Types of Multi-Level Governance

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in the social sciences. Yet beyond the bedrock agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no convergence about how it should be organized. This paper draws on various literatures in distinguishing two types of multi-level governance. One type conceives of dispersion of authority to multi-task, territorially mutually exclusive jurisdictions in a relatively stable system with limited jurisdictional levels and a limited number of units. A second type of governance pictures specialized, territorially overlapping jurisdictions in a relatively flexible, non-tiered system with a large number of jurisdictions. We find that both types co-exist in different locations, and we explain some facets of this co-existence.