ABSTRACT
Environmental issues are the most prominent, but by no means exclusive, indicators of an emerging new political culture that cannot be confined to either nation state boundaries or the hierarchical framework of institutionalized politics. Such issues are of a political relevance that is at the same time global and local, personal and universal. In consequence of the ‘unbinding of politics’, the nation state has to share the global political arena with non-governmental and non-political actors while issues that where formerly confined to the debate in political institutions are dragged into the multiple ‘agoras’ of everyday life and civil society (Beck, 1996; 1997). Conversely, attempts to (re-) vitalize civic participation within hierarchical institutional frameworks, such as the EU, therefore, require special attention to the dynamics of regional culture and local society, where the political and the subpolitical actually intersect. Programmes of ‘good governance’, such as the European Commission’s ‘White Paper’ on ‘European Governance’ (2001), aim in this direction. Both these structural developments, the politicization of everyday life and the search for new forms and levels of democratization of hierarchical governance, call for a refined understanding of governance commonly captured in the formula of multilevel-governance (MLG). This chapter pursues this argument in two directions and is grounded in a sociological, rather than political science, perspective.1
