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Sustainable and balanced urban-rural development largely depends on governance system and methods, instruments and practices deriving from it. Just, efficient and effective governance requires collaboration and sharing of responsibility in policy formulation and decision-making processes between different stakeholders at different levels of territorial organization. This implies a complex set of mechanisms, processes and institutions through which stakeholders can articulate their interests and exercise their rights, but also share ideas, negotiate, reach common understanding and agree on solution in given circumstances. This paper discusses process and achieved results of the collaboration between academic institution and local government in the students' master thesis and integrated projects development for. .set on application of multilevel governance instruments in order to achieve balanced development of the municipal territory. Students' projects address different challenges: devastation of agricultural land; migration of (especially young) population from rural to urban areas; poor services and low income in rural areas; waste management; neglect of natural and cultural heritage. The educational approach was designed in order to create learning environment that foster collaborative learning for all participants involved: students, local stakeholders, consultants and mentors. The paper has three main parts. The first one provides a brief overview of the theoretical background of the multilevel governance and collaborative learning and practice oriented educational approach. Second part presents the objectives of this educational model, methods and structure of the expected deliverables. The third part presents seven students' projects that are dealing with urban-rural relationships and highlights key multilevel governance instruments for the implementation of proposals. Conclusion discusses process and product outcomes differentiating benefits for all involved, obstacles and challenges and provides recommendations for future work.

Sustainable and balanced urban-rural development largely depends on the system of governance, as well as methods, instruments, and practices which were derived from it. Just, efficient and effective governance requires collaboration and sharing of responsibility in policy formulation and decision-making processes between different stakeholders at different levels of territorial organisation. This implies a complex set of mechanisms, processes and institutions through which stakeholders can articulate their interests and exercise their rights, but also share ideas, negotiate, reach common understanding, and agree on solutions in given circumstances. This paper presents and discusses the process and results of the collaboration between an academic institution and a local government in the development of students' master's theses and integrated projects for the territory of the municipality of Pančevo, Serbia. The main focus of the curriculum was the application of multilevel governance instruments to achieve balanced development of the municipal territory. Students' projects addressed various challenges: devastation of agricultural land; migration of (especially young) people from rural to urban areas; poor services and low income in rural areas; waste management; neglect of natural and cultural heritage. The educational approach was designed so as to create a learning environment that fosters collaborative learning for all the participants involved: students, local stakeholders, consultants, and mentors. The paper consists of three main sections. The first provides a brief overview of the theoretical background of multilevel governance, collaborative learning, and the practice-oriented approach to education. The second section presents the objectives of this educational model, and the methods and structure of the expected deliverables. The third part presents six students' projects that deal with urban-rural relationships, and highlights key multilevel governance instruments for the implementation of the resulting proposals. The conclusion discusses process and product outcomes, differentiating benefits for all those involved, obstacles, and challenges, and provides recommendations for future work.

The method adopted by Spain in dealing with the legacy of the Civil War and the Dictatorship can be depicted as a blank page approach, incorporating a combination of amnesty and amnesia. Among the actors that challenge this official line, the Autonomous Communities (ACs) particularly energize the post-transitional justice process. Complementing, transcending and superseding the efforts at the national level, the law-making activity in AC legislatures has come in two separate and diverse waves, leading to the development of public policy and institutions dealing with the recovery of memory. Political cycles surface as the factor shaping the resilience of governments' commitment. It is argued that the reinvigorated coexistence of regionalist and left-wing parties in the ACs bodes well for further memory-related policy development and institutionalization. With an interplay and occasional discord between the national and subnational governments, the experience of Spain demonstrates that multilevel governance is an aspect to be reckoned with in relation to how countries deal with their past.

Since the late 1990s, the regions in Italy have played a pivotal role in the immigrant integration policy, reinforced in 2001 because of the approval of federal reform assigning to the regions full autonomy on matters of social policy, immigrants' integration included. Notwithstanding this crucial position, during the 2000s Italian regions have faced considerable cuts to their social policy budget, as well as pressures from the national government to accommodate in their immigrant integration policy issues of civic integration and Italian language learning, regarded as priorities in the EU context. This paper analyses how these new constraints and requirements have been confronted in regional policy-making processes, which characterise for the closeness with local administrations and civil society organisations, i.e. the actors charged with the implementation of regional policy programmes. Five regions in different areas of the country will be considered: Piedmont and Lombardy in the North-West; Emilia-Romagna in the North-East; Tuscany in the Centre; and Apulia in the South. The main objective is that of highlighting the emerging of different regional policy styles and systems of governance of immigrant integration, even in a context of increasing pressures towards convergence on civic integration policy priorities.

In this article, we suggest that the governance of problems shapes the institutional dynamics of multilevel governance (MLG) polities. MLG arrangements—processes and institutions that enable policy‐making across different jurisdictional levels wherein both public authorities and non‐state actors are involved—can or cannot succeed in solving policy problems and at the same time they could create new problems. We argue that the problem‐solving capacity and problem‐generating potential of multilevel arrangements can result in further, downwards, upwards or sideways delegation of political authority, which in turn reconfigure the multilevel architecture of the political system following either centripetal or centrifugal tendencies. We illustrate our point with a stylized account of the dynamics of MLG in the European Union (EU) since the early 1990s. We conclude with some remarks about developing a more general theory of multilevel policy‐making.

The article will be dealing with the empowerment of local institutions within a complex context of multilevel governance. The strengthening of cities will lead us to consider a new transformative municipalism. The transition from classic government to relational forms of governance paves the way to consider both emerging multilevel networks and models of citizen involvement at local level. The case of Barcelona today will be shown as an example of boths trends: initiatives of community engagement in urban policymaking, and local-global action at European and international level. KEYWORDS: Networks. Governance. Empowerment. Multilevel.

The European Union and the United States are paradigmatic examples of multilevel governance systems that are also regulatory states. In both settings, informal networks of regulators preceded and existed alongside supranational (federal) regulatory agencies. The literature understood their rationale as preparatory to the creation of higher level agencies. This approach, however, cannot explain why informal regulatory networks still exist, years after the establishment of higher level agencies. What explains the persistence of informal regulatory networks? The argument of this article is that in multilevel governance systems, the relationship between regulatory networks and the supranational level of governance is coevolutionary and embodies struggles for autonomy and authority: as the multilevel governance system consolidates, the character of this relationship evolves from collaborative to competitive. The argument relies on a comparative historical analysis of two voluntary networks of energy regulators from the European Union and the United States, based on 27 interviews and archival research.

The chapter focuses on how multilevel governance affects interstitial institutional change in decision-making in the EU. Interstitial institutional change occurs if formal institutional rules are ambiguous, and in consequence, when applied, are renegotiated by actors. Each concerned actor seeks to strengthen its own institutional power in these renegotiations in order to influence policy outcomes. This leads to an informal institutional change between formal treaty revisions. Héritier argues that MLG and multi-arena governance offer additional opportunities for actors to strengthen their institutional powers in the re-negotiation of incomplete formal rules during implementation, but may also set limits to such endeavours. The chapter analyses in three cases of European politics, the nomination and investiture of the Commission President, the nomination and investiture of individual Commissioners and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, the conditions in which multilevel and multi-arena strategies of the European Parliament bring about an informal interstitial institutional change. All these cases imply a power shift between European institutional actors in favour of the parliament.

Past work has shown that economic conditions influence electoral outcomes at multiple levels of government in Canada and in democratic states around the world. However, there is significant variation in the jurisdictional ability of different governments to influence economic conditions; in particular, municipal governments may be least able to influence the economy. As a result, voters may be less likely to hold municipal incumbents accountable for economic conditions than either provincial or federal politicians. Building on this discussion, this article explores several questions. First, do citizens differentiate between the impacts of different orders of government on economic conditions? Second, does the economy affect incumbent support in local elections? Finally, does knowledge of the jurisdictional responsibilities of the three levels of government condition economic effects at the municipal level in Canada? We consider these questions using individual-level data collected during the 2014 Toronto municipal election.