ABSTRACT
There is no shortage of analytical tools aimed at the improvement of our understanding of European integration. The last decade has seen a proliferation of research programmes looking into political arrangements beyond the nation-state and advocating the notion of governance specifically, but not exclusively, in the context of the European Union (EU). For many scholars, European governance has become the most appropriate overarching term to capture the complex, dynamic and fast-changing features of the interdependent institutional ensembles operating at subnational, national, and supra-national levels.1 There remains, however, significant disagreement about the theoretical and empirical status of the closely related, though simultaneously narrower and broader, term of multi-level governance (MLG).
