| Abstract: | To be a player in federal negotiations, state governments needsophisticated internal coordination skills. The more intensethe federal agenda, the greater the demands made on state governmentmachinery to prepare comprehensive policy advice for those representingthe state. This study argues that moves in Australia to reformfederalism, by dealing with jurisdictional overlap, also produceda significant upgrading of state coordination capacity. A casestudy of one state, Queensland, in the Council of AustralianGovernments (COAG) experiment suggests how states carve outa space in negotiations by rethinking their internal governancearrangements. |
