The costs and the accountability of EU multi-level governance: issues and lines of analysis from a public management/organisation science perspective

The paper reacts to some of the questions posed by the Discussion Note. In particular, it addresses four issues: 1. the issue of the transaction costs in Multi Level Governance (MLG) settings; 2. the issue of resources and overlapping in MLG settings. 3. the issue of accountability in MLG settings; 4. the issue of the importance of the interconnectedness between different levels (as well as among administrations at the same level) in MLG settings; The underlying idea is that the adoption of different theoretical perspectives – and particularly the adoption of theoretical perspectives drawn from the camps of public administration/public management and organisation science – may help improve our understanding of the functioning of MLG systems . This knowledge may have also implications in terms of policy prescriptions, also at the level of the design of MLG settings in the EU – though the detailed elaboration of such implications is for future work