Regional Challenges to Global Governance
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Author | Miles Kahler |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12392 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
Regional Challenges to Global Governance
Miles Kahler
American University and Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract
The latest wave of regional organizations may pose a more serious risk of fragmentation in global governance than earlier
regional initiatives. Although these new organizations offer additional resources for global ends, the benefits of specialization,
and innovation that could improve global governance, they also risk uncoordinated fragmentation, competition that undermi-
nes global norms, and a neglect of important global policy aims. Reinforcing global institutions, building consensus on global
purposes and a global-regional division of labor, and establishing informal and formal organizational links between regional
and global institutions can offset risks and expand the benefits of the new regionalism.
Regional institutions and initiatives have proliferated in the
twenty-first century. The latest wave of regional innovation
raises a long-standing conundrum for global order: When is
regional organization a useful, even essential, complement
to the ends of global governance –financial stability, an
open trading system, sustainable development, robust pro-
tection of human rights, or the end of civil wars –and when
does it threaten or undermine the achievement of those
goals? How the challenges and risks of the new regionalism
are addressed will determine whether a fragmented global
order or more effective global and regional governance
emerge over the next decade.
Five authors examine these dilemmas across five issue
areas: finance, trade, development lending, human rights
and peacekeeping operations (Kahler et al. 2016). Each
author suggests ways in which the new regionalism can be
harnessed to serve global purposes. In each issue area,
regional actors and institutions have emerged that reopen
and recast earlier debates about regionalism and its effects
on global order. In four of the five issue areas, a single,
established global institution contends with regional alterna-
tives: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the United
Nations. In the domain of human rights, the newly rede-
signed UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) does not enjoy a
similar, central position; instead, global human rights con-
ventions set the normative frame for regional human rights
commissions and courts.
The latest wave of regionalism: is this time
different?
The latest wave of regional organizations, like previous ones,
resulted in part from dissatisfaction with existing global
options. Demands by the emerging economies for greater
voice in the IMF and World Bank grew following the global
financial crisis. The slow pace of reforms that would grant
these economies larger vote and quota shares in the IMF
and World Bank produced a search for outside options,
specifically a strengthened Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateral-
ization (CMIM) and new multilateral development banks
(MDBs) such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB or BRICS Bank).
A new trade agenda aimed at nontariff and regulatory barri-
ers was promoted by the United States and the EU in the
Doha Round of negotiations at the WTO. In the face of stale-
mate at the global level, those economic powers turned to
mega-regional trade agreements, the Trans-Pacific Partner-
ship (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Part-
nership (TTIP).
The new regionalism was also the product of great power
strategies. The United States turned to mega-regional trade
agreements in order to embed preferred rules of trade gov-
ernance in influential commercial collectives. China, the pre-
eminent rising power, viewed regional institutions as a
means to advance its leadership in Asia, to realize national
economic interests in regional infrastructure, and to cement
its claims to a larger role in global institutions. Each of
these powerful actors advanced regional projects that posed
risks for the coherence and stability of global governance
institutions.
The latest regional advances resembled earlier periods of
regional institution-building in their uneven distribution. Eur-
ope remained exceptional, with the most elaborated regio-
nal alternatives. Regionalism in Asia displayed a potential, as
yet unrealized, to rival Europe in regional resources and eco-
nomic weight. Regional projects in the Americas were con-
centrated in trade, development, and human rights, and
even in those domains, less authority was delegated to
regional institutions. The African Union (AU) provided new
African leadership on human rights and peace operations
after 2000; subregional trade and economic arrangements in
Africa also widened markets in a highly fragmented regional
setting.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Europe’s elabo-
rate regional edifice were South Asia –hampered by the
Global Policy (2017) 8:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12392 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 1 . February 2017 97
Special Section Article
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