MULTILEVEL POLICY ENFORCEMENT: INNOVATIONS IN HOW TO ADMINISTER LIBERALIZED GLOBAL MARKETS
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | EVA G. HEIDBREDER |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12226 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12226
MULTILEVEL POLICY ENFORCEMENT: INNOVATIONS
IN HOW TO ADMINISTER LIBERALIZED GLOBAL
MARKETS
EVA G. HEIDBREDER
Multilevel governance that spans beyond traditional hierarchical steering within states creates new
policy enforcement challenges because it involves autonomous administrations of different jurisdic-
tions in a single administrative act. Scrutinizing concrete new coordination tools, the article aims at
conceptualizing coordination strategies and instruments to overcome structural problems in multi-
level policy execution and trans-boundary administration. The empirical ndings on instrument
innovation in the European Union highlight the increased strategic promotion of horizontal admin-
istrative coordination. The functioning logic and autonomy-preserving character of such vertical
coordination makes it a potential solution to functionally equivalent enforcement challenges on the
global scale, exemplied by the administrative implementation of international trade agreements.
INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES IN ‘CLOSING THE GAPS’ OF MULTILEVEL
ADMINISTRATION
In contemporary public policy research, the term governance has largely replaced that
of political steering. The reason for this is the conceptual widening of political coordina-
tion beyond the traditional, hierarchically organized and closed state structure (Mayntz
2003). Day-to-day policy-making has opened up both inside states and across states to
embrace non-state actors and inter- or supra-state cooperation. The debate about gover-
nance focuses primarily on policy formulation. This is not surprising because most ‘gov-
ernance beyond the state’ clearly lacks a ‘bureaucracy beyond the state’. It is exactly this
process that the editors of this special issue (Stone and Ladi 2015) capture with the concepts
of global public policy (GPP) and transnational (public) administration (TPA). What we
witness is increased intersecting and overlapping action by public bodies (be they states or
international organizations) with non-state actors, in particular in agenda-setting and pol-
icy formulation. This includes the selection of policy instruments (see in particular Wolff
in this issue).
The present article moves attention to the ipside of theses processes. The focus is not
on how global decisions come about but what happens once they are in place and need
to be enforced in administrative acts that necessitate trans-boundary cooperation. Neither
does it put the spotlight on international bureaus or organizations, as most international
administration literature does (probably most prominently, Barnett and Finnemore 1999,
2004; Thompson and Snidal 1999; Shepsle 2010) or on the governmental interactions as
captured by the literature on transgovernmentalism (Wegrich 2007, p. 982). Instead, for-
mulated from the GPP perspective the question is: What happens once common norms
and policy agendas to secure global public goods are moulded into international agree-
ments, and how does TPA really look when enforcementis at stake? This article therefore
asks what governance, which creates rules that disrupt the jurisdictional boundaries of
states, implies for the enforcement of policies, the authority over which remains by and
large within state boundaries.
Eva G. Heidbreder is at the Faculty of Philosophy,Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (940–955)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
MULTILEVEL POLICY ENFORCEMENT 941
In practice, the problem is not new and evident in many contexts. Federal systems in
which a higher level formulates policies that are implemented by lower-level administra-
tions are one example of vertical multilevel enforcement challenges for harmonized rules.
In addition, international agreements offer examples of horizontal multilevel coordina-
tion challenges that necessitate cooperation between competent bodies in different states.
Vertical and horizontal challenges are typical for international trade agreements. As we
currently see various major trade agreements being negotiated, we may envisage the intro-
duction of partly harmonized rules and the massive extension of mutual recognition across
jurisdictions, amongst these the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
between the European Union (EU) and the USA, the EU–Canada Comprehensive Eco-
nomic and Trade Agreement (CETA), and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) which
is currently being negotiated among 23 states plus the 28 states of the EU. All these agree-
ments have in common that they establish partially harmonized rules and rely strongly
on mutual recognition.
Toenforce these agreements the vertical and horizontal challenges this article focuses on
will inevitably be at stake. Once legal agreements are established, the enforcement of these
accords entails also the need for some form of trans-boundary administration. The aim of
this article is to explore and theorize a particular strategy to overcome these challenges.
To this end, the introduction of compulsory horizontal administrative coordination in the
EU, which obliges the member states to cooperate, will be scrutinized. It is argued that
instead of harmonizing administrative rules or fostering convergence of national systems,
the obligatory cooperation of horizontally linked autonomous national administrations
offers an alternative coordination mechanism to overcome the specic pitfalls of verti-
cal and horizontal policy enforcement of multilevel systems. To allow for generalizability
beyond the EU, the concept of multilevel governance is used as an analytical descriptive
device to capture the horizontal and vertical interactions and processes between supra-,
inter-, national, and sub-national administrative actors. The term multilevel administra-
tion is used when speaking more specically about implementation and policy execution.
Empirically, the focus is on the EU because it represents a multilevel system that shows
features of federal systems (Kelemen 2013), as well as an inter-sate cooperation operat-
ing logic, most evidently in policy areas in which non-member states take part in EU core
policies such as free trade (Rittberger 2013). The EU hence features different multilevel
logics that capture the vertical and horizontal dimensions just outlined, which Hooghe
and Marks dene as type I and type II multilevel governance (Hooghe and Marks 2003).
Depending on the policy at stake, the EU can be classied as a general purpose jurisdiction
with non-intersecting membership in which authority is clearly attributed to a particular
level in the framework of a system-wide institutional architecture; in other policies, it is
marked by task-specic jurisdictions with intersecting membership in which authority is
not limited to a single jurisdictional level and the design remains exible and malleable
if the context changes. In addition, in the EU the member states maintain formal admin-
istrative autonomy which should bare insights that are applicable also to other multilevel
settings such as international trade agreements. This implies also that administrative coor-
dination tools that effectively overcome vertical and horizontal coordination problems can
be extended to convey more general insights about how to overcome structural enforce-
ment problems in global public policy.
Independent of their type, the challenge all multilevel types share is a fundamental
coordination dilemma. ‘To the extent that policies of one jurisdiction have spillovers (i.e.
negative or positive externalities) for other jurisdictions, so coordination is necessary to
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (940–955)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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