ABSTRACT
State and provincial governments form an intermediate level of authority that is present within most medium or large-sized countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, India, China, and Brazil. These countries either came together from a collection of smaller political entities or possess a sufficient scale of territory as to make a layer of governments below the national level desirable. Some have internal regions with their own cultures or quasi-autonomous institutions of government. The United Kingdom has England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; Spain has Catalonia and the Basque country. Many of these large cultural territories might easily be countries in their own right, or once were. Most states and provinces, in contrast, have no such pretentions, and simply form a consistent tier of government between national and regional or local scales-a level that may prove best suited to some dimensions of sustainability planning.
