Carving Out Policy Space for State Government in a Federation: The Role of Coordination

Abstract

To be a player in federal negotiations, state governments need sophisticated internal coordination skills. The more intense the federal agenda, the greater the demands made on state government machinery to prepare comprehensive policy advice for those representing the state. This study argues that moves in Australia to reform federalism, by dealing with jurisdictional overlap, also produced a significant upgrading of state coordination capacity. A case study of one state, Queensland, in the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) experiment suggests how states carve out a space in negotiations by rethinking their internal governance arrangements.