Gary Marks (born 1952 in London) is an American-based academic and an expert on multilevel governance and the European Union.
[1] He is a Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[9] Multilevel governance (MLG) can be described as the dispersion of authority away from central states to subnational and supranational levels.
In a 1996 Journal of Common Market Studies article, Marks and co-authors develop the concept of multilevel governance and contrast it with intergovernmentalism.
“Instead of the two-level game assumptions adopted by state centrists, MLG theorists posit a set of overarching, multi-level policy networks… The presumption of multi-level governance is that these actors participate in diverse policy networks, and this may involve sub-national actors — interest groups and subnational governments — dealing directly with supranational actors.”[13] In their 2003 American Political Science Review article Marks and Hooghe conceptualize two ideal-types of MLG, general purpose (or Type I) and task-specific (or Type II) governance, with the goal of theorizing the "unraveling of the state" in Europe and beyond.
They bundle multiple functions, including a range of policy responsibilities, and in many instances, a court system and representative institutions.
Type II governance, predominant above states, conceives of jurisdictions built around policy problems.