“…The challenges posed by wicked problems range from global health pandemics, such as COVID-19 (Paquet & Schertzer, 2020;Tang & An, 2020), to the integration of mass waves of migrants (Adam & Hepburn, 2019), global warming, and regional integration, all which require a multi-level governance response (Happaerts, Schunz & Bruyninckx, 2012;Peters & Pierre, 2001;Puppim de Oliveira, 2019). This is notwithstanding the fact that the recent fiscal crises suffered by a number of countries have led to a greater centralisation of decision making at diminution of the autonomy of sub-national governments (Mello & Jalles, 2019). Effective intergovernmental relations, in contrast, can serve to integrate the efforts of different tiers of government and can increase the capacity of a state to respond to multi-level challenges more effectively (Balme & Ye, 2014;McGuire & Silvia, 2010).…”