Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Federal

Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations

Federal system of governance has largely been associated with the United States of America. This is a system where the governance structure of nation comprises of several levels of governance with each level managing its affairs at its area of jurisdiction. However, all these lower levels of government are answerable to the federal government. In as much as this system has been rolled out in several countries such as Canada, Nigeria, and South Africa, the system used by the United States has stood out to be outstanding. In this study, focus is to discuss as well as analyze the coordination and collaboration with regard to intergovernmental relationships at the state and local levels. I also explore some of the challenges.

The state and the local governments form the two lower levels of intergovernmental relations in the federal system of the United States of America. For the two sets of government to coordinate and collaborate effectively, there is certainly an urgent need of measures and policies that clearly articulate the areas of jurisdiction of each of the government. The federal government harmonizes this process by considering the various interests of executive officers and representatives from these governments (Stephens and Wikstrom, 2007).

The challenges of the intergovernmental relations emanate from the crisis experienced by the federal system. This crisis largely affects the political systems rather than the social and economic systems. This is as far as the relations between governments, the nature of division of power and responsibility, and the manner they engage with each other. For a considerable time, the underlying source of crisis of federalism begins from the variations of ideologies of community, regional economic tensions, and linguistic. All these tensions are mobilized, directed, and manifested through the federal and provincial governments and their leaders. As such, resolving such challenges calls for the redefinition of the powers of these governments. This exercise entails, at the least, new consensus on the structure of political authority (Saxena, 2006).

The reality on the ground is that the state and the local levels of governance have produced two levels of active aggressive governments. Each of these governments is pursuing its own competing goals, and seeking much more control over a wide range of the contemporary policy instruments. Some of the contentious issues have revolved around the fiscal sharing and on the utilization of the federal spending capability in social policies. These social policies include the pensions, hospital insurance, and the Medicare. There was a consensus regarding both the thrust of policy, also referred to as Keynesian economics and the welfare state. This gave legitimacy to the federal leadership. Evidently, it is clear that the stated factors foster the tools of taxation, regulation, and public enterprise to protect their regional industry and counteract the federal policies. They call for greater recognition in the national policies, which negatively affect the goals (Zeemering, 2007).

Taking a critical perspective, I find the Federalism and intergovernmental relations to be undemocratic. This system propagated the tendency towards executive dominance in the American system. It further limits the senate and the legislatures. In spite of the increasing number of open conferences, the process has stringent measures to reinforce the government secrecy. As a result, it ends up contaminating the transparency and accountability of governments to the public.

The process of federalism and intergovernmental relations has many other costs associated to it. So much bureaucratic resources are set aside to operating the process itself. The necessity of constant and frequent consultation cause delays, uncertainty, and unpredictability of major decisions that may require urgent solutions. The process itself dominated the significance of policy. For instance, much time is spent finding out who will perform a given task, who will carry on the cost, who will get credit, or who will be blamed in case of failure. This confusion goes on at the expense of finding out what needs to be done.

The overwhelming demands taking into account both the state and local interests' ends up frustrating consultations that are a necessity in advanced stated. These consultations are between governments and the functional interests, business and labor. Both local and state governments have increased such consultations in the recent years through trade and commerce. Unfortunately, there still stands a challenge of integrating these two processes, of functional and territorial consultation, because they both involve different actors and different players (Zeemering, 2007).