Resumen La organización territorial establecida en España desde 1978 se ubica en un punto intermedio entre los modelos unitarios y federales. En este marco institucional, la coordinación de las políticas sectoriales se ha canalizado a través de organismos intergubernamentales como las Conferencias

Since 1978 Spain represents an example of a particular territorial model, intermediate between the unitarian and federal cases. In such an institutional framework, the coordination of sectoral policies has been ensured by inter‐governmental bodies like the Sectoral Conferences, which are meant to integrate regional partners in the shared rule of the central State. By the same token, these Conferences should be a way to establish horizontal coordination for the Autonomous Regions in a context, such as the Spanish case, where no other tools for inter‐territorial power sharing were designed. In this article, the main conclusions of a research project funded by the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (INAP) are presented. This project was devoted to analyzing the workings, dynamics, and results of the Sectoral Conferences as well as their role as shared government instruments. In other words, an empirical analysis was made of the coordination effectiveness of such bodies, taking their working dynamics as a reference. This means that, apart from the formal analysis, attention was paid to some elements that are sometimes out of reach of a normative framework and that have a close relationship to human factors, leadership, ideology or the very nature of the topics discussed.