Federal Structure Of Government Research Articles

The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787

AbstractAccounts of the factors that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have focused on Congress' failures to levy taxes, regulate commerce, and provide security against internal unrest and foreign encroachments. Left out from history are the attempts of the founders to force Britain to return thousands of escapees from slavery they sheltered. Patriot state leaders tried to coerce the return of all fugitives from slavery evacuated with the British army by blocking payment of debts to England in violation of the Treaty of Paris. Such actions ultimately caused the breakdown of the agreement and exposed the structural inability of the Congress to enforce the terms of a duly ratified treaty over intransigent states. Ultimately, the issue of the “carried off” and with it the nation's ability to conduct foreign policy, was the paramount issue that could only be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of the federal structure of government.

Health Equity through Structural Adjustment by Nepal for Public Health

The study states at Nepal's healthcare system, emphasizing structural changes and obstacles to enhanced health of people. The federal system prioritizes social determinants, healthcare personnel, quality access, community involvement, and the impact of globalization on health while providing comprehensive services despite decentralization and collaboration. With an emphasis on social justice and the promotion of public health, this paper investigates Nepal's healthcare system and health equity in the context of globalization. Reviewing data, policy, implementation, and literature assists it to analyze and draw conclusion. In discussing Nepal's shift from a unitary to a three-level federal government structure, the article highlights the consequence of developing policies and programs that promote social justice and equity in health. In addition to calling for a massive effort by the public health community to discuss and analyze health crises related to globalization and develop social justice-based strategies for a world where health for all is a reality, it suggests that a single strategy should be developed to address health crises.

Attributing blame: how political parties in Germany leverage cooperative federalism

This study investigates how political parties used the federal structure of government for discursive blame attribution strategies in parliamentary debates during the Covid-19 crisis. The analysis focuses on the German case which is considered an embodiment of cooperative federalism. Largely intertwined responsibilities and joint decision making provide incentives for self-serving blame attribution strategies. The empirical investigation includes a qualitative content analysis of 212 parliamentary debates in the Bundestag and the 16 state parliaments. Overall, 2067 statements were manually coded and integrated into a novel dataset. The data reveal a more diverse discursive toolkit of blame attribution strategies than commonly conceptualised. The study demonstrates that parties, especially when they are involved in intergovernmental bodies and coalition governments, resort to ‘softer’ forms of blaming. The vertical integration of the party system also creates an effective blame barrier, containing self-serving strategies even during the prolonged crisis and several election campaigns.

Are Australian regulatory and policy frameworks ready for a distributed‐energy‐resources‐led energy transition?

AbstractElectricity markets are facing innovation disruptions at levels never seen before. One of the major drivers is the introduction of distributed energy resources (DERs) technologies, especially those that apply to rooftop solar power. This has called into question established regulatory practices and brought new challenges to system operations. In this context, this article seeks to provide a comprehensive investigation of potential policy options for Australia's energy markets from two perspectives. We first examine recent and proposed reforms in this area, and then proceed to review the challenges for Australian regulators that will have major implications for the future, affecting policymaking, regulation, and market design.Points for practitioners The Australian energy framework is complicated, reflecting its regulatory history, geographical complexity, and federal governance structure. As a force for creative distraction, the penetration of DERs has created challenges for the electricity system and requires careful regulatory treatment. Topical themes in the regulation of DERs include, amongst others, technical standards, metering access, reserve capacity, new business models, network stability, the role of regulated utilities, and support for low‐income households. The necessary regulatory transition is accepted as being evolutionary rather than revolutionary in nature so as to enable the existing major stakeholders to adapt to the new environment.

Rural Water Supply Systems in Nepal: Factors Affecting Equitable Access to Water

Issues of gender and social inclusion in the governance mechanism of rural water supply systems have been a major concern of users, policymakers, and practitioners in Nepal. Amid changing livelihood context due to migration, transition to a federal governance structure, and social hierarchies, communities face persistent inequities in access to safe water, while its supply continues to diminish. In this context, increasing competition for water has in many instances resulted in the fulfillment of water needs of some groups, while compromising the water needs of others. In such instances, it is usually the poor and marginalized groups who are disproportionately affected. Moreover, understanding the factors affecting equitable access to an adequate supply of water now particularly after Nepal’s entry into the new federal governance system, and COVID-19 pandemic is paramount.
 Based on the learnings of 3-year research project that seeks to understand the role of gender and power dynamics in the functionality of community water systems, this paper will provide insights on collective water management practices. A mix of qualitative inquiries such as focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, social and institutional mapping, and observation were utilized to collect the data. This paper will present evidence from the project sites highlighting how community institutions are managing the supply and distribution of water particularly by discussing factors influencing equitable water supply.

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West

Everyone has a story about the Post Office. Sometimes the story is endearing—the mail carrier who becomes like a member of the family and brings treats for the dog every day. Sometimes it is a cautionary tale of bureaucracy run amok. Either way, the ubiquity of interactions with the Post Office marks its centrality in American life. Yet for scholars, that presence means that the postal system can be easy to overlook when they examine government and society. Or to put it another way, “when something is everywhere, it can start to become invisible” (4), as Cameron Blevins introduces the postal system in Paper Trails. A stunning work of scholarship, Paper Trails explores how the US Post Office shaped the American West and the federal government's structure during the nineteenth century.The key, according to Blevins, is that the postal system created a “gossamer network,” a metaphor that suffuses the book. Rather than creating a rigid, top-down infrastructure, the postal system in the West developed as a series of webs, interconnected and constantly changing to meet the needs and demands of residents, officials, and the federal government back in Washington. To make his case, Blevins constructed a database using geographical information about tens of thousands of post offices created or eliminated throughout the nineteenth century, allowing him to visualize the growth and extent of the postal network with precision across a broad chronology.Through seven chapters organized in rough chronological order, Paper Trails delivers a fascinating view into how the post office integrated the West into the United States. In addition to establishing offices, the Post Office undertook a significant (though chronically underfunded) effort to map the hundreds of routes crisscrossing the nation—which became the cartographic tools of choice for nearly all other federal agencies after the Civil War. Likewise, Blevins explores the advent of the money order system, another innovation of the Civil War that allowed people to send sums securely across vast geographic distances. In a region that lacked not only extensive banking but also significant currency circulation, money orders became a tenuous lifeline that westerners used at double the rate of their eastern brethren, primarily to engage in regional and national commercial life. And though this institutional history necessarily offers a limited cast of characters, Blevins colors his account with the stories of numerous individuals whose lives and careers shaped (or were shaped by) the US Post Office.The result of Blevins's meticulous work is a significant contribution to debates about the formation of an American state in the nineteenth century, the nature of federal power in the West, and the role of digital history as a research method. In particular, Blevins argues that understanding how the American state formed must take more careful consideration of geography on a granular level. On one level, he accomplishes this simply by shifting the lens away from the halls of power in Washington, DC, but the point extends further. The state not only existed outside the capital, it also drew much of its organization and eventual power from its development as a decentralized and contingent network. Because so much of the postal system's infrastructure was based on contracts with individuals to operate an office in their town, its presence often appeared locally as “a fleeting entity capable of popping up and then quickly melting away along with the fortunes of a local business owner” (48).Digital history is no longer a new methodology, though the most recent decade has seen remarkable advances in the tools available. Even so, scholars—including Blevins himself, in “Digital History's Perpetual Future Tense” (2016)—have engaged in a lively debate about whether digital history will eventually deliver on the promise of historiographical interventions in addition to its introduction of a plethora of methods for historians to analyze massive sets of historical data. Paper Trails emphatically declares that such interventions are indeed possible, even as Blevins displays facility with a range of digital tools. He displays these through forty-nine stunning figures, most of which visualize the geographic implications of the book's argument. They not only illustrate but clearly advance Blevins's case for the relationship between state formation and the Post Office, showing in minute detail how the Post Office opened and closed offices, where it utilized government employees versus private contract labor, or how individual Americans used the money order system, to give just a few examples.Blevins, a diligent scholar and writer, carefully documents the limitations of his methods—not least of which is that the data sets for nineteenth-century post offices occasionally require rough approximations for the locations of specific offices. That self-awareness, alongside the extensive research, make Paper Trails a model of digital history methods and historical writing.

Notes on the African Burial Ground National Monument, New York City

Notes on the African Burial Ground National Monument, New York City Erich Kessel Jr. (bio) What does a national monument to a forgotten slave cemetery confer upon the history to which it refers? And what does the form of the monument itself do to how we are meant to grasp this history? In a germinal form, these questions occupied me as I approached the African Burial Ground National Monument, a structure that takes up about a quarter of a small block enclosed by Duane and Reade Streets in New York City amid a towering complex of federal administrative buildings. The monument sits atop a larger span of land that, following a 1697 law in the recently established Province of New York, became a burial plot for slaves and free blacks who had been banned from being interred alongside white parishioners.1 Andrea Frohne’s history of the site points to a 1735 map that marked the plot as the “Negro Burying Place,” reflecting its situation within the racial geography of Manhattan’s sprawling slave estate.2 After 1794, the burial ground was closed and within a century became a plot that would be occupied successively by a department store, a credit reporting agency, and finally a federal building—each erecting an architectural stage in a process of forgetting that transmuted slave society into a multicultural democratic space. Preparatory excavation for a new federal government structure in 1991 once again unearthed the racial history of the plot. The site’s 300-plus year history thus is an archive of this forgetting, and this is the problem that the monument seeks to redress. The monument project was set in motion when the site was named a National Historical Landmark in 1993, following a law signed by George H. W. Bush halting further construction on the plot after two years of protest over the destruction of what Black community members saw as sacred ground. In years following this new designation, researchers at Howard University partnered with General Services Administration (GSA) officials to conduct extensive archaeological research to attempt to reconstitute a history of the erstwhile Negro Burial Ground; their excavations suggested the presence of as many as 15,000 skeletal remains on the site. From this process, a total of 419 skeletal remains were exhumed, and later reinterred in a 2003 ceremony when [End Page E-47] the memorial site was officially dedicated. As an event that drew on West African funerary practices and traditional African religious sites, the ceremony was intended to re-sacralize the space, establishing it as a place of reflective contemplation. As the future of the site became a question at various levels of government, the nomenclature tied to the location shifted—from the “Negro Burial Ground” to the “African Burial Ground.” For Frohne, this shift marks the influence of pan-African and Afrocentric community organizations in the process of protecting the plot; the framing of the space more broadly was shaped by a desire for “a return to Africa (at times a homogenous one)” that could unite the varying arts, cultures, and spiritualties of the diaspora.3 Such a desire played a central role in the design competition run by the GSA for the creation of a monument. The proposal that won the competition was designed by Rodney Léon, a Haitian American architect, in association with Nicole Hollant-Denis and AARIS Architects. Through its visual and processual design, their plan for the site pursues one kind of affective relationship between the Black diaspora and Africa as a lost homeland, wherein the imagination and performance of a return to West Africa repairs an experience of absence, lack, and forgetting. Understanding the aesthetic potentialities of monumentality helps to illuminate how the architects recruited monumental form for the project of remembrance. Writing in early twentieth-century Vienna, the conservationist and art historian Alois Riegl offered a paradigmatic description of the monument. For him, the category defined “a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations.”4 His is a distinctly anthropocentric definition of monumentality, and it also implies that...

Federal Government and Allocation of Taxing Powers under the Constitutions of India, Usa, Australia and Canada: a Comparative Study

Australis, Canada, USA and India, all have adopted a Federal structure of government although with varying degrees but still in consistency with the provisions contained in each other’s Constitutions. Federal structure of government calls for division of Ruling power amongst two different sets of governments in the same country along with a demarcation between the powers of both the tiers of governments. And such division and demarcations are mostly provided in the Constitutions of the Federal countries and similarly the Constitutions of all the above-mentioned countries more or less provide for the same. Financial powers are also subject of distribution under the Federal structure of government. Such financial powers also include taxing powers of the government. Under each Federal government, distribution of taxing powers is also more or less provided in their Constitution itself. This paper will therefore make an analysis of the Constitutions of the above four Federal countries in order to have an understanding about the manner how taxing powers have been distributed amongst the different tiers of governments in all these countries for the purpose of having a better Corporate Governance.

New State Structure and Agriculture Governance: A Case of Service Delivery to Local Farmers in the Eastern Gangetic Plains of Nepal

Under the new constitution adopted in 2015, Nepal embraced the federal structure of government comprising seven provincial and 753 local governments, each with their own legislative, judicial, and executive powers. Nepal’s agriculture sector provides livelihoods to about 60% of the population. However, its bottlenecks are rooted in poor implementation of agricultural policies and plans, low levels of investment, uncertain political commitment and weak governance, especially a lack of an effective service delivery mechanism to farmers. This study analyzed the impacts of federalism on the institutional arrangements and governance of the agriculture sector through both review of literature and field-level information gathering, particularly focusing on extension service delivery to farmers in Province 2. The findings highlight the impacts of federalism on agricultural governance mainly in functional overlapping, resource allocation, priority setting, coordination, human resource management, and extension service delivery. The lack of coordination and collaboration between the three tiers of government and the line agencies results in less-effective extension service delivery, especially in providing integrated, specialized technical services to farmers which is the main responsibility of local governments. Lack of poor understanding of governance, institutionalization, and human resources management is found to be one of the most serious problems with the provincial and local governments. The consequences are that despite a huge potential to improve service delivery leading to increased production and a market surplus, the province remains food-deficient and lacks food and nutrition security. The study recommends a strong political commitment, better policy and institutional coordination and coherence, and good governance in all tiers of government by providing demand-driven agricultural services leading to higher cropping intensity and productivity potential for which it is well recognized.

Country Note: Does a Local Government in Nigeria Have the Power to Tax?

A local government is the third level in Nigeria’s federal government structure. It is this administration that addresses the affairs of the local people. Unfortunately, the local governments experience difficulty when attempting to raise the funds that are required for effective service delivery. Legally, this unfortunate situation has been attributed to their lack of taxing power. But this article argues otherwise. It maintains that, although the constitution is ineptly drafted in this respect, local governments are constitutionally empowered to tax. A survey identified certain socio-legal factors militating against the exercise of taxing powers and provided possible remedies to the identified problems. Nigeria, local government, local people, tax, taxing powers, impose tax, collect tax, federalism, socio-legal problems; lack of financial authority.

Fiscal Federalism and Economic Growth in Nigeria: An Empirical Analysis

Nigeria as a nation operates a federal structure of government, ‘Federalism’ refers to the existence in a country of more than one level of government, each with different expenditure responsibilities and taxing powers. The major aim of this work is to assess the impact of fiscal federalism and government expenditure on economic growth in Nigeria.
 Secondary data employed in this work was collected from the Central Bank of Nigeria's (CBN) Statistical Bulletin, CBN Annual Report and Statement of Accounts, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and The World Bank Group for years 2000, 2017 and 2018 and part of 2019, respectively. The data covers the period, 1990-2017 on an annual basis. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) was used to estimate multiple regression model where Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as dependent variable and independent variables were interest rate, inflation rate, exchange rate, growth rate of share of federal government from the Federation account, growth rate of share of state government from the federal account, growth rate of share of local government from the Federation account. The results obtained from the regression shows that there exists a positive relationship between the economic growth and share of federal revenue, state government revenue, exchange rate and interest rate from the federation account and economic process in Nigeria. From the above result, it can, therefore, be concluded that a policy to maintain macroeconomic stability by controlling the rate of inflation within the reasonable limit is required to promote economic growth.

Striving for equivalency across the Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec carbon pricing systems: the Pan-Canadian carbon pricing benchmark

ABSTRACTThe Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change is designed to put Canada on track to meet its Paris commitments. A key pillar of the plan is the introduction of a pan-Canadian carbon price by the end of 2018. However, four Canadian provinces, nearly 85% of the Canadian economy and population, have already implemented carbon pricing systems. British Columbia (BC) has a carbon tax. Alberta is transitioning from an output-based allocation system for industrial emitters to a hybrid system combining a carbon levy and refined output-based system. Québec and Ontario have implemented cap-and-trade systems, linked to California. Recognizing these existing systems, rather than impose a single carbon pricing mechanism, the Pan-Canadian Approach to Carbon Pricing gives provinces and territories the flexibility to adopt a carbon tax, a hybrid system, or a cap-and-trade system. To address concerns relating to ‘fairness’ and equivalency of carbon price, a federal carbon pricing benchmark establishes criteria relating to minimum ‘common scope’ and ‘increases in stringency’ that provincial and territorial carbon pricing systems must meet. This article explores the design features of the existing Alberta, BC, Ontario and Québec carbon pricing systems, and considers how the benchmark affects stringency and addresses equivalency of carbon price across these different systems.Key policy insightsCanada is taking advantage of its federal structure of government to introduce a minimum pan-Canadian carbon price of $10/tCO2e in 2018, rising by $10/year to $50/tCO2e in 2022.Rather than imposing a uniform pricing mechanism, the Canadian federal government is recognizing existing subnational carbon pricing mechanisms with very different design features – BC’s carbon tax, Québec and Ontario’s cap-and-trade systems, and Alberta’s hybrid system – to deliver the pan-Canadian carbon price.In order to deliver a minimum level of increasing stringency and to address issues of equivalency of carbon price across sub-national jurisdictions, the federal government is in the early stages of implementing a federal carbon-pricing benchmark.The lessons learned from the Canadian experience will be relevant to harmonizing carbon pricing systems across both other federal jurisdictions and countries.

The Resurgence of the Niger Delta Militants and the Survival of the Nigerian State

The 2016 resumption of hostilities in the oil-rich Niger Delta region that is the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, in a dwindling international oil price, has become a subject of controversy. This analysis, which is based on empirical evidence from primary and secondary sources, shows a group of militants—the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), selective anti-corruption crusade, the clamp down on federal government structure in the Niger Delta, amnesty time limit to Niger Delta ex-militants, self–determination and the attempt to single out former President Goodluck Jonathan from Niger Delta, among other former presidents for prosecution, as the core drivers of insecurity in the oil-rich region. It is suggested that the Nigerian government should embrace the power of dialogue that has brought relative peace in the Niger Delta region from 2009 to 2015, as a veritable tool to stop the ongoing hostilities.

Migration and Redistribution: Why the Federal Governance Structure of the Economic Union Matters

We argue that the degree of coordination among the member states potentially contribute a great deal to our understanding of observed policy differences between the EU and the US as economic unions: the generosity of the welfare state and the skill composition of migration.

The Fiscal Impact of Immigration

The fiscal impact of immigration — how immigrants and their descendants affect government budgets — is a widely debated and contentious issue. Economists overwhelmingly accept the economic gains of immigration, but are less certain about immigrants’ impact on government budgets. Contention over this issue is fueled by the numerous methodologies and complexity of analysis that obscure the fiscal costs of immigration.The complexities are many. Each layer of the United States’ federal structure of government — federal, state, and local — is funded by different types of taxes and each spend their budgets on different programs and in different ways.The types of public goods consumed by immigrants also affect their fiscal impact. If the public goods are “pure,” meaning that they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, then more taxpayers in the form of immigrants spread out the tax cost without diminishing the quality of the goods. Immigrants lower the tax burden of providing pure public goods. But, if the public goods are “congestible,” more immigrants could decrease the quality of the goods, prompting the government to spend more tax dollars to maintain the quality. Some congestion occurs for most government-supplied goods whenever population increases, by immigration or through procreation, but the fiscal impact varies widely.Immigrants also impact the U.S. economy. They can displace U.S.-born workers, complement them, or have little impact on their employment opportunities, all of which alter tax revenue and government welfare expenditures in different ways. Immigrants are also consumers of real estate and other goods and services in the United States, boosting aggregate demand and spurring investment that further grows the taxable economy. The methodologies employed to study the fiscal impact of immigration are also numerous and complicated. This chapter will examine these methodologies’ relative merits and demerits, and present the common findings of the major studies using the various methodologies.

Moro and Basque Nationalism and the Limitations of “Liberal Democracy”

AbstractThis paper seeks to compare and contrast the manner in which the respective political systems under a liberal democratic set-up in Spain and the Philippines attempted to accommodate the needs and concerns of the Basque and Moro separatist movements, respectively, during their post-authoritarian periods. Both the Spanish and Philippine governments attempted to create a political system which is more participative and deliberative through the pursuit of peace negotiations and the creation of a federal structure of government for the Basque region and an autonomous region for Muslim Mindanao as can be found in associative democracies. Such attempts were also influenced by external factors, e.g., the impact of the US War on Terror on Spanish and the Philippine peace negotiations with the ETA and the MNLF/MILF respectively. For the Philippines, the major stumbling blocks to this include the “illiberal” character of its democracy, Muslim Mindanao being the poorest region in the country, and its marginal...

Cross-level information and influence in mandated participatory planning: Alternative pathways to sustainable water management in Germany's implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive

State and non-state actors increasingly work across scales to address complex environmental problems. Prior studies of stakeholder participation have not fully examined how collaborative processes play out in multi-level policymaking. At the same time, multi-level governance studies do not adequately investigate the impacts of stakeholder participation. This study examines the cross-level interactions of influence and information in the participatory implementation of the European Union's Water Framework Directive. This directive is an example of mandated participatory planning, a relatively new approach that engages grassroots collaboration through a top-down structure with nested policy cycles. A case analysis of three collaborative planning units in the Land of Lower Saxony, within the federal governance structure of Germany, finds limited influence and information transmission across levels via formal planning and implementation processes. However, the collaborative efforts did yield alternative pathways for achieving substantive progress toward the directive's aims via learning, coordination, and buy-in among participants.

Smoke-free laws and direct democracy initiatives on smoking bans in Germany: a systematic review and quantitative assessment.

Background: Germany’s 16 states regulate smoking differently within health protection principles laid down in the federal law. All state smoke-free laws in Germany have undergone at least one change since taking effect. Methods: We systematically review federal and state laws regulating smoking, as well as petitions, popular initiatives and referenda that aimed at changing statutory smoking bans. Data generated through the systematic review were correlated with state smoking rates. Results: The protection from the dangers of secondhand smoke is the primary motive for smoking bans in Germany. The first smoke-free laws affecting smoking in pubs, restaurants and several other public places were introduced in 2007. In 2008, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled in a leading decision on the smoke-free laws of two states that some common smoking ban exemptions of the introduced smoke-free laws violate the basic right to freely exercise a profession and mandated revisions. All states but Bavaria and Saarland, whose smoking bans were more and less comprehensive than those judged by the constitutional court, respectively, needed to change the smoking ban exemptions to reconcile their smoke-free laws with the constitution. Direct democracy initiatives to change smoking bans were only successful in Bavaria in 2010, but a total of 15 initiatives by citizens’ or interest groups attempted to influence non-smokers protection legislation through direct democratic procedures. Early ratification of a smoking ban in a federal state correlates with a higher reduction in the smoking rate from 2005 to 2009 (Spearman’s ρ = 0.51, p = 0.04). Conclusions: The federal government structure and direct democratic participation in smoke-free legislation in Germany has produced a diversity of local smoking bans and exemptions.

Applicability of Nigeria's Arbitration and Conciliation Act: Which Field Does the Act Cover?

AbstractIn 1988, Nigeria's Federal Military Government promulgated the Arbitration and Conciliation Decree (now the Arbitration and Conciliation Act) to provide a unified legal framework for commercial arbitration throughout Nigeria. At the time of the decree's promulgation, the Federal Military Government had unlimited competence to legislate over any matter in, and for all parts of, Nigeria. However, under Nigeria's current constitutional democracy and federal structure of government, legislative powers are shared between the Federal Government and the respective state governments. This article investigates the constitutionality of the continued application of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act as federal legislation with application in all states of the federation.

RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL FEDERALISM IN A WARMING WORLD

Climate change policy analysis has focused almost exclusively on national policy and even on harmonizing climate policies across countries, implicitly assuming that harmonization of climate policies at the subnational level would be mandated or guaranteed. We argue that the design and implementation of climate policy in a federal union will diverge in important ways from policy design in a unitary government. National climate policies built on the assumption of a unitary model of governance are unlikely to achieve the expected outcome because of interactions with policy choices made at the subnational level. In a federal system, the information and incentives generated by a national policy must pass through various levels of subnational fiscal and regulatory policy. Effective policy design must recognize both the constraints and the opportunities presented by a federal structure of government. Furthermore, policies that take advantage of the federal structure of government can improve climate governance outcomes.