Managing the Environmental Union: Intergovernmental Relations and Environment Policy in Canada (Institute of Intergovernmental Relations)

Ottawa and the provinces share responsibility for environmental protection. As a result, environmental policy is an area that offers some insight into how the two orders of government interact. 'Managing the Environmental Union" brings together a diverse set of authors from law, political science, and policy studies to consider how we think about intergovernmental relations and environmental policy, and what drives the two orders of government toward various patterns of cooperation, competition, conflict, and mutual avoidance. The authors offer insights into the consequences of these patterns for both environmental protection as well as for the broader sweep of intergovernmental relations. They compare Canada to the United States and to other federations, notably Germany and Australia. "Managing the Environmental Union" offers a detailed account of how, and to a certain extent why, governments interact in the ways that they do, demonstrating the merits of moving beyond a simple dichotomy of conflict or cooperation when describing intergovernmental relations.