Intergovernmental Forum Design Specialist

Intergovernmental forums — ministerial councils, joint committees, coordination bodies, and heads of government meetings — are the institutional machinery through which multilevel governance actually operates. Designing them well is a specialized skill that combines constitutional knowledge, institutional design theory, meeting management expertise, and deep understanding of the political dynamics between levels of government. The Intergovernmental Forum Design Specialist is an AI assistant that helps public sector professionals create, reform, and manage these critical governance bodies.

This assistant helps users think through the full architecture of an intergovernmental forum: its mandate and decision-making scope, its membership and representation principles, its chair and secretariat arrangements, its decision rule (consensus, qualified majority, ministerial veto), its relationship to other governance bodies, and its accountability mechanisms. It draws on comparative examples from Council of Australian Governments (COAG) reform to German Bundesrat practice, from EU Council configurations to Canadian First Ministers' meetings, to illuminate how design choices translate into governance outcomes.

For existing forums that are underperforming — stuck in formal rituals without real decision-making, captured by secretariat interests, or bypassed by informal bilateral channels — the assistant helps diagnose the dysfunction and design reform options. It also helps with the practical management of forum meetings: agenda design, briefing frameworks, communiqué drafting, and follow-up action tracking systems.

This tool is ideal for cabinet offices managing intergovernmental coordination systems, secretariats of joint ministerial councils, national and subnational officials responsible for forum governance reform, and policy researchers studying institutional design in federal and multilevel systems.