ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to ground the discussion in many of the other contributions by developing a typology of more concrete and prosaic accountability problems connected with a rapidly growing form of global governance — transgovernmental regulatory networks, or 'government networks'. It seeks to broaden the understanding of government networks by placing them in more historical context and by elaborating different types of government networks within and without traditional international institutions. The chapter overviews the literature on trans-governmentalism since the 1970s and sets forth a typology of three different categories of government networks. It seeks to pinpoint the specific accountability concerns associated with each type and offers one approach to answering some current accountability concerns by adapting the concept of 'information agencies' from the European Union to the global level. This analysis rests on a claim of similarity between global government networks and a number of EU governance structures, primarily the 'comitology' system and related trans-governmental and public-private networks.
