Introduction: A Policy-Focused Approach

This book aims to contribute to our theoretical and empirical understanding of comparative intergovernmental studies and public administration during a period of increasing political, social, and economic crises. These crises have meant that, over recent years, those involved with intergovernmental relationships (IGR) have had to cope with new challenges and manage often unprecedented tensions between levels of government. In particular, new and emergent issues have arrived on the political agenda. These issues create present or looming crises in government and wider society—such as over disease control (such as Covid-19), mass migration, and climate change. They pose new and complex governance challenges, and place strains on the political responsiveness, policymaking capacities, and operational capacities of existing European substate political-administrative institutions. These unprecedented challenges necessitate a critical examination of the prevailing assumptions that underpin contemporary studies on European substate government and intergovernmental relations (IGR). This book provides such an examination through applying a policy-focused approach (Hacker & Pierson, 2014). This approach departs from the conventional institutional-focused approach, prevalent in past comparative European intergovernmental relations studies, which seeks to explain contemporary IGR arrangements predominantly in terms of the persistent and dominant influence of political-institutional, structural legacies (e.g. Loughlin et al., 2011). In contrast, the policy-focused approach contends that the structures and processes of IGR are best understood by analysing how specific policy issues are navigated by actors.