Policy advisory system quality under multilevel governance: the German COVID-19 experience

Policymakers frequently seek scientific expert advice to navigate new and complex policy challenges, but the decisions that must be taken to address these problems often require the cooperation of different levels of government as well as state and non-state actors. While existing literature has acknowledged that the political context influences the processes of scientific policy advice, it lacks the formulation of specific expectations or mechanisms on how such multilevel structures affect scientific policy advice. This article explores the key challenges that scientific policy advice faces in multilevel settings and specifies how multilevel structures can both support and hinder effective problem-solving. The study highlights that while the inclusion of diverse governance levels can enrich policy debates with scientific evidence, it can also lead to fragmented advisory structures that question the hierarchy of scientific evidence and hinder science-policy transfer processes. We underpin this argument with empirical evidence from COVID-19 crisis management in Germany, a country that is exemplary for multilevel governance structures both within its domestic context (federalism) and beyond (as a member of the European Union). The findings underscore the challenges for scientific policy advice in contexts that span across multiple scales.