Multilevel Governance and Strategic Planning
Multi-level governance (MLG) implicitly or explicitly relates to problem-solving. It is a concept applied to make sense of the interaction between a multiplicity of actors across different levels of government, which can occur either within a general-purpose, territorially-bounded polity or according to a task-specific logic where jurisdictions are overlapping and potentially unlimited in number and scope.
By working together (through an MLG approach), public authorities can combine their expertise to benefit the planning process:
• Ensure coherency between local and regional plans: a collaborative process can help to integrate plans and policies at regional and local levels (for greater efficiency).
• Develop clear and consistent visions: sharing knowledge and ideas between authorities can enable ambitious and realistic visions to be created.
• Establish more favourable financing mechanisms: partnering up with other authorities can create more secure and stable conditions to attract investment.
• Communicate more effectively: defining objectives collaboratively ensures that messages are harmonised between stakeholders.
• Establish consistent monitoring and reporting tools or reporting structures, to ensure plans are monitored more coherently between the local and regional levels.
• Share expertise, skills and knowledge: this can fill important skills gaps in the planning process and facilitate the spread of good practices and innovative actions.
To initiate the collaborative process, as a first step, before a common vision and objectives can be developed, it is advisable to identify the different needs of the various stakeholders involved – starting with the regional authority. This can provide an initial draft of the vision which will evolve as other stakeholders become involved.
During the last interregional meeting the project team worked on how to manage multilevel governance in order to implement collaborative planning and identified that the process of setting up an MLG process can be broken down into the following steps:
Involving key stakeholders, and keeping them engaged and informed throughout the process, is one of the keys to the success of the collaborative process. Therefore it is important to identify the types of stakeholders to engage with, and their roles in the process since the roles and motivations of stakeholders will change depending on their expectations, the resources at their disposal, and their willingness to be involved.