Coping with Power Dispersion Autonomy, Co-ordination and Control in Multi-Level Systems Journal of European Public Policy Series

The last decades have witnessed a significant shift in policy competencies away from central governments in Europe. The reallocation of competencies spans over three dimensions: upwards, sideways, and downwards. This collection takes the dispersion of powers as a starting point and seeks to assess how the actors involved cope with the new configurations. Chapters discuss the conceptualization of power dispersion and highlight the ways in which we add to this research agenda. Some general conclusions are also outlined, indicating future avenues of research. Taken together, the collection contributes answers to the challenge of defining and measuring ? in a comparative way ? the control and co-ordination mechanisms which power dispersion generates. In sum, the collection explores the tension between political actors' quest for autonomy and the acknowledgement of their interdependence whilst revealing how, as power dispersion deepens, central governments have sought to both manage and limit it. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

1. Coping with power dispersion? Autonomy, co-ordination and control in multilevel systems 2. On the path to differentiation: upward transfer, logic of variation and sub-optimality in EU social policy 3. Negotiating the morass: measuring and explaining variation in co-ordination mechanisms in the European Union 4. Network governance and the domestic adoption of soft rules 5. Exploring the co-ordination of economic regulation 6. Controlling bureaucracies with fire alarms: policy instruments and cross-country patterns 7. Regional policy variation in Germany: the diversity of living conditions in a ‘unitary federal state’ 8. Competence ring-fencing from below? The drivers of regional demands for control over upwards dispersion

Mads Dagnis Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Christel Koop is Lecturer at the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, UK.

Michaël Tatham is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Norway.