Ian Bache and Matthew Flinders provide an overview of the development and main issues in the study of multi‐level governance, before identifying the main themes of the book. These are concerned with how multi‐level governance should be defined and how the concept is understood and utilized in different academic fields; how structures and processes of multi‐level governance differ across policy sectors and how these differences might be explained; the implications of multi‐level governance for the power, position, and role of the nation state; the implications of multi‐level governance for democratic accountability; and the limitations of the multi‐level governance model.