European Governance and Local Development in an Enlarged Europe

The term governance probably owes its success to the need of political science to find new analytical categories which can better describe and analyse how the decision-making processes of recent years have taken place, processes which involve rising levels of participation and/or negotiation. Essentially, what seems to have changed is the decision-making process and those taking part in this process. As with all new terminology, there is still disagreement amongst scholars concerning its meaning and it tends to be used with different meanings in different countries and different disciplines. One of the first ambiguities of the term arises from the fact that the English language has two different words to refer to the ‘government’ as an institution (government) and to ‘government’ as an activity (governance). Because this distinction does not occur in all languages, it is best to A second ambivalence comes from the fact that within the very framework of the governance theory there exist two different meanings whereby the decision-making process is seen in terms of ‘negotiation’ and ‘governance’: economic governanceuse and political governance. This dual notion of governance is particularly important for research and therefore needs to be taken into consideration, particularly when a definition of ‘good governance’ is required. The economic approach of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, for instance, defines ‘good governance’ in terms of economic regulation prevailing on political regulation according to which “more Market, less State” is best; whereas the political approach defines ‘good governance’ in terms of a decision-making process which allows for as much democratic participation as possible. We therefore have two different notions of the same term which in turn can lead to two different of the quality of development. The paper introduces the concept of Mulilevel Governance in European studies and it concludes with some critical comments of the reform of European governance proposed by the EU White Paper