inter-national, federal, and asymmetric elements (Galligan and Mulgan 1999 ).
While federal frameworks are helpful in understanding aspects of non-federal
countries, for example China’sWscal decentralization (Davis 1999 ), it is unlikely
that China will evolve into a classic federal system. The challenge for scholars will
be to adapt and develop conceptual models for understanding evolving and new
forms of decentralization, especially in non-Western countries like China.
Federal systems provide working models of power sharing in complex systems of
multiple spheres of government. Whether this is helpful for understanding the
expanding sphere of regional and global governance and the interactions between
these and domestic governments, as Imbeau claims ( 2004 , 13 ), is to be established.
The suggestion made here is that the two are compatible. A challenge for future
scholarship will be to show whether and in what ways the study of federal systems
assists in the study of larger regional and global spheres of governance. The
blending of international and intergovernmental relations will likely be a rich
Weld that beneWts both international and federal studies.
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