From Cooperative to Opportunistic Federalism: Reflections on the Half‐Century Anniversary of the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations

In 1955, the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations—the Kestnbaum Commission—embellished the intellectual framework of cooperative federalism and laid out a policy agenda for promoting it. Since then, our intergovernmental system has evolved from a predominantly cooperative federal–state–local system to one characterized by corrosive opportunistic behavior, greater policy prescriptiveness, eroding institutional capacity for intergovernmental analysis, and shifting paradigms of public management. These trends threaten to undermine effective intergovernmental relations and management. Recent developments, however, offer some promise for building new institutions of intergovernmental analysis, more effective paradigms of intergovernmental public management, and greater horizontal cooperation.