Beyond Europeanization? Differentiated Integration and Transnational Municipal Networking

Over the past decades, sub-national bureaucracies have come to play an increasingly important role in the European Union (EU) policy-cycle. Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) at the EU level have been instrumental in facilitating and sustaining this development, being involved in activities spanning from channeling and administering EU-financed projects involving municipalities and regions, providing guidance as to how EU legislation is to be interpreted and applied locally, to offering policy advice to the European Commission. Municipalities participating in EU-level TMNs – e.g., financed, coordinated, or otherwise linked to EU institutions – are however also often linked up via parallel transnational networks. From the perspective of differentiated integration, such "network multiplicity" and overlapping memberships can be seen as providing alternative venues for influencing EU-level developments, implying that investing time and energy into alternative TMNs would be particularly important for sub-national bureaucracies in non-EU member-states such as the European Economic Area (EEA) country Norway. This paper draws on survey-data gathered at the central administrative level in Norwegian and Swedish municipalities (N: 225) in order to investigate this proposition, focusing on the extent to which, and how, different categories of TMNs – including regional and international networks – are mobilized as municipal bureaucracies work on EU/EEA-related questions. The paper finds that multiple TMNs are mobilized in municipal work on EU/EEA-related questions regardless of form of affiliation. Rather, the activation of different types of TMNs is shaped by what sort of EU/EEA-related tasks the municipal bureaucracy typically engages in, and the propensity to engage broadly across different TMNs is first and foremost linked to municipal size, thus pointing to two additional sources of differentiation.