Regulatory Regionalism and the Dynamics of Territorial Politics: The Case of the Asia-Pacific Region

Abstract

This article examines the emergence and politics of new modes of regional governance understood as a form of regulatory regionalism. Regulatory regionalism is defined in terms of the institutional spaces of regional regulation functioning within ostensibly national policy and political institutions. The central insight of this essay is that the politics of this regulatory regionalism can be conceptualised as a system of territorial politics fought out and accommodated across the institutional space of the state. The emphasis on territorial politics highlights the fact that strategic moves within institutional space are shaped by the political context in which the regional and ‘regionalising’ actors operate. From our perspective regulatory regionalism is a distinctive method of boundary control over overlapping political arenas, which brings into play a system of territorial politics within the state. We test this argument through an examination of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific region which is often thought of as being inhospitable to such governance innovation.