Regionalising the state: political topography of regulatory regionalism

Abstract

In recent years new modes of regional governance such as peer review, policy networks, and multi-level governance, have emerged not only in the European Union but in other regions such as the Asia Pacific. This article explains the rise of these new modes of governance in terms of the framework of regulatory regionalism. It suggests that these new modes of governance constitute distinctive forms of regionalised governance within the state. Hence emerging practices of regional governance are not above the national state, but instantiated within it. Just as much as the national territorial state was consolidated over the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is likely to see the consolidation of new forms and practices of regional governance in which the 'regional' becomes incorporated within the political space of the state.