Transition Management: toward a prescriptive model for multi-level governance systems

Over the last decades, we have witnessed a shift from the centralized government-based nation-state, towards liberalized, market based and decentralized decision-making structures. Due to societal developments the power of central government to make policies and implement these has decreased, leading to increasingly diffuse policy-making structures and processes stratified across sub-national, national and supra-national levels of government (Hooghe and Marks 2001). Generally referred to with the term ‘governance’ (Kooiman 1993), the current practice of government in making policy is in interaction with a diversity of societal actors. At the European level, this development has led to multi-level, participatory decision-making structures in which for example regions are dealing directly with EU-offices, NGO’s and businesses are involved in the development of policies and top-down decisions are limited to the politically most controversial issues. But governance has also become common practice at the global as well as on a regional scale, where influence of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), business and science slowly becomes part of policy-making.