Lost in State Reconfiguration? The Politics of Multi-Level Governance at the Subnational Level

Abstract

The reconfiguration of statehood in Europe and the emergence of multi-level governance that it entailed has brought about profound changes in the organisation of territorial scales and intergovernmental relations within nation states across Europe. It notably resulted in a strengthening of subnational entities, such as regions, metropolitan areas and (larger) cities. However, multi-level governance arrangements in these contexts have also brought about a dispersion of power across multiple jurisdictions, thereby challenging the principles of symmetry and congruence between decision-makers and citizens that is at the core of democratic politics and accountability more generally. While the democratic challenges of multi-level governance as a consequence of state reconfiguration in Europe have been debated in the scholarly literature for quite a while, research in this field is still characterised by a ‘policy’-focus in that it predominantly tends to focus on assessing the democratic quality of multi-level governance arrangements in terms of policy-making processes. Instead, this panel seeks to draw attention of scholars to the ‘politics’-side of multilevel governance, i.e. power struggles, political contention and mobilization. Theoretical and/or empirical papers contribute to this perspective by analysing the role and/or the behaviour of political actors or citizens with relation to multi-level governance arrangements, focusing most particularly on the field of urban, metropolitan or regional governance.