Why Strong Coordination at One Level of Government is Incompatible with Strong Coordination Across Levels: The case of the European Union

Egeberg, Morten and Trondal, Jarle (2015) Why Strong Coordination at One Level of Government is Incompatible with Strong Coordination Across Levels: The case of the European Union. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

Introduction: ‘Better coordination’, meaning creating more consistency among decisions horizontally as well as vertically, is usually a stated goal in modern political-administrative systems. Recent administrative doctrines have shared a near universal agreement on the desirability of ‘better coordination’. What is often not realized, however, is the impossibility of combining strong coordination of implementation processes at one level of government with strong coordination across levels. In order to illustrate our argument, we use the multilevel European Union (EU) polity as our case in this paper. The EU inherited ‘indirect administration’ from classical international organizations: policies adopted by the international organization are to be implemented nationally by member states themselves, and not by bodies owned by the international organization (Hofmann 2008). Such an arrangement, characterized by relatively weak coordination across levels, allows for corresponding strong coordination at the national level. However, at the same time, this has often led to legislation being incorporated and applied rather differently across countries (Treib 2014).

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