Abstract
This article conducts a comparative case study of Germany and India to examine how education is governed within their federal systems. Based on the multi-level governance theory, it examines the role of institutional design in determining the relative autonomy of subnational and national coordination. Germany is an example of a decentralised country in which coordination is achieved through negotiated and consensus-based mechanisms and fiscal incentives. India, in turn, presents a path of concurrency, driven by the growth of regulations and the setting of standards. The article demonstrates that federalism in education operates through different coordination channels and depicts that the forces of globalisation reform these processes, creating a persistent flux between local autonomy and federal authority, thereby adding a new dimension to the concept of educational federalism.