Multi-Level Governance: Underplayed Features, Overblown Expectation and Missing Linkages

This chapter provides a concise but precise definition of multilevel governance, argues that it is a theoretical and not just a descriptive concept and dispels some misconceptions associated with it, for example, that it underplays the exercise of power or is incompatible with democracy . On the contrary, it argues that the standard decision-making procedures associated with national parliamentary democracies are ill-apt to describe and account for the type of decision-making that characterizes highly intercoonected yet only loosely-coupled institutional systems like the EU and that therefore a new notion of multilevel, transnational democracy must be developed.