Multi-Level Governance through a Constitutional Prism

Abstract

This article applies a constitutional lens to the multi-level governance concept as developed in the literature of political science. The approach of this article is twofold: the first part covers the semantics, and tries to disentangle multi-level governance from federalism. I contend that multi-level governance is a better framework to descriptively capture current real-world governance, and is comparatively more suitable than federalism. However, despite the descriptive strength of the theory of multi-level governance, its normative dimension is found wanting. Therefore, the second part addresses constitutional concerns in the multi-level governance debate. A specific analysis of the values and safeguards, the formalization and proceduralization, and the justiciability of multi-level governance traits is made in order to compose a constitutional perspective. This lays down a foundation for the in-depth enquiries of the following articles of this special issue.