Whose Agents? Sub-National Bureaucracies in Multilevel Administrative Spaces

Abstract

Sub-national bureaucracies perform a key role with respect to implementing policies initiated at other levels of government. As such, sub-national bureaucracies are exposed to, and must reconcile, potentially conflicting decision-making signals from different centers of authority. On the one hand, they implement local political initiatives and are thus subjected to local political control. As implementers of national (welfare) policy goals, however, they are also subjected to central state steering and must relate to both political signals and administrative control exerted by the central state bureaucracy. In order to solve delegated tasks, they also frequently engage in collaborations with other sub-national bureaucracies that may subject them to additional external expectations. As relevant sector laws contain provisions stemming from EU legislation, finally, the sub-national bureaucracy must also relate to signals from supranational institutions. In sum, sub-national bureaucracies are embedded into different multilevel administrative spaces with implications for local autonomy. This panel is devoted to papers that explore various aspects of how sub-national bureaucracies relate to different centers of authority, with a special emphasis on how the embedding of sub-national bureaucracies into multilevel administrative spaces impacts on patterns of local autonomy and external control.

Title	Details
Towards Multi-Hatted Local Government Bureaucracies? Sub-National Bureaucracies and the Practicing of Supranational Law	View Paper Details
Municipal Practices of European Union Law: Local Policy Delivery, Fusion Dynamics, and the Quest for Peers	View Paper Details
Perceptions of central steering of local and regional governments among civil servants	View Paper Details