The Role of Local Governments in Vertical Intergovernmental Coordination

Vertical intergovernmental coordination in today’s multi-level public governance settings is strongly linked to cooperation among the levels of public governance (politico-administrative) systems, from local to global, in all phases of the policy process.
Political (partisan-political) and administrative (administrative-technical) approaches to coordination are interlinked and interdependent, but different in several important aspects, including coordination forms, instruments and mechanisms. These two basic approaches follow the traditional differentiation of politics and administration.
Vertical intergovernmental coordination needs to ensure linked, well-combined, interrelated, coherent, legally-consistent and joined-up policy responses to relevant public challenges, as well as implementation and management of public policies irrespective of non-negligible risks and problems of multi-level governance.
Traditionally, vertical coordination was based on bureaucratic coordination within the administrative departmental siloes. These siloes used to be strongly vertically coordinated within themselves particularly in centralised countries. Hierarchy-type mechanisms used to be typical for vertical coordination. Some evidence indicates that even when a government tries to introduce network-type or market-type mechanisms into coordination of public organisations, it does not reduce hierarchical control based on authority and domination nor it changes means of top-down control.
However, federal, devolved, regionalized and decentralised countries, with stronger position and greater autonomy of federal units (states), regional and local governments, needed more complex, refined, soft and state, regional or local autonomy-sensitive institutional arrangements designed for coordination and instruments thereof. Thus, both top-down and bottom-up approaches are highly relevant in achieving coherent and adjusted design of public policies and delivery of public services to the citizens.
This panel is focused on the particular situation and role of local governments in vertical intergovernmental coordination.