In June 2009, the Committee of the Region has published its white paper on multilevel governance. Multilevel governance, here, is understood as coordinated action by European, National and local authority levels based on partnership and aimed at drawing up and implementing EU policies. Key recommendations made by the Committee of the Regions are the accompaniment of Community strategic reforms by a regional action plan, the support of participatory local democracy, in a long term strategic perspective, the reinforcement of partnership practices in a horizontal as well as vertical manner.
The paper also argues that the territorial level is of central importance, and that participatory governance and territorial indicators should developed, just as territorial impact analysis should become standard practice in order to assess the impacts of Community proposals.
About the Covenant of Mayors, the Committee of the Regions also argues that it allows pioneering experiments to be shared, it facilitates the exchange of good practices and increases the awareness of citizens and local socio-economic actors with regard to sustainable energy use.
The paper underlines that ‘the Covenant of Mayors forms a reference model for the active engagement of cities and regions in achieving strategic goals in the European Union and should be extended to other areas such as employment, integration policy or social exclusion’.
It is also stated that ‘the Committee of the Regions is working with the European Commission to develop this initiative and plans to extend it to regional authorities. The action plans of towns and cities actually need to fit within the context of regional and national action plans’.
Finally, it is argued that ‘to reinforce the effectiveness of the Covenant of Mayors, it is also essential that the political mobilisation on the ground is followed by specific responses in terms of European policy and funding: loans from the European Investment Bank should be readily accessible for local authorities and regions willing to invest in energy efficiency programmes and promote the use of renewable energy sources’.
Putting the territorial level at the centre of the game and allow cities and local authorities to push forward European strategies is the philosophy of many of the initiatives run by Energie-Cités. In this light, the Covenant of Mayors, as underlined in the white paper, is a nice example of a multilevel governance process, which is not really top-down, and not really bottom-up either. It is the result of discussion and negotiation carried out by different authority levels, initiated by the European Commission and taken as an opportunity by local authorities.
Multilevel governance, though, is not only a vertical process between different level of decision making, but is an horizontal process too, between local authorities and local stakeholders (the classic local governance process) on one hand, but also between local authorities themselves under the form of regional, transnational and international networks on the other hand.
The challenge here, and this is one of the aspects of the IMAGINE initiative, is to reconcile these different governance processes, which are interrelated in order to negotiate decision-making processes between the relevant players and to be able to build sound strategic visions.
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