Book Review: Benz, Arthur. 2024. <i>Rethinking Multilevel Governance</i>. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar

Does multilevel governance still have any relevance for understanding our political world today? This question is the starting point that informs Arthur Benz's (2024) latest state-of-the-art monograph. It is an important and remarkable question to ask, considering that multilevel governance as a concept has become a real growth industry in political science since it emerged in the context of European integration in the early 1990s. Today, scholarship spans a broad spectrum of research areas like comparative federalism and regionalism (Benz, 2016; Börzel & Risse, 2016; Hooghe & Marks, 2016), global governance (Zürn, 2010, 2018), municipal and regional governance (Conteh, 2020; Tatham, 2021), Indigenous-settler relations (Alcantara & Nelles, 2014; Breen & Thomas, 2021; Papillon, 2012, 2015) or European Integration (Hooghe & Marks, 2003; Kohler-Koch & Rittberger, 2006; Piattoni, 2009, 2010, for a general overview see Bache & Flinders, 2004; Benz et al., 2021; Enderlein et al., 2010). “Antagonistic alliances of states more and more obstruct global cooperation among governments. Political power has shifted back to states…Claiming to manage crises, central governments have extended their power against regional and local governments within states. In brief: Politics within and beyond states tends towards a separation of powers instead of integration, autonomy instead of coordinated action, concentration instead of a division of power, and confrontation instead of cooperation.” Although these developments appear to point towards an erosion of multilevel governance, Benz argues the opposite, empirically and normatively. Despite significantly changing contextual conditions, multilevel governance has not become irrelevant. On the contrary, we have many reasons to critically reflect on how the concept can be applied in the current context, and how multilevel governance can still facilitate legitimate and effective policy-making. In his latest book, Benz offers convincing conceptual and theoretical innovations as to how scholarship needs to “rethink” multilevel governance after more than 30 years of research. Arthur Benz is one of the leading scholars in the field of comparative federalism and multilevel governance, with a background in both comparative political science and public administration. Since the mid-1980s, his œuvre has been variously centred around two constitutive characteristics of multilevel politics: interdependencies and dynamics. First, for Benz almost all policy challenges create interdependencies not only among territorial jurisdictions, but also between state and society. Addressing this reality requires different forms of coordination—the foundation for multilevel governance. Second, ongoing coordination itself often creates tensions caused by institutionalized complexity. Moreover, external crises place arrangements of multilevel governance under pressure. Both, internal and external factors lead to dynamic adjustments over time, either through more informal adaptation or formal institutional reform. Accordingly, multilevel governance is far from obsolete. Climate change is an obvious example of where policy interdependencies tend to increase over time. The climate crisis is a collective action problem par excellence that demands ongoing and close coordination among jurisdictions. What is more, unlike all other policy challenges, failure to address global warning will result in irreversible consequences with significant potential to destabilize societies economically, socially and politically (Beckert, 2024). Consider, for example, one of the largest carbon-emitting economic sectors: transportation. Mobility patterns—carbon-intensive and non-intensive alike—are incongruent with political jurisdictions that shape infrastructure policies. This even applies to the lowest governance level. In Canada municipalities influence directly or indirectly roughly 50 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. The role of transport, in particular, is substantial, due to the dominant use of personal vehicles instead of modes of active transportation or public transit (Cappell et al., 2022). To alter the modal split in favour of less carbon-intensive modes, jurisdictions need to collaborate. This entails not only sufficient spending from the provincial and federal government for public transit or active transportation infrastructure. It also requires coordination between and among municipal orders of governments, especially in two-tired systems such as the Region of Waterloo. In this case, three cities and the region share responsibility for roadways, active transportation infrastructure and public transit, all important instruments for incentivizing climate-friendly mobility. However, different approaches preferred by individual jurisdictions often hamper the harmonization of policies. Measures to enhance road safety, which are important for changing the modal split in municipalities, are controversial. Kitchener's city council, for example, decided to partially opt out of the Region of Waterloo's speed camera enforcement program in school zones as it considers it as punitive and unreasonable (Broschek, 2024). In this context, the book makes a twofold contribution. First, building on his earlier work, Benz introduces a refined, sophisticated analytical framework for studying multilevel governance in a dramatically changing world. Second, Rethinking Multilevel Governance also offers an encompassing examination of how societal and economic change affects coordination across jurisdictions, and highlights what this means for the prospects of legitimate and effective decision-making. The result is a significant advancement in conceptual clarification and theory-building. Benz demonstrates that multilevel governance is more than just an “empty signifier” (Offe, 2009) indicating metaphorically that governments work together. The first three chapters of his book carefully reconstruct its core analytical components. Benz's theoretical angle is institution- and actor-centred. He begins with a concise definition of multilevel governance, before constructing a three-dimensional model. The starting point for Benz is the distinction between government and governance. Although the notion of government encapsulates the rules that define formal power holders, governance captures the structures and processes through which collective actors interact (Benz, 2024, 17). These actors may be confined to the sphere of government, as in case of intergovernmental relations, but they can also—and often do—include non-governmental actors and groups. Accordingly, constitutive for this definition is neither the number of levels—essentially an empirical question—nor the type of actors included. Instead, it gets to the bottom of the theoretical problem underlying multilevel governance, which the book discusses in more detail in chapter three: the division of authority and the resulting need for coordination in the provision of public goods. Paradoxically, Benz's model of multilevel governance is parsimonious and complex. It is parsimonious because it encapsulates, in a theoretically informed way, concisely the necessary elements of multilevel governance and depicts how they relate to each other. It is complex because multilevel governance is a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Any attempt to capture the essence of multilevel governance must account for this inherent complexity, and Benz meets this challenge convincingly. The multi-dimensional model consists of what Benz calls “structures” and “arenas,” within which different types of actors interact through “linkages.” The division of authority variously creates such configurations of multilevel governance. It accomplishes this first by establishing a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension. The vertical dimension entails different orders of government, which can empirically range from two to five: from the local to the global level. The horizontal dimension captures relationships between and among jurisdictions on the same level, such as municipalities or constituent units in federal systems. Secondly, because most policy challenges cannot be addressed by one jurisdiction in isolation, they have to interact through different modes of coordination. Often, this also involves non-governmental actors, who are essential in policy-making processes. This is how spheres of multilevel governance are created through linkages, establishing arenas. Moreover, arenas also exist within jurisdictions, with potentially important implications for multilevel governance. Governmental and non-governmental actors themselves are bound by their “domestic” rules and the expectations of their constituencies such as parliaments, political parties, voters or memberships. This model allows Benz, for example, to introduce a typology of modes and mechanisms of coordination in multilevel settings. Depending on whether authority is shared or separate, centralized, concurrent or decentralized, we can expect to observe the propensity of distinct patterns of interaction such as joint decision-making, cooperation in the shadow of hierarchy or yardstick competition (Benz, 2024: 46). Another instructive example for the analytical strength of Benz's model is its ability to capture the challenge of authoritarianism for multilevel governance. Benz elaborates systematically how multilevel governance differs within a democratic and authoritarian context, and the challenges multilevel governance poses between and among democratic and authoritarian regimes. Although authority in authoritarian regimes is not absolute and requires that leaders strategically navigate constraints to stabilize their power, the modes of coordination are more limited. Authoritarian multilevel governance is largely confined to modes based on control, such as the shadow of hierarchy and punitive or rewarding incentives. Those modes Benz identifies as most promising, such as yardstick competition, best practices and policy learning, by contrast, are barely available (Benz, 2024: 63). Likewise, authoritarianism profoundly hampers multilevel governance beyond the nation-state. These problems are on full display as the United States is drifting fully into competitive authoritarianism, making it difficult to imagine how Canada could re-establish new and reliable economic and security relationships with its southern neighbour. As Benz articulates this problem on a general level: “Policy coordination is difficult under these conditions. The variety of democratic and autocratic governments in multilevel governance may prompt dynamics but cause more instability than adaptability and more stalemate than flexibility. Research on multilevel governance has so far underestimated this problem” (Benz, 2024: 65). In chapter five and six, Benz switches from an actor- and institution-centred to a society-centred perspective. This enables him to elaborate within his model how economic and societal conditions shape multilevel governance. Economic disparities and geographic conditions interact with the division of authority, which creates tensions that require accommodation through coordination or institutional reform. For example, this analytical angle directs the attention to fiscal federalism as a means to address vertical and horizontal imbalances. But efforts to resolve such inherent tensions through grants or equalization schemes themselves can perpetuate frictions within multilevel governance, most notably whenever they are perceived as unfair. Again, Canadian scholars can instantly relate in light of ongoing conflicts about equalization. According to Benz, intragovernmental arenas where governments are held accountable by political parties, parliaments and the public create a challenge for intergovernmental coordination especially when conflicts are redistributive in character. This problem can be become reinforced through social divisions covered in chapter six. For Benz, territorial jurisdictions are often the baseline for the social construction of communities as “a demos,” which opens the door for the politicization of identities. This can be a challenge for effective and legitimate multilevel governance if the demos is framed as a homogenous political community, and economic disparities, along with cultural practices and norms, are tied to identity construction. One can easily see how this applies to escalating intergovernmental dynamics between Alberta and Saskatchewan on the one hand, Ottawa on the other hand. In short, multilevel governance can exacerbate polarization. If this happens, it creates frictions and at the same time hampers efforts to coordinate policies among jurisdictions. Take again the example of the climate crisis in municipal politics. The more the increasing monetary and non-monetary costs of insufficient climate action become apparent, the more climate action tends to become polarized not only within civil society, but also between and among governmental jurisdictions. In many Canadian municipalities, rather mundane policy decisions aimed at incentivizing less carbon-intense mobility choices—such as traffic calming or bike lanes—are highly politicized. This has even prompted provincial governments in Ontario and Alberta to intervene by forcing municipalities to remove bike lanes or to restrict the use of automated speed camera enforcement. The problem is, there is no easy way out. According to Benz (2024: 163), “[c]omplex problems of societies cannot be solved or mitigated without multilevel governance.” Considering the cross-cutting nature of most policy challenges and collective action problems, the functional imperative for governments to work together needs to be reconciled with the community logic underpinning democratic legitimacy (Hooghe & Marks, 2009, 2016). According to Hooghe and Marks, both logics increasingly come into conflict. From a functional perspective, higher-level jurisdictions are often more effective to cope with contemporary challenges such as the climate crisis, or the provision of public goods due to the economies of scale. From a community logic, however, this is often not considered as legitimate as it collides with the desire of territorial communities such as provinces to make collective decisions in line with their preferences. In Canada's multi-national federation, such tensions are manifold and by no means limited to Quebec or Indigenous peoples. It is no accident that premier Moe evoked the idea of Saskatchewan as a “nation within Canada” in the province's dispute with the federal government over energy, taxation and immigration policy (Hunter, 2021). If multilevel governance fails, it promotes decision-traps and reinforces polarization, secession threats or democratic deficits. But institutionalized complexity also offers escape routes. For Benz, this leads to the main challenge for multilevel governance: the ongoing act of balancing power relationships across jurisdictions and political arenas. Since multilevel governance can be observed in various forms and is inherently dynamic, it offers flexible opportunities to rebalance the need for effective governance with the legitimacy concerns of territorial communities. One general pathway is to appreciate the openness and ambiguity of multilevel governance. For example, the sequentialization of decision-making processes offers opportunities for the reframing of problems and issues, or to create package deals aimed at finding a compromise. Opting out and asymmetric arrangements, moreover, can contribute to de-escalate conflicts and to accommodate increasing diversity. More generally, and echoing contributions inspired by organizational theory (Landau, 1973; Lindquist, 1999; Mayntz, 1990), it is the “increased complexity through redundancy that makes multilevel governance work” (Benz, 2024: 73). Against the backdrop of hierarchical organizations as an alternative, multilevel governance multiplies arenas for decision-making based on negotiation. This organizational form not only mirrors societal complexity, but tends to better reflect its needs and demands. It also reduces the propensity of system failure—in case one jurisdiction fails, another can compensate. To make his case, Benz adopts an eclectic approach that combines different theoretical angles. This sets his contribution apart from many others in the field that seek to demonstrate the explanatory power of one particular theoretical approach such as new institutionalism, (neo-functionalism) or society-centred theories, or simply adopt one particular angle, such as actor-centred institutionalism (Hooghe & Marks, 2009, 2016; Piattoni, 2010; Scharpf, 1988, 2008). On the analytical level, his model is remarkably rich. Its wide applicability has a lot to offer for scholars working in different areas of multilevel politics, and regardless of whether they have a policy, institutional or public administration focus, it goes beyond many existing approaches that try to define and conceptualize multilevel governance (see for example Alcantara et al., 2016; Behnke et al., 2019; Tortola, 2017). Arthur Benz's approach shows that multilevel governance is not just a metaphor. His book offers an intellectually inspiring, conceptually and theoretically sophisticated framework that is abstract enough to be broadly applied, and capable of capturing configurations and processes of multilevel governance in very different settings. It resonates very well and demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Alan Cairns' classical essay published for the Macdonald Commission 40 years ago: The Embedded State (Cairns, 1985). In a way, Benz's book reconceptualizes through the lens of multilevel governance Cairns' image of the modern state—mutually intertwined with society, institutionally fragmented and highly complex—that has created interdependencies that are hard to dis-entangle. Today, Cairns' diagnosis is more true than ever. The provinces and territories have gained power over the last decades. At the same time, municipalities are key actors that have significant responsibility in areas like housing or climate policy. Like Indigenous peoples, whether territorially organized or not, they still lack, however, an appropriate role in Canadian multilevel governance. Canadian society, moreover, has become more diverse and polarized, regionally and in general. The Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act (2022) and the Saskatchewan First Act (2023), along with recent threats by Alberta's premier Smith to create a national unity crisis if Ottawa is unwilling to meet a list of provincial demands, suggest a failure of multilevel governance. Alberta's and Saskatchewan's obstructive stance in intergovernmental relations are possible because norms based on reciprocity are weak. For such norms to evolve, institutionalization is critical. Benz (2024: 49) is correct when he identifies the key problem underlying the Canadian case: The lack of “institutionalization of multilevel governance explains the instability of coordination.” A “Team Canada” approach can help to mitigate a short-term problem, as in the case of Donald Trump's trade war and annexation threat, but it will not be sufficient to tackle Canada's institutional governance deficit in the long-term. One key lesson from Benz's book, therefore, is that we need to start a conversation about long overdue reforms that would strengthen our governance architecture through a more robust institutionalization of intergovernmental coordination—at the apex but also across key policy domains. No matter how much current political rhetoric aims at resolving complexity by evoking a return to the “strong” and unified Westphalian state, or even an authoritarian version of it, or by dis-engaging from intergovernmental coordination through unilaterally building jurisdictional “firewalls,” Benz makes a compelling case that such efforts are profoundly misguided. Only appreciating and tapping into the potential of multilevel governance in all its varieties offers some hope that societies can find feasible solutions to cope with the turbulent political challenges of the twenty-first century.

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