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In two decades since the Maastricht Treaty, multi-level governance (MLG) has developed as a conceptual framework for profiling the 'arrangement' of policy-making activity performed within and across politico-administrative institutions located at different territorial levels. This contribution examines the ways in which the MLG literature has been employed, effectively taking stock of applied research to date. It identifies five main uses of MLG and the different focus of emerging research over time. Considering the most recent scholarship, the contribution explores possible new directions for research, in light of global governance, culminating in a 'bird's eye view' of MLG over 20 years.

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Well-being has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in Britain and beyond, signalled most clearly by Prime Minister Cameron's announcement in 2010 that well-being measures developed by the Office for National Statistics would be used to guide public policies. Here we seek to explain why well-being has risen up the British political agenda, drawing on Kingdon's multiple streams approach. While this approach has considerable merit, it does not acknowledge the complexity of multi-level governance in which policy, politics and problem streams can operate at different territorial levels. As such, we argue that the match between policy, politics and problem streams has to be not only temporal, but also spatial. The consequence is that, while in relation to measurement a paradigm shift may be taking place, in terms of decisive action there is some way to go before well-being can be described as 'an idea whose time has come'.Well-being has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in Britain and beyond. This article is concerned specifically with the idea and current proposal that a set of measures wider than economic performance be used to measure societal progress. A shift in this direction was signalled most clearly by Prime Minister David Cameron's announcement in November 2010 that well-being measures developed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) would be used for public policy purposes. 1 The ONS subsequently conducted a series of hearings and presented its findings in July 2011, with the first set of data to be made available to government within twelve months. 2 These developments signal that, in some respects at least, well-being is an idea whose time has come in British politics. Moreover, that Britain has gone furthest in this respect makes this case an important one to examine for understanding the significance of this idea.In this article we seek to explain why well-being has risen up the British political agenda, drawing on research conducted in the UK, Brussels and Luxembourg in 2011. 3 In doing so, we apply John Kingdon's (2011) 4 multiple streams approach to agenda setting. While developed in the context of US politics, it has become a landmark contribution that has been applied more widely and we also draw on some of these applications.This approach provides a very helpful way of understanding developments in the UK, explicitly theorising both structural and agential factors without privileging one over the other. However, we suggest that an important dimension of our findings that is not really signalled by Kingdon's approach is the importance of international networks through which ideas are developed. This is an indication of how national politics are often nested within broader processes of multi-level governance and of the potential territorial disjunctures between the policy and politics streams. bs_bs_banner

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