Mads Dagnis Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Christel Koop is Lecturer at the Department of Political Economy, King's College London, UK.

Michaël Tatham is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Norway.

How do actors involved in the dispersion of government powers upwards, sideways and downwards cope with the new configurations? This collection looks at the tensions between autonomy and interdependence as well as at the control and co-ordination mechanisms that are introduced to deal with these tensions. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

1. Coping with power dispersion? Autonomy, co-ordination and control in multilevel systems 2. On the path to differentiation: upward transfer, logic of variation and sub-optimality in EU social policy 3. Negotiating the morass: measuring and explaining variation in co-ordination mechanisms in the European Union 4. Network governance and the domestic adoption of soft rules 5. Exploring the co-ordination of economic regulation 6. Controlling bureaucracies with fire alarms: policy instruments and cross-country patterns 7. Regional policy variation in Germany: the diversity of living conditions in a 'unitary federal state' 8. Competence ring-fencing from below? The drivers of regional demands for control over upwards dispersion