcing, see Piccoli (2020).

14 At the same time, increases in regional authority may indeed create incentives for those regions to subsequently invest in capacity building. We thank Sara Niedzwiecki for this point.

Additional information

Funding

Arjan H. Schakel would like to thank the Trond Mohn Foundation [grant number TMS2019REK01] and the University of Bergen [grant number 812468] for financial support.