ABSTRACT
State and provincial governments form an intermediate level of authority that is present within many medium or large-sized countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, India, and Brazil. These nations either came together from a collection of quasi-independent regional entities, or possess a sufficient scale of territory as to make a layer of provincial governments below the national level desirable. Going beyond this, some nations have internal regions with their own cultures or quasi autonomous institutions of government; Great Britain has Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and Spain has Catalonia and the Basque country. Many of these large cultural territories might easily be their own nations, or once were. States, on the other hand, form a consistuent tier of government between national and regional or local scales, usually without such pretentions – a level that may prove best suited to some dimensions of sustainability planning.
