Governance is, in one of its most renowned definitions, "the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest" (Commission on Global Governance 1995).
The expansion of governance practices in many different spheres responds to an intensified complexity of policy issues, reflecting a dramatic increase in societal complexity. The fields of surface water management and of use and conservation of biodiversity are also subject to this expansion of governance. New forms of governance demand co-ordination between policies, the public, and science. Moreover, particularly regarding environmental problems decision-making processes are highly complex encompassing different and interwoven levels.
EU governance necessarily is multi-level, i.e. created by and implemented through interaction of political actors operating at different levels: European, national, sub-national, local. The coherence of EU environmental policies is hampered by the diversity of legal and political traditions in the member states. EU enlargement, policy integration and mainstreaming environmental policy provide new challenges. GoverNat addresses the implementation of network-based governance solutions such as those contained in the Habitat and Water Framework Directives.
Multi-level environmental governance, thus, faces challenges regarding the integration of heterogeneous levels of decision-making governed by rules of their own and the integration of political and natural scales examined by scientific concepts often difficult to synthesize. GoverNat examines the linkages between the European, national and local levels of governance through case studies, which will be selected to represent the diversity of environmental governance settings in Europe. This will generate insights on policy implementation and on how the problems of multi-level governance have been and can be addressed.
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