The focus of this paper is on the necessity of and techniques for allocating roles to different levels of government, then integrating functions and processes among them. It first discusses why such integration is necessary, but challenging to achieve. It then provides three examples of how very different nationsóthe United States, Sri Lanka, and Tanzaniaóall with different basic governance arrangements and coastal priorities have made different decisions as to how to distribute authority and responsibility among national and local government in order to achieve mutually supported management objectives. It concludes by suggesting government consider a number of key questions as they work to distribute and integrate the authorities and responsibilities for coastal management.