The Federal Constitution of 1988 innovated the federal design redefining responsibilities of the levels of government. Two of the main ways to implement this new design were the decentralization and the definition of instruments of intergovernmental coordination supported on the binomial municipalization and policy systems. But the federative balance conceived by the political, fiscal and administrative decentralization follows an open issue in Brazil. Of the same way, the intergovernmental relations in the Brazilian federalism historically were characterized for the difficulty of finding a balance between autonomy and interdependency, sometimes centralizing the decisional power in the Union, sometimes expanding the autonomy of subnational governments. The article analyzes the decentralization in Brazil and highlights both the actions to reinforce its cooperative character in vertical or horizontal terms as well as the recentralization happened in some policies.