In the current climate of collaborative federalism, where the roles and responsibilities of sovereign entities intersect and overlap, cooperation between governments across different jurisdictions is essential. As successive attempts to clarify separate and clearly identified spheres of responsibilities along 'clean lines', exemplified by the Abbott Government's White Paper process having stalled, it has become clear that the success of policy enterprise in a wide range of programs relies on effective collaborative interactions between governments across the range of activities from policy development to service delivery, regulatory design, enforcement and funding. Despite this, the field of intergovernmental relations is relatively underdeveloped in Australian scholarship, particularly when compared with its federal counterparts elsewhere. The attention it has attracted has largely been focused on the executive level, that is, the institutions and interactions of elected officials - prime ministers, premiers and ministers - through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) or Ministerial Councils. There has been less focused analysis of these interactions at the level of public officials - public servants - who are charged with developing the detail and ensuring the implementation of intergovernmental policy.1 This chapter begins to redress this gap by examining what officials themselves say about collaboration, when and where it works and why it is more or less successful.