Network State

term from Manuel Castells

What emerges is a new form of the state. It is a state made of shared institutions, and enacted by bargaining and interactive iteration all along the chain of decision making: national governments, co-national governments, supra-national bodies, international institutions, governments of nationalities, regional governments, local governments, and NGOs (in our conception: neo-governmental organizations). Decision Making and representation take place all along the chain, not necessarily in the hierarchical, pre-scripted order. This new state functions as a network, in which all nodes interact, and are equally necessary for the performance of state's functions. The state of the Information Age is a Network State.

• exists within a Network Economy? cf Network Governance

So what we have, for instance, in the case of Europe (EU), is a complex system of institutional relations, which I call the network state, because, in fact, it's a network of interactions of shared Sovereignty.

netzdialog.ines.org

http://www.ifhc.org.br/painel_castells.htm