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welcome everybody to today's session on turn on federalism on intergovernmental relations in federal systems my name is soren kyle i'm an academic at canterbury christ church university in the uk and together with my colleague dr paul anderson i'm in charge of the website 50 shades of federalist please allow me to say a few words about turn on federalism about our partners and about today's session before i head over to today's speaker turn on federalism is a cooperation between 50 shades of federalism and the hans zida foundation which is the german political foundation entrusted with a mandate from the german federal parliament and its core mandate is to promote democracy and the rule of law within germany but also worldwide with over 100 projects in more than 60 partner countries 50 shades of federalism is a project that was established in october 2017 with the aim to foster debate on federalism the website 50 shades of federalism.com provides short articles on federalism which are free to download and use the new online series turn on federalism today's event is number four in our series brings together the hunts idol foundation and fifty shades of federalism with the aim of enhancing the debate on federalism globally the a the theory is aims to engage with experts politicians and civil society actors around the world and to discuss the possibilities of federalism in different shades and country-based evolutions as well as to create further networks of exchange discussion and cooperation our topic today focuses on intergovernmental relations these are often key in order to explain why federations work as today's speaker professor joanne poirier will point out intergovernmental relations are often challenging to study because they often bring together formal processes but also informal practices indeed the head of the conference of swiss contents when i ask him about intergovernmental relations one said to me well they usually involve emails phone calls and chats which is interesting but particularly challenging to study so today we ask the question why do these intergovernmental relations matter so much and what can we learn from mature federal systems especially also for emerging federations many of our participants today come from countries where we are seeing emerging federal structures before i hand over to today's speakers please allow me to introduce our our panelists today those of you who have joined us before will know that the wonderful anya richter will be our moderator today anjara is the head of the huntsville foundation office in london in the united kingdom today's speaker is professor joanne poirier teaches at mcgill university's faculty of law in montreal canada where she holds the peter mccall chair in federalism we are very very pleased to have both of them here with us before i head over to juan please let me remind you if you have any questions for our speaker please use the q and a box we will collect all the questions and pass them on to professor polier please feel free to listen to us either on this channel in english or to select the myanmar channel in the language button in your zoom menu and follow the discussion in myanmar language i will now hand over to professor pourier thank you very much hi am i on screen i just want to be sure i got a good platform excellent uh bonjour uh good morning minga i hope i pronounced this somewhat correctly uh it's a real privilege to participate in this seminar today with uh with people i understand from around the world so it's a very humbling experience thank you for joining me at probably ungodly hours uh around the globe some of you should be probably sleeping for me it's very early in the morning it's also absolutely beautiful right now uh near montreal where i am it has snowed overnight and for some of you it probably is unthinkable that we love to live in a country where it's minus 20 uh outside uh i'd like to thank the uh the foundation the han seidel foundation for for inviting me uh and the the leaders of fifty shades of federalism uh both really interesting uh initiatives to bring discussion about federal systems into a broader community than uh than academic specialists and it's really an important learning experience for for all of us including uh certainly the speakers um before i start i would like to acknowledge that i am speaking today i'm in canada in quebec which for many of you will know is the french-speaking part mostly french-speaking part of canada but i am speaking from unceded land of an indigenous people called the abenaki part of the agnes nation and i would like to thank the indigenous peoples on on whose land we are grounded uh today um i have about 12 minutes to speak and i would like to speak to you about 50 shades of igr so this will be quite difficult so i will speed through some of it and of course we can go back to elements uh during the uh the discussion uh period so let's go um basically this talk is based on the 50 shades of federalism uh article that i contributed to the project in which i use big words a little bit um saying that intergovernmental relations are ubiquitous meaning they're everywhere they're idiosyncratic meaning that they're very specific to each system despite the fact that there are common trends uh they are often opaque which means that they're difficult as sovereign underlying very difficult sometimes to to access to understand but we know they're there uh so we keep digging um and of course they're they're quite essential they're just inescapable so on the menu a few questions what rgi why who does who's involved how and how so what's the consequence of some of it so what they are oh sorry i wrote rg so it should be rgr um intergovernmental relations are can be described in all sorts of fashions and and political scientists sometimes uh use more terminology of international relations to talk about them but i will have a more limited description if you will um i'm talking about mechanisms and instruments or institutions through which partners in a federation or another kind of decentralized multi-level governance structure enter into relation so while uh entering partaking in intergovernmental relations is an exercise of self-rule you do it through your autonomy you do it through your own powers if you have powers in a federal system um but it actually is an exercise of joint rule it's a way of acting together and of course the balance between self-rule and joint rule is the destiny of federalism the definition and the destiny uh why igr well they are basically inevitable because of the dispersion of authority and policy um responsibilities in a and i will say federal system uh and and that's a positive thing you basically have a federal system to you know for all sorts of reasons you've explored in other contexts uh but basically you divide responsibilities and powers between different orders of government but policy has this way of not respecting borders all the time so that interaction is inevitable and probably increasing so there's always this tension between saying okay you get autonomy for instance you can run your own schools but there might be elements where interconnection and interdependence need to be taken into account either for funding or to give you an example because although you run your own education system it might be that only one of your regions or one of the regions or several of the regions of the country can actually have a very technical engineering faculty and therefore students need to be able to travel and get a degree so you need to interconnect to do that but sometimes it will be done for all sorts of other policies so basically igr are ways of clarifying who should do what and how it's done of course who should do what in a federal system the blueprint will be in the constitution it will be the division of powers but the division of powers can never be specific enough to really see how things are done on the ground and even when they're specific there can be interactions you can actually say you do this we do that in the constitution but actually when you start implementing your policy to developing them you realize that there's overlap or interference with other orders of government so igrs will be ways of managing this interconnection sharing information making joint decisions co-managing resources if you know two regions or a straddle a body of water for instance um structure redistribution fiscal federalism because of course autonomy in a federal system means nothing if you don't have the funds to actually act upon your autonomy so you need to structure how money and resources will be redistributed and there are ways of sometimes renting services from another order of government so are there all sorts of reasons why we need this and why igr are essential who's involved um official actors of the federation and by this i mean the federal authorities and the provinces state regions or sometimes the municipalities the actors that are actually recognized in the constitution and hold powers and the division of powers um but they're also and and this is an important trend increasing other actors who enter into intergovernmental relations sometimes they're formally recognized in some constitutions sometimes they're not and i'm thinking here of different types of minorities if minorities don't actually sort of control a region they don't necessarily have a power structure in the federal system but it doesn't mean that they're not involved in in developing policies and sharing information and being taken into account and so on indigenous people sometimes municipalities if they are not recognized as formal actors we've even seen sometimes industry involved in igr uh in nigeria from for instance the oil industry sometimes participates in government um uh meetings uh intergovernmental meetings i'm not judging whether this is a good or bad thing i'm just saying it's a sort of descriptive uh element um i put army with a question mark because of course in some parts of the world this might be an element to what extent um power holders or important actors are involved in in in these networks of intergovernmental relations civil society um it's a challenge and this is where we need a lot of institutional creativity to be sure that the public is involved in these networks as well um these relations can be vertical so federal order of government with the units and when i say vertical it's sort of a descriptive term i don't mean it in a normative way i don't mean that the federal government's above the regions uh in in most federal systems they are understood to be equals but it sort of describes um you know it's a catchphrase if you will sort of federal and constitutive units sometimes it's between the units themselves we call this more horizontal it can be multilateral lots of units sometimes we say omnilateral meaning everybody's involved sometimes it's bilateral so it will be between two units or between the federal order and one particular region um or several of the regions but all in parallel this can generate asymmetrical arrangements uh so these these are very flexible and again it makes it difficult sometimes to assess what's going on but it's actually really important it's the sort of the lifeblood of federalism i also put unilateral and that's pretty weird isn't it that in a network you'd have unilateral action but sometimes unilateral action can be positive or negative imagine that you're the federal authority and you have absolute in theory um exclusive power over um let's say um environmental protection to say something but you still need to engage with local authorities to deliver to to educate to police violations and so on you might actually unilaterally decide to invite participation from units of course once participation is going that it's no longer unilateral but the initiative is unilateral states of course of course egypt isn't federal but states and federations are generally thought through you know and then i'm a constitutional lawyer some of you probably see in the states are seen as pyramidal kind of structures or or concepts with you know authority at the beginning at the top and then it straddles down and then legitimacy coming from the people and moving into the institutions and if you have a federal system you might have different types of pyramids and they might be related intergovernmental relations are networks so they work through these formal structures but they create connection and these connections can be positive or uh or negative factors that influence igr i said earlier that they're idiosyncratic meaning they can they get to be very context dependent and context specific and i will not go through all of them you can read them but all of these elements and more are relevant to how these networks develop and work some of them will be structural like do you have a presidential system or parliamentary system how many units do you have it's the relationship if you've got 50 units like in the united states or if you've got six plus in australia is quite different of course um sometimes it will be more cultural what kind of political culture is there is a political culture of compromise legal culture do you like to write things down in constitutions and informal texts or do you think do things more pragmatically these will all be elements that will affect uh intergovernmental relations relations can be collaborative that's what we're sort of hoping for but sometimes they're very conflictual and sometimes they can even be coercive coercitive meaning despite even official equality between partners it might be that one partner is more equal than others has more power more money and can basically either force other parts of the country of the federation to act according to its priorities or can induce it through uh what we call the spending power if you've got money sometimes you can convince others to do things by offering money for for that policy objective igr can be egalitarian they can be hierarchical you know when i just said coercive they can be asymmetrical as i said particularly if you have regions with a special status uh special identity um you know to take my country in in canada canada ten provinces and three territories historically there's been a special arrangement although not formally recognized really in the constitution um are you showing me something sir oh sorry um um but but there's been special arrangements to with quebec because quebec as the majority of the french-speaking minority in in canada as soren said formal and informal this is a scale and you will have countries where igr mechanisms and structures and institutions are more formalized and some of them where they're less formalized but everywhere even when you've got the textbook formalized arrangements you still have the informal the unpredictable the personal the phone calls them it used to be the meetings and so on and this can be really positive but of course it can be pretty problematic because it can lead to old boys network you know people who meet all the time will know each other will be able to solve things and that might be effective but it also means that it leaves other people out so having formalized institutions is sometimes a way of ensuring broader participation igr well there's a toolbox and i will not go through all the possible tools that you could use because i don't have time but um some include legislative instruments um so you know second chambers if they work well obviously are the archetypical means of joint rule and participation so this is a very formalized element some would put them in intergovernmental relations some would not but anyway it's a our typical example of where cooperation can can occur at least participation of units in central decision making but it can also be through executive elements composition of the federal cabinet for instance if it draws from every region and every minority and so on sometimes you have parliamentary collaboration and techniques so all sorts of ways of drafting legislation that can take other orders of government into consideration saying i will draft a general legislation with objectives and then the units can adopt further legislation or regulations to detail it or they can implement it sometimes you'll have model legislation saying okay we're all independently responsible for to take again the example of education but it might be a good idea to have a model law about access to education or about the school year or about you know certain aspects of the curriculum and everybody can choose voluntarily to adopt that model and it will be you know it will draw some harmonization you can do it through the civil service but different models here typically in some many federal systems which we call dualist the civil service will be independent in each order but in some countries there's quite a lot of exchanges and india has a very interesting notion or concept or tradition uh of having a national civil service where people are trained together and then send to all the different regions and there's rotation so people get to know other parts of the country and that facilitates intergovernmental relations you can create agencies you can conclude intergovernmental agreements which are sort of formal or informal written down arrangements for all the other things that we've talked about i will skip these very briefly because they're just further examples of igr in the legislative branch executive agreements and umbrella bodies that actually are meant to organize intergovernmental relations sometimes that happens you know and i put we've put a bit of emphasis on what's not really visible but sometimes in some countries you have like a department in charge of intergovernmental relations or you have a body within each order of government often in the you know maybe in the premier's office or the president's office that will be in charge and sort of akin to foreign affairs you know if you think about the importance of foreign relations into international relations well within a federal country you have that kind of diplomacy as well and the more you have a structured body with specialists know the business know the ropes know the mechanisms well you can hope that the system will be more effective idiosyncratic lots of differences but some common elements that come through when we do uh comparative analysis some of them have mentioned everywhere ubiquitous highly executive led even when we try to involve other order the legislative branch it is executive led and therefore that creates issues of um uh democratic deficit and opacity and so on it might be more effective and flexible but less controlled we see increasing in many federations horizontal relations between orders of government as opposed to federal to constitutive units increasing new actors i've mentioned it a waltz between formal and informal so even when you're very formal structure sometimes you've got informal developing and increasing in very informal intergovernmental relations canada is typical we've got almost nothing written down we're seeing now with the covet crisis calls for more predictable organized structures um an element i haven't talked about we can come back to it is how igr can sometimes circumvent the constitution or complement the constitution that can be positive and that can be quite problematic uh and there's of course the the a problem which i've mentioned there's this tension between efficiency which igr facilitates and accountability if it's executively lead and opaque it's more difficult for it to be scrutinized and accountable i'm nearly finished the treatment for some of these problems i've just mentioned well in some cases it's to structure igr through law have you know framework legislation uh maybe enable the judiciary to control how relationships take place now that's a problem if you don't have an independent judiciary uh and and you know this is this is a complicated one um in you know different good practices spain has adopted a transparency law that says okay igr are important they're opaque what are we going to do well at least you've got an obligation by law to publish certain elements you have to publish your um agenda when there's an intergovernmental meeting you've got to publish a certain number of things there will be opaque and unseen things but but it brings it out a bit more in the open and facilitates civil society and media interaction generate a federal culture federalism is self-ruled joint rule it's a complex moving fluid challenging balance and you need a sense with all the actors that you need some respect for autonomy and for understanding that you need participation i will stop here thank you very much and i'm happy i'm looking forward to to your questions thank you for your attention well merci thank you very much joanne that was fascinating and probably a lot to take in for everyone to a global audience let me also just briefly welcome you and wish you a happy new year on behalf of the hansel foundation it's now my great pleasure to moderate this part of the event where we get to quiz joanne on her presentation but also ask questions that may relate more to your various countries i will start with just a couple of questions to get the discussion going and while you're still thinking although i can already see questions popping up we have a truly global audience today from argentina to greenland morocco philippines pakistan and of course our many friends in myanmar so i really look forward to all of your questions as zurin said just a quick reminder please write your questions in the q a box keep them short and sweet as you can and please refrain from comments so we can run through those questions and pose them to joanne and hopefully get through all of them today so joanne in previous seminars you mentioned this is already number four you said we've we've discussed how people in established or newly established federal systems can become true federalists we've looked at safeguarding mechanisms or specific constitutions you said they can never be specific enough and of course political culture how do you think igr helps federal systems to work better just briefly well um they weren't better under certain conditions of course because because of the informal element of intergovernmental relations and sometimes even the very formal uh it can be a space for power politics and and real politic you know where you negotiate and when you negotiate sometimes uh you know again power matters so sometimes it will lead to unbalance in in in a federal uh system but basically how they help to work is is by allowing sharing of information allowing participation allowing for consultation so that you don't actually act on your own in ways that can be uh problematic or detrimental to other members of the federation and it is a challenge because of course the way the reason we opt for federal systems uh you know there is sort of the old federations which opted for um you know to manage large territories or uh for sort of defense military reasons or um you know to diffuse power and prevent authoritarianism these are all very important reasons but the more recent federations tend to have developed in contexts in which there is a a search for accommodation of diverse groups uh sometimes that have been you know um in in huge tension and in conflict and intergovernmental relations are a way of saying or federalism is a way of empowering groups to have a certain degree of self-government um so that minorities are empowered to make decisions for themselves and are not um dominated by by a majority and so on so forth now if you have intergovernmental relations and that allow despite this to have at least channels of communication i think these are really important both for policy making and this is what the angle i've put uh the accent i've put on earlier but also and this is something i'm really interested in and concerned with and this is not something i really research i'm just really interested in it is the importance of as your devolving powers to bring more stability in a polity you also need to think that people need to continue knowing each other or to learn about each other because if you don't know about your neighbor you might distrust your neighbor so learning about other cultures learning about how they're doing things learning from others who might be experimenting in their own units with their own powers is really important uh so it doesn't mean that you have you have your decisions taken away from you it just means that you're sharing information and learning from each other and this is what igr allows to do just while we're talking about learning from others or units there is just a follow-up question for asking for clarification from the audience whether by igr we mean relations between different states within one country or between states and another foreign country well i meant within the federal country i i distinguish it from international relations which would be between independent states on the world stage uh but there is obviously a parallel and sometimes they interconnect because and and this might be going further than what you're looking for but it's important because sometimes for a country to manage its international relations with its neighbors or with the rest of the world they will engage domestically in intergovernmental relations because you don't want only one voice or even the dominant voice to engage with neighbors if you have a very complex polity so sometimes you need to have that these channels of communication and decision making and sharing of information and taking into consideration people you know the different groups is interest before you engage externally and continuing on the topic of learning from others we've got a question on the current coveted 19 pandemic of course igr and crisis situations are there any lessons to be learned about intergovernmental relations in the pandemic could you give some examples of any good or bad practices in different federal systems i think many have been grappling with the issue whether federal assistance have been at an advantage in germany we've seen the german chancellor of being frustrated dealing with her premier uh ministers and in the united states donald trump often seemed sort of an open conflict with with state governors so could you give some examples uh either of good or bad practices or if there can already be a conclusion on on whether federal systems have fed better or worse well obviously this is a very very difficult question i think we'll be researching this for several decades um i've just participated in a comparative uh exercise where we compare how 20 federations have handled the first six months of the pandemic and of course so that's sort of the first wave more or less and of course things changed after that first wave and sometimes tensions that weren't there have appeared and you know different configurations occurred it's very hard to draw a conclusion that federations fare better or worse than unitary countries we find examples and counter examples everywhere some you know if you you compare um at first we compared france with germany and said oh well federalism is better that's what the french were saying and then after that you compare it with the states and say oh well maybe not you know so it really again depends on the different configurations of power in the federal system and the the intergovernmental arrangements uh one thing i'll say is that you know when we to take this the u.s example again um or even if we took brazil and and you know i know that there are people probably from the state and brazil there so please uh you know i'm happy if you disagree with me but sometimes we think speaking with one voice and acting with one um sort of one leader will be better and this is a bit what you're suggesting with uh with merkel's statement you know and and because people in germany trust her and because generally she's been managing things quite well you could think well it would be simpler wouldn't it uh but imagine that bolsonaro had the final and only voice in cuisine or that uh president trump had the only power to make decisions on the ground in the united states well this is where you think federalism is complicated and led with to battles but it at least allowed different strategies to be tried at different levels um because powers and resources were were spread out now in terms of so that that's just one aspect of the advantages of federalism and the disadvantage now how intergovernmental bodies manage this is quite interesting when one of the findings were that that we're learning is that even when there's quite str organized structures of intergovernmental relations sometimes they were bypassed by something else that was um developed quite spontaneously because it was more effective in australia for instance there is a very formal body of intergovernmental relations called the the koag the council of australian governments and it's based it has sort of its major office in canberra in the federal capital and so on now it's seen and i'm speaking you know uh sort of quoting my my my colleagues there it's it's hugely bureaucratized and it tends to be seen as an arm of the central government a bit more than what it was intended to be so that when covet occurred they developed something else which they called the national cabinet and and basically all the heads of all the units and the federal government started meeting in that context without all the bureaucracy that normally is could be quite useful but they started using something more informal um so so we see in formal structures and sometimes the the crisis created unexpected ways of of decision making uh belgium and switzerland are highly decentralized and during the year initial periods of the of covet they allowed the federal government to make decisions that normally they wouldn't have power to make they collaborated in making them but they allowed a certain amount of centralization um what we saw in canada was quite tacit cooperation the federal government allowing the provinces to make a lot of decisions instead of making it for them because it sort of worked and you know we could go into more more details what seems to be key here though is how much preparation there was for this pandemic or for other emergencies and that requires very effective intergovernmental cooperation at the administrative level at the legal level below the surface do you have protocols and procedures to decide how you're going to close borders uh share medical resources now distribute the vaccine or access the vaccine buy the vaccine so that you're not fighting within the federal government about these kinds of things when do you declare an emergency what is an emergency what kind of responses are going to take and this in countries where there was some preparation they had anticipated it it might be one factor we're explaining why things have worked better so would you agree that having certain maybe meeting forums or channels of communications in place as you described preparing for such an emergency helps we've got a related question hence i'm asking how do you foster those channels of communication or that federal culture so that for example in a crisis or emergency those channels are already established it's very difficult again because every system is quite unique but my my sense is that having certain formalized structures predictable arrangements meetings that are uh compulsive sort of pro compulsory might be a strong word but i mean if if if all intergovernmental meetings are called at the whim of the president or uh or the prime minister uh or the chancellor then it becomes politically um sort of a political gamble whether the meetings are going to be called or not but if they're predictable if we say every month we're going to meet or every two months we're going to meet or every minister of health and every minister of uh environmental protection or even every minister responsible for public security police and so on will have regular meetings and an annual conference or an annual report on how they share information and how they work together uh how they've practiced you know one thing i've learned by talking to civil servants again this didn't come out was that uh the public security agencies in canada had already tested some of their reactions every month they predict that there's going to be an emergency a bit exaggerating but it could be like fire you know forest fires or it could be major landslides or it could be uh you know possibly an invasion or something like that and they anticipate together now it's very theoretical of course but at least it's there so you know who you're talking to you know what channels you're going to use now the downside of it is for the pandemic and i'm talking again about a very specific example we've pulled out or get word accessed some of the preparation were some of the agreements and protocols not all of them because they're not all published and so on and the organograms the who does what who consults with whom at what level is so complicated there's like 60 bucks on a page that you think okay when the emergency occurs and you're on the 13th of march 2020 do you go through this or do you not go through this so you anticipate you discuss but you cannot overly um structure because then you lose flexibility maybe moving away a bit from emergency situations but staying on the topic of writing things down should intergovernmental relations be written in detail in constitutions and can inter-governmental relations harm the division of powers between federal the federal level and the units to a certain extent uh these are really two uh really important and interrelated but different questions uh on the issue of writing things down um now not everyone will agree okay i come from i'm a lawyer uh you know i tend to work quite interdisciplinary way but ways but i i'm a lawyer so generally you like sort of things written down uh i'm also i'm both trained in the civil law tradition in the common law tradition quebec has both and i've done you know my post some of my postgrad work in europe continental europe and some of it in britain so i you know i've been sort of uh affected by at least two legal traditions and of course in the world there's lots more legal traditions but the common law is much more pragmatic and federations that have come out of the british empire tend to be less uh prone to writing things down although india might be an exception partly uh and those that have come out of more of a the continental tradition germany switzerland belgium spain or south american federations to a certain extent like to write things out so that's just i'm not saying it's good or bad it's just a process now how much you write things down i would say it's probably a good idea to write predict insert major principles of cooperation constitutions are not only contracts about who does what but they're also aspirational documents and especially when they're drafted quite recently and then when they're drafted in a sort of post-conflict uh situation they we put a lot into them don't we in terms of how we draft them and what we think we're going to get from them sometimes it's a bit excessive we might be too ambitious about what a constitution can do but it does that so putting in the constitution the obligation to cooperate the federal a principle of federal loyalty or committee or cooperation is probably a good idea i find if you're looking for a model at least in writing the south african constitution as a chapter chapter 3 on cooperative federalism and it comes way up in the constitution and it's a signal saying okay we're not officially federal but we've divided powers to a certain extent and we need these different bodies to actually work together and this is where how we're going to do it and this is what courts can do and this is how you know what the principles are so i would say that's a good idea certain institutions why not constitutionalized intergovernmental some intergovernmental meetings and so on and so forth uh that might be a good idea now not everything will get written down if it's too strict you might lose inflexibility um the other question is about how much igr can harm the division of powers and that's a really important um question because igr can be as i said a forum or a mechanism or phenomena phenomenon of power politics and if you have a division of powers but then you have intergovernmental relations that allow for buying services from another government or for uh imposing certain types of of uh of actions uh for the arrangement saying okay you're in charge of help but frankly here we've got the money and we'd like you to do x with health care um you're of course challenging uh the the division of powers and it might be sometimes something that could be taken to a constitutional court but not necessarily so it has to be checked uh i think that risk that intergovernmental relations have what i had called earlier and i skipped it a para constitutional impact or function is actually there and therefore it needs to be as transparent as possible so that this does not happen the the division of powers in the constitution must remain the blueprint and ideally if it doesn't quite work because after five ten twenty years you realize that frankly giving uh exclusive jurisdiction to one order of government under one policy is not ideal well hopefully you can bring the polity together maybe to amend the constitution to see that rather than do it in the roundabout way through only intergovernmental relations you somewhat hinted to the the possibility in a bad way of course you can you could possibly buy your way so on that we've got a question on financial resources and what parts they play in making intergovernmental relations work for example if the federal or the national government level has resources to distribute money is so key isn't it um so that this is why fiscal federalism and redistribution is so important and and this is one aspect that arthur benz uh underscored in his uh presentation on the balance between the tension between democracy and and federalism uh having just as i said earlier having powers but no money to exercise them uh is actually false autonomy so you need to have resources you need to have predictable resources that are not distributed at the whim of only one player at the same time you need to have a sense of justice you know and their are tensions in every federal country about redistribution um it it depends on a lot of different factors depends on how resources are are distributed even you know um again i'll just give you one one example but in canada natural resources belong to the provinces with a few exceptions um so that you know if if you're alberta five years ago you're as rich as saudi arabia and of course now you're not but what i mean is there's unbalance there and we need equalization redistribution and so on where igr come in is how you manage that redistribution you re you manage it through the tax system you manage it through transfers are these transfers conditional or not conditional will give you money but you must put into place these kinds of policies or will monitor you and if you don't do it we'll take the money back or do you actually give it unconditionally so that um so that the the units can actually make autonomous decisions you were taught you know to do the constitutive units have a sufficient tax or resource base to actually make their own decisions and so on so this of course is is extremely important and this is where uh the opacity of intergovernmental relations can be really problematic if on the face we're all respecting self-rule but actually there's money wrangling intentions there so you i think you know this is probably one area if i were to draft a new constitution where i would be very explicit about uh redistribution and and the rules of the game and the institutions that proceed with uh redistribution creating maybe some kind of agency independent uh sort of independent body that can advise the governments talking about the rules of the game so far most of the examples are probably all of the examples you have given applied to or referred to liberal democracies but what about authoritarian countries a country like russia has a federal structure has a constitution but the question is whether intergovernmental relations there might be very different from those in liberal democracies such as you've mentioned australia canada and others so what's your take on that a i'm not a specialist of russia and one thing i find is that when we do case studies specific case studies sometimes we find uh processes that we as external sort of observers and and people who tend to synthesize miss and for instance on covid it happened that some of the regions actually were really productive you know they in developing vaccines and so on so forth so we have that division of lack of autonomy in russia because it's an authoritarian regime and because uh some of the local leadership have been replaced by appointees from you know from moscow and so on uh and this is all true but it doesn't mean that below the surface there's not more happening so intergovernmental relations can also somewhat allow for this but we don't necessarily uh see it now how do we provide for rules of the game now i think in terms of you know what's happening in russia or in other non-liberal or or less democratic systems is more about how much federalism there is in the federation than about intergovernmental relations per se i mean it's a broader question to what extent do you have disrespect for self-rule and joint rule uh and a respect for you know before you even get to intergovernmental relations respect for the actual constitutional bargain but it what what the question of international intergovernmental relations bring to the fore is that even if on the surface you seem to be respecting the constitution and sometimes they're not but sometimes they are and you know there's a certain concern for even amending the constitution so that it looks what you're doing looks legitimate and legal uh but if below the surface you're putting your cronies in leadership positions you're redistributing resources according to political preferences uh if you're imposing uh certain policies if you're negotiating um you know bargaining access to services or resources uh or even astronomy uh for other things then of course the intergovernmental relations network is quite on you know it's very unhealthy um so sometimes it can be positive and sometimes it can be quite negative another question on the form of government and how that impact or could be influenced by intergovernmental relations so how could igr be different in a parliamentary or a presidential we've just mentioned the authoritarian system well again this is a broad generalization but in the number of factors that we need to think about when we think about igr that is one that comes out and again so what i'll say is quite um you know it's just this oversimplification of course because there are different types of presidential regimes under different types of you know parliamentary regimes and the electoral system will be important in all this uh but just to take sort of a very short snippet um and again the united states right particularly right now because you know it's so radical what's happening there uh is is a good example where you have a parliament a presidential system in which the congress and the president are have each have their own legitimacy uh they're elected they have powers uh you know we say the executive when we talk of the president but of course the president is only the executive president has normative powers and they can be at locker head it and the same can happen of course at the level of states and therefore um policy making joint decision making will tend to be possibly more conflictual in a parliamentary system and again it's this is a gross generalization but in a parliamentary system and they let's take the simplest one with uh you know a first-past-the-post kind of electoral system a majoritarian system but even with a coalition uh proportional representation kind of approach um the the government gets its confidence from the elected officials from the elected assembly and will le is less likely to act in a contradictory way so the so the leadership the executive leadership and the legislative legislature will tend to be more aligned than they might be in a presidential system uh so that intergovernmental relations will be negotiated within before you even negotiate out and this might be quite productive but again it really depends on on the system but basically i would say that the big difference is that is the potential for conflict seems to be higher in a presidential system i'm aware that we're nearly running out of time there's still so many questions uh from our audience without which i would like to to get in and i'll try to group them together now there's quite a few questions on the role of civil society so one question um is we're all in favor of opening up igr processes to involve civil society and the public are there any instructive examples notably in newer federations and we've actually got a question from someone from angola saying civil society do participate in public debate but its idea is rarely taken into consideration so what is the reality in other countries that you might know now this is really interesting and i would say if there are amongst the 100 some people participating from some 25 countries today who have good examples please send it send them our way you know don't be i am not a specialist of this i know this is an issue and this is a problem and that civil society and this you know civil society is a very broad term of course like let's talk about sort of interest groups in the positive sense uh minority groups groups of women the media uh you know some political parties and so on how did they can access this because intergovernmental relations can become quite a selective club and so if you if you're thinking about designing intergovernmental relations at a stage where civil society still has an impact because you're drawing the constitution make sure that it's built in you think about this now how can that happen it can happen through making sure that there are public um debates that there's public consultations that intergovernmental i'll give you an example intergovernmental agreements when they're negotiated could be made the draft could be made public and subject to public consultations before it's actually concluded now this might make it really difficult to conclude uh so there's a you know there there's a tension there but but it might be an element um you know in switzerland there's a sort of the reverse once you've got a consensus there can be the equivalent of a referendum to actually overturn it but let's think about it the other way around how you actually get input uh on on the advantages of cooperation uh and i would say let's say you've got cooperation in the um again infrastructure or healthcare system across units uh well there's no reason why you shouldn't consult the medical profession whether you shouldn't be consulting with uh you know the the building profession or engineers and so on to see what advantages and challenges there can be in acting jointly i'm sorry it's quite a vague answer but but this is i would say cutting-edge research this is where we need innovative institutional uh design and maybe information sharing this is where these federations can learn from new ones indeed um we've also got questions related to ethnic can federalism solve ethnic problems and you've explained as well that intergovernmental relations may also be used to create regional groupings to for example circumvent formal territorial divisions or give ethnic minority groups a voice is idr really an effective route for them to achieve their aims if official tools of state are not on offer it's a very very difficult question a really important one so we start from the premise that in there's a federal system and we have um minority groups religious ethnic linguistic uh so on who do not have the tools of power they are not um they don't have their own unit for instance in which they can exercise majority rule and so on and or the minority is spread out across several units can igr help there um i would say yes in at least in theory um igr could be a means of saying well there has to be in the overall intergovernmental um body and an arrangement in the country uh ways of creating committees information sharing resource sharing between between those groups to at least have their voice brought together to the central level and to their own units we're experimenting now with ways and and sometimes it's quite theoretical sometimes it starts to be implemented on the ground uh experimenting with ways in which minorities which are not territorially based can actually share decision-making power over certain things they could share curriculum in schools they could share certain types of resources um in in self-government agreements in canada within you know for indigenous peoples and nations sometimes this happens because the the the people although they're very very grounded in their territory are now living largely in cities and therefore you need to make these kinds of very creative connections and intergovernmental relations can can help that either because you bring these groups into the broader conversation with the formal actors or because they create their own networks um and and can share information co ls um and and and be better negotiators and in why not imagine that they have access to resources so that they can make policies as we're coming to an end now i'd like to bring it back to sort of the academic sphere um we've got a question from the audience whether there's a way to measure intergovernment of relations so the intensity or the degree of institutionalization the relevance of output etc are there any academic indices or similar and in that context i would like to ask you this is your chance for for your own pitch you've said as you are largely understudied so why do you think that is and given we have quite a few academics in the audience what is your pitch what should future research focus on in your view now on the first question i i'm not aware of an indices of formal informal i'm aware of comparative analysis that will uh try to to pinpoint that and then i should already say that the definition of what is formal and informal uh differs across countries and across disciplines what lawyers consider formal is not necessarily what political scientists or economists consider formal so you can have a very formal process of negotiations and meetings but it's not written down anywhere uh so that some people will say well this is very informal and others will say no it's formal because it really you know we know it happens and it's and it's you know very diplomatic and so on so we need to we would need to have definitions but we we can you know we could draw a range and say well it tends to be more formalized in you know certainly to give you an example in belgium uh and in south africa uh than than it is in in the united states uh for instance so you could you could sort of try to put it there and the advantage of trying to do that is that you probably find counter examples all the time and what is important from academic for academics in a way is not getting the answer right just to get the questions right and to get the research right so that you can actually shift them and you ask now in terms of doing the research why it's understudied and where we should you know start focusing um i i'm very puzzled by that why it's so understudy when you think you've got you know you couldn't get a job as a diplomat without having studied probably international relations or something related you know there's training for international relations it's respected as a discipline um and yet you can get into intergovernmental relations by happenstance you learn it on the job in most cases uh it's not taught in um in law schools in most places it's not taught in political science it's not even taught in many places in public administration courses so that in you're learning public administration and a federal system almost as if you were in various unitarian small unitary units there are exceptions and i did mention uh india because you know with a more um unified centralized upper echelons of civil civil um service then then there is more of that that concern um so why i think it's partly because it's opaque partly because it's been sort of dismissed as being petty politics and you know it's um because it it and it it's also quite descriptive and in our world right now and maybe not everywhere but descriptive work is not valued in academia very much anymore you know we like um quantitative data uh we we like very theoretical work and sometimes we can do that with igr of course we can count how many meetings and we can count these kinds of things and so on and so forth and we can have theories we can apply game theory and so on but we also need just to understand what's going on and that is extremely difficult and time consuming you need to go below the surface you need to talk to people they need to agree to talk to you so it's complicated and it takes a lot of time and um and i don't think it's been done enough and i think you know the what is coming out now and one thing i've seen a little bit through the cove 19 is that i see public administrators coming to academics to try to say can you help us understand what we've been doing and maybe anticipate what we could do better uh in terms of igr because clearly what we've been doing has not been optimal and i think that conversation with actors is really really important and this is not something that academics um necessarily do enough partly because it takes time it takes funding and if you've got the publish or parish pressure uh it's easier sometimes to do other types of research um so so i think there's a call for interdisciplinary valuation of igr still lots to do and then and given we've got so many questions still still left um i'm sure we'll have another seminar on igr but i'm afraid we need to conclude the discussion now as we're way over an hour already and it's getting late for many of our participants thank you for staying with us and apologies to those whose questions have not been answered today but our next seminar will take place on the 9th of february at the usual time and we will take a more country specific you again and talk about probably the most known federalist country the united states so join us for a very timely discussion with professor jared sonigson on the fragmentation and polarization of u.s federal democracy does leave me to thank you all for watching and participating please fill out the feedback forms and thank you joanne in particular for sharing your insights this has been fascinating and you've tried to answer many of those very complicated uh and difficult questions in a short and sweet way but i'm sure we will see you again and continue the discussion but for now depending on where you're watching from i wish you a very good night a good morning and your case joanne or a good afternoon to everyone else bye bye merci thank you you