Governance approaches Flashcards
Three core assumptions of governance approaches
- Integration processes evolve unevenly in different policy fields.
- Integration processes are both intergovernmental and supranational.
- Integration processes are driven by both public and private actors, from various
levels.
Origins of governance approaches
- Approaches came about because of the crises of the 70s and 80s. There was a lot of public mismanagement and the new public management is to run the government like a business.
- In this period there was also a lot of corporatist decision-making, where the government facilitated grand bargains between different trade unions and employers, instead of fulfilling a more hierarchical role.
- Discourse on what good governance is.
Goal of governance approaches
Understand an overflow of governing structures and mechanisms in the EU, as well as all these different actors involved in EU policy implementation, and to understand the administrative procedures and agencies (the role of non-majoritarian institutions in the decision-making process).
Definition of governance
A set of institutionalised modes of coordination through which collectively binding decisions are adopted and implemented to provide common goods.
Key point of governance theory
We have moved from simply having a government to actual governance: actors involved in providing public goods in a coordinated institutionalised way. The government is involved in governance, but governance is not exclusively the business of governments, it is broader.
Key concepts in governance theory
- Multilevel governance
- Coordination dilemma
- Types of coordination
- EU governance modes
Multilevel governance
Efective governance involves many different levels. There have been formulated two ideal types of multi-level governance. Because they are ideal, they will never exactly be like this. There is a fragmented type 1 and a fluid type 2. National governments are more type 1, and the EU is more type 2.
Type 1 of multilevel governance
Fragmented:
1. It has a general-purpose jurisdiction based on a community
2. Jurisdictions don’t intersect at any level
3. There is a limited number of jurisdictions and they are organised in a limited number of levels
4. There is a lasting, system-wide architecture
Type 2 of multilevel governance
Fluid:
1. It has more task-specific jurisdiction, based on a policy area
2. Jurisdictions are intersecting at all levels
3. There is an unlimited number of jurisdictions and there is no limit to the number of jurisidictions
4. The architecture is more ad-hoc, making them fluid and thus exist in size or at all depending on the urgency or relevancy of the issue
Coordination dilemmas
Due to spillovers to different policy areas, some coordination is needed between these jurisdictions, which is conceived as a second-order coordination problem, because it involves coordination among institutions that coordinate human activity in order to solve a societal problem that different individual institutions have (first-order coordination).
EU governance modes
- Supranational joint decision making: co-decision
- Supranational delegation: member states permitting the EU to decide, so that
decisions are as apolitical as possible - Political competition: intergovernmental disagreement and competition
- Inter- and transgovernmental networks: cooperating agencies to regulate
some policies, no hierarchy - Intergovernmental coordination
- Corporatism
- Public-private partnerships (such as on research and innovation)
Theoretical critiques on governance approaches theory
- It may provide a useful heuristic and description, but it does not offer analytically relevant, causal explanations.
- The role of nation-states as possible veto players is underestimated in many governance approaches
- Governance approaches tend to ignore political conflict and power imbalances: it is about coordination and cooperation and not about conflict.
