Coordinating school improvement: Understanding the impact of state implementation approach on coordination in multilevel governance systems

Multilevel governance is theorized to facilitate effective policy implementation by encouraging the use of local knowledge and expertise, enabling the participation of non-government actors, and capitalizing on the coordinating and sanctioning authority of centralized governments. Whether a particular multilevel governance arrangement achieves this, however, depends in part on the degree to which it enables coordination among governmental and non-governmental actors representing different levels and jurisdictions. Using a comparative case study of education governance reform in the United States, this study investigates how differences in state policy implementation approach impact the structure and mode of coordination in multilevel governance systems and considers the effects this has on policy implementation processes. The results indicate that a state's implementation approach impacts coordination by structuring how different levels of government interact, share information, and influence policy. Specifically, variation in the structure of the central governing agency directly enables or restricts the influence of bottom-up coordination from lower levels of government. The results also highlight the theoretical limitations of current binary structure models of multilevel governance (i.e., centralized vs. decentralized, top-down vs. bottom-up, hierarchy vs. network) for capturing important nuances in policy coordination. These findings advance the understanding of policy coordination in multilevel governance systems and inform the design of institutional arrangements that balance trade-offs in centralization and the delegation of authority across governance systems during policy implementation.