ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some important factors humans create: government and non-profit agencies. The world of governance is made up of myriad of these government parts and their interactions. They constitute a complex intergovernmental system within which and through which planning operates. It also examines the case of complexity of the US intergovernmental system. It finds that the US intergovernmental system is indeed complex, self-organizing, adapting and highly interdependent. The US intergovernmental system, purposely structured to be complex, evolved through processes of federal program development, interest group liberalism, and partisan mutual adjustment, correcting negative side effects and expanding roles for non-profit organizations. The intergovernmental system has the key features of a complex adaptive system: agents: individual agents, connected by networks, Interactions: agents interact dynamically, exchanging information, Nonlinearity: interactions are nonlinear, iterative, recursive and self-referential, systems behavior: system is open, system's behavior determined by interactions not by components, robustness and adaptation: capacity to maintain viability and evolve.
