State and non-state actors in multy-level governance systems: from the iron triangle to co-governance

The article scrutinizes the current changes in the process of policy formulation and policy implementation. Analyzing classic and up-to-date literature on policy studies, the authors demonstrate that the new roles of stateand non-state actors and the new modes of their interaction serve as a background for policy change regardless of the political context it takes place in. The authors utilize the concepts of multi-level governance and network governance in order to identify the new functions actors take in a policy process and to outline the pathways for future research in the field.
Literature overview demonstrates a pervasive increase in co-dependence of all stakeholders, who became an integral part of public policy, starting from social agenda and ending up with global environmental challenges. Such phenomena as cogovernance, regulatory state, and private government become extreme examples of shifts in quality of multi-level governance systems. These changes are also relevant for non-democratic and non-capitalist market contexts, even though they are limited to specific policy spheres and might produce different outcomes. Inevitable shortcomings of multi-level governance are a tendency of private capture of public policy, legitimacy decline and blurring of accountability as well as escalation of the principal-agent problem. The crucial explanation of multi-level governance efficiency lies in the coherence of layering of responsibilities, fair distribution of costs and additional incentives for cooperation among various layers of governance.
The article is organized as follows. The first paragraph describes the role of the state and governmental actors under the conditions of multi-level governance. The second paragraph is devoted to the role of non-state actors (business, NGOs, international, and transnational organizations) in the process of policy formulation and policy change. Finally, the third paragraph focuses on the changes in actors’ behavior that take place at the stages of policy implementation and feedback. To conclude, the authors discuss how the development of multi-level governance influences state autonomy.

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