Intergovernmental councils have emerged as the main structures through which the governments of a federation coordinate public policy making. In a globalized and complex world, federal actors are increasingly interdependent. This mutual dependence in the delivery of public services has important implications for the stability of a federal system: policy problems concerning more than one government can destabilize a federation, unless governments coordinate their policies. This book argues that intergovernmental councils enhance federal stability by incentivizing governments to coordinate, which makes them a federal safeguard. By comparing reforms of fiscal and education policy in Australia, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, this book shows that councils’ effectiveness as one of federalism’s safeguards depends on their institutional design and the interplay with other political institutions and mechanisms. Federal stability is maintained if councils process contentious policy problems, are highly institutionalized, are not dominated by the federal government, and are embedded in a political system that facilitates intergovernmental compromising and consensus-building.

Introduction : politics, government, management across boundaries -- Federal framing of intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental management -- Integrating the federal system through law and politics -- Legally and politically based intergovernmental relations in practice -- Jurisdictional interdependence -- Managing interdependency -- Intergovernmental management partnerships with nongovernmental organizations -- Managing intergovernmental management partnerships -- The network era -- Organized intergovernmental management networks -- Conclusion : the past and future of intergovernmental management

This book is the result of a collective re¬flection among scholars from 8 federations and decentralized countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Italy, Mexico) who sought to update approaches and arguments on federalism in a post-COVID-19 scenario. On one hand, the pandemic highlighted the importance of federalism to deal with complex intergovernmental problems. On the other hand, federations also faced challenges to coordinate different spheres of government. The pandemic has allowed intense learning about the potential and limits of multilevel governance and federal arrangements in addressing emergencies and crises whose effects spread throughout the country. Regarding contemporary challenges such as climate emergency and democratic backsliding, which take on particular contours in federal, quasi-federal, and decentralized countries, the book offers insightful thoughts for scholars and practitioners. Federalism and federal countries can be pivotal in this debate due to their form of territorial division of power. This volume seeks to contribute to these discussions based on thoughts grounded on different national settings. The volume is organized in 16 chapters that contemplate essential topics on federalism and federations, based both on theoretical refl¬ections and empirical research. The chapters were mainly organized to offer for the authors a comparative perspective between the international debate and the Brazilian context. The book covers central issues such as federalism and institutional forms, federalism and democracy, federalism and de/centralization, managing interdependences and intergovernmental relations, federalism and ethnic diversity and federalism and challenges for the welfare state. Although this book is subject to the scrutiny of time, in line with changes in federations themselves, both organizers and authors aspire to provide ongoing debates with insightful contributions on Federalism and Democracy in Brazil and Beyond. This book is an essential reading for students and scholars of federalism, intergovernmental relations, multilevel governance and comparative politics.

A comprehensive guide to the theory, methodology, and development for modeling systems of systems Modeling and Managing Interdependent Complex Systems of Systems examines the complexity of, and the risk to, emergent interconnected and interdependent complex systems of systems in the natural and the constructed environment, and in its critical infrastructures. For systems modelers, this book focuses on what constitutes complexity and how to understand, model and manage it.Previous modeling methods for complex systems of systems were aimed at developing theory and methodologies for uncoupling the interdependencies and interconnections that characterize them. In this book, the author extends the above by utilizing public- and private- sector case studies; identifies, explores, and exploits the core of interdependencies; and seeks to understand their essence via the states of the system, and their dominant contributions to the complexity of systems of systems. The book proposes a reevaluation of fundamental and practical systems engineering and risk analysis concepts on complex systems of systems developed over the past 40 years. This important resource: Updates and streamlines systems engineering theory, methodology, and practice as applied to complex systems of systems Introduces modeling methodology inspired by philosophical and conceptual thinking from the arts and sciences Models the complexity of emergent interdependent and interconnected complex systems of systems by analyzing their shared states, decisions, resources, and decisionmakers Written for systems engineers, industrial engineers, managers, planners, academics and other professionals in engineering systems and the environment,this text is the resource for understanding the fundamental principles of modeling and managing complex systems of systems, and the risk thereto.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In Shared Rule in Federal Theory and Practice, Sean Mueller provides a new, in-depth treatment of shared rule, a crucial but so far largely neglected dimension of federalism and multilevel governance. He discusses shared rule's conceptual evolution and defines three different meanings commonly ascribed to it: shared rule as horizontal cooperation, centralization, or bottom-up influence seeking. An original expert survey conducted among 38 federalism scholars in 11 countries is used to measure actual regional government influence over national decisions. Drawing on a wide range of literature, from lobbying and political parties to power sharing and secessionism, the author then investigates the emergence and impact of shared rule thus understood. The evidence presented includes qualitative case studies on Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the US as well as quantitative, cross-sectional analyses at regional and national level. Mueller shows that shared rule has the potential to become the holy grail of territorial politics in that it satisfies both those wanting greater unity and uniformity of policy making as well as those desiring greater regional autonomy and recognition of diversity. Building on the conceptual and empirical groundwork laid by the Regional Authority Index, he takes us further and deeper still into the mechanics of territorial contestation, cooperation, and cohesion. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

The time is ripe to revisit Canada's past and redress its historical wrongs. Yet in our urgency to imagine roads to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, it is important to keep in sight the many other forms of diversity that Canadian federalism has historically been designed to accommodate or could also reflect more effectively. Canadian Federalism and Its Future brings together international experts to assess four fundamental institutions: bicameralism, the judiciary as arbiter of the federal deal, the electoral system and party politics, and intergovernmental relations. The contributors use comparative and critical lenses to appraise the repercussions of these four dimensions of Canadian federalism on key actors, including member states, constitutive units, internal nations, Indigenous peoples, and linguistic minorities. Pursuing the work of The Constitutions That Shaped Us (2015) and The Quebec Conference of 1864 (2018), this third volume is a testimony to Canada's successes and failures in constitutional design. Reflecting on the cultural pluralism inherent in this country, Canadian Federalism and Its Future offers thought-provoking lessons for a world in search of concrete institutional solutions, within and beyond the traditional nation-state.