What is a multi-level governance system? The concept of multi-level
governance, Bache and Flinders (2004: 4) emphasize, seeks to explain “the
dispersion of central government authority both vertically, to actors located
at other territorial levels, and horizontally to non-state actors.” For students
of governance, this means that in an age of multi-level governance we must
expand our unit of analysis beyond the state to incorporate other actors who are located at different levels, vertically and horizontally. The concept of a multilevel
governance system proposed here takes into consideration this multipleactor
situation and suggests that in the proposed multi-governance system
concept, the central government and other relevant actors in and outside the
state are joined together in a “system.” One can therefore speak of the multilevel
governance system of a country at a particular time (see Appendix One for
a description of Thailand’s multi-level governance system).