Introduction

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the book. It sets out the book’s subject, namely, the effects of non-hierarchical architectures on actual policy processes and policy outcomes. It also seeks to advance contemporary debates on regulatory governance through an analytical framework that builds on them but also responds to their limitations. That framework seeks to address: an over-narrow focus on (experimentalist) institutional architectures; a view of political factors as antithetical to functional ones, if not neglected altogether; rival but untested predictions about the long-term trajectory of non-hierarchical governance; and currently unfalsifiable arguments about allegedly rival mechanisms underpinning non-hierarchical governance. Instead, it gives due weight to actors’ choices on which governance processes to employ, underlines the mutually supportive role of functional and political pressures, challenges conservative views that non-hierarchical governance is doomed to be unsustainable, and shows that it is precisely a combination of positive (shadow-of-hierarchy) and negative (penalty-default) mechanisms that typically helps non-hierarchical processes to deliver policy outcomes effectively. The introduction ends by setting out the book’s research design and (comparative and process-tracing) methods and summarizes the chapters that follow.