EU Transport Infrastructure Policy, New Institutionalism and Types of Multi-Level Governance: The Case of Vienna

Awesti, Anil (2009) EU Transport Infrastructure Policy, New Institutionalism and Types of Multi-Level Governance: The Case of Vienna. In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Multi-level Governance (MLG) fundamentally challenges a state-centric, intergovernmentalist understanding of EU policy-making, emphasising the nonhierarchical, interconnected and multi-actor nature of contemporary governing. As such, MLG encapsulates the reconfiguration of EU policy-making space, rejecting a conception of governing as existing at either the domestic or international level, but rather as a single entity characterised by a complex web of interaction amongst the variety of interested actors. The EU’s institutions are critical to the reordering of policy-making space in the EU in that they provide arenas of interaction. The institutions undertake the role of ‘honey pot sites’, attracting actors and therefore facilitating the processes of interaction that so mark MLG. By applying the analytical tools of new institutionalism to the experience of the city-region political administration of Vienna in the EU's transport infrastructure policy, this paper proposes a framework for understanding MLG as existing in three distinct types, varying in accordance to its rational choice, historical and sociological institutionalist guises. In doing so, this paper offers a continuation of Hooghe and Marks’ ‘types of multi-level governance’ approach but in a different form. Rather than distinguishing types of MLG on the basis of jurisdictional features, this paper presents three types of MLG emerging from differing institutional processes.

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