Meta governors as guardians of legitimacy: a theoretical fairy tale or not?

An increasing amount of complex societal issues like COVID-19, Climate change or the banking crisis require governments to more often rely on institutional relations with society to address these problems. These institutional relations are in this research defined as governance networks. However, in these networks decision making processes shift from formal democratic arena’s to informal networks. Different perceptions are found about what this means for democratic legitimacy, thereby providing different norms about how legitimacy in these networks should look like. Furthermore, scholars point towards the crucial role of meta-governors, who via various shaping and steering methods should ensure safeguarding of legitimacy in governance networks. This role is often bestowed on politicians or administrators, but scholars remain sceptical about their capability of democratising networks due to several identified barriers. In addition, as the debate about democratic legitimacy remains unlinked from the application of meta-governance it is unclear how the different norms stemming from the perceptions are reflected in how meta-governors set out to democratise networks. Therefore this research set out to link these debates and study what role meta-governors’ perceptions about democratic legitimacy might have in how they shape networks to become democratic. Thereby exploring which theoretical norms are found in their perceptions and if democratic norms are the dominant factor in meta-governors’ democratising strategies. By interviewing meta-governors and analysing documents in the context of the Dutch National Climate Agreement several insights are provided. While a group of administrative, political and independent meta-governors has managed to provide a full-fledged meta-governance strategy aimed at democratising the NCA, their perceptions show that critical dilemmas of the theoretical debate are evaded. Furthermore, the role meta-governors give to Parliament seems to have directly influenced the design of the agreement. However, regarding other choices in the managing and shaping of the agreement trade-offs between effectiveness and legitimacy are identified. Though the perceptions about democratic legitimacy are reflected in meta-governors’ strategies, effectiveness arguments thus also have a role. Although the conclusions of this study might be more indicative than providing empirical prove, in the valuation of the democratising capacity of meta-governance it is vital to take this role of effectiveness into account. Future research would do well to further explore the role of effectiveness and perceptions about democratic legitimacy in the application of democratising meta-governance strategies.