“In the shadows of hierarchy”: Intergovernmental governance in Canada and the European Union

Abstract

The articles in this issue suggest that intergovernmental governance takes a different form in Canada and the EU, raising questions about the transference of practices and institutions from one to the other. In both systems, non‐hierarchical modes of governance provide coordination in social policy. Hierarchy also plays a role, though not in a manner that one might expect. In the EU, hierarchy is tempered by members' direct participation in policy formulation. In Canada, hierarchy is important, but within rather than between governments, resulting in executive dominance of the intergovernmental process at the expense of devolving power to civil society and sub‐provincial governments.

Multi-level Governance: Conceptual challenges and case studies from Australia

“…Most federal systems do not have a genuinely autonomous supra-national level of government like the EU; there are important differences in institutional architecture between the EU and Australia and the circumstances that gave rise to the federation in Australia are clearly different from those that gave rise to the EU. Bakvis (2013) underscores this point with reference to the Canadian context. He argues that, whilst non-hierarchical modes of coordination are used in Canada, hierarchy plays a more critical role in Canada than in the EU, due to its propensity for top-down control, the government's lack of willingness to engage civil society and a closed and elite-driven form of executive federalism:…”

From the Change of the Pattern to the Change in the Pattern. The Trilateral Game in the Italian Intergovernmental Relations

“…The basic concern is always the vertical arrangement and the resulting degrees of freedom for each level of government when negotiating power with the other tiers. Bakvis (2013) showed for instance how in the Canadian case, compared to the EU, the relevance of hierarchy remained inside the level of governments, while in the IGRs it was the mechanism of bargaining to prevail, due to the multilevel and overlapping authority dispersion "in the shadow of (earlier) hierarchy." Equally, Ingold and Pflieger showed the seemingly incoherent attitude of Swiss institutions at international and domestic level, since IGRs matter and shape contradictory policies on the same issue.…”

Shifting scales of governance and civil society participation in Canada and the European Union

“…Nowhere was this more evident than with the signing of the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA) in 1999 (Bakvis 2013;Verdun and Wood 2013). Much like the OMC, one of the major innovations of SUFA was the transformation of the accountability regime toward results-based management (Jenson 2004;Phillips 2001Phillips , 2006Saint-Martin 2006).…”