Regulatory regionalism in the Asia-Pacific: drivers, instruments and actors

This essay introduces the special issue on ‘Risk, Regulation and New Modes of Regional Governance in the Asia-Pacific’ and provides an analytical framework to understand the emergence, consolidation and resistance to these modes of governance. The article proposes the concept of ‘regulatory regionalism’, which points to the creation of new state spaces of regional governance, transforming—rather than transcending—the national space of the state. In particular, the essay explores the creation of these governance spaces through the mobilisation of political projects of risk management. The strength of this framework of regulatory regionalism is that it facilitates an understanding of new modes of regional governance within the context of political projects of market-making and state transformation in individual countries. This approach to the understanding of regional governance takes us beyond the moribund debates on Asian integration which dominate the international relations literature.