The Internationalization of Public Policy and the Prospects for a Theory of Multi-Level Governance

Globalization represents a significant paradigm shift in political science. Whereas well into the 1990s, most sub-fields of the discipline focused on the nation-state, the actions of governments, and the relationships between governments and other societal actors, globalization has forced us to revise many of our existing theories. In a truly globalizing environment, politics cannot focus solely on the state. Scholars across the discipline have moved away from studying governments to studying governance within both a national and international context. Domestically, the evolving interest in the policy network/community approach demonstrates the increasing role of the private and community sectors in governance arrangements. Internationally, regime theory has extended the frontiers of political science to study private regimes, multinational corporations and the ever-increasing importance of NGOs. Despite calls from scholars like Rosenau to speak of a post-international system following the end of the Cold war1, or from Keohane and Milner to better understand the relationship between domestic politics and international politics2, little theorizing work has actually been able to incorporate knowledge from the sub-fields of political science in order to present a truly holistic view of the emerging global order.