Regionalism on Purpose is based in part on the conference, "Urban-Suburban Interdependence: New Directions for Re-search and Policy," held in September 1998 in Chicago. For two days in plenary and smaller group sessions, more than 120 public and private officials, academic researchers and policy analysts grappled with emerging questions of city-suburban linkage, metropolitan economies and regional policy, trying to distill and make sense of what we know and don't know about the process and outcomes of regionalism.
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism - the first of its kind - offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.
Theories of New Regionalism represents the first systematic attempt to bring together leading theories of new regionalism. Major theorists from around the world develop their own distinctive theoretical perspectives, spanning new regionalism & world order approaches along with regional governance, liberal institutionalism & neoclassical development regionalism, to regional security complex theory (RSCT) and the region-building approach.
The book critically analyzes the ongoing changes in the regional, intra-regional, and global dynamics of cooperation, from a multi-disciplinary and pluralist perspective. It is based on the insight that in a post-hegemonic world the formation of regions and the process of globalization can be largely disconnected from the orbit of the US, and that a plurality of power and worldviews has replaced US hegemony. In spite of these changes, most existing analyses of current changes in the world order still rely upon Western-centered approaches, and Westphalian thinking. Against this backdrop, the book proposes to advance a truly global IR understanding of the post-hegemonic world, and weaves together the pluralist and multi-disciplinary perspectives of scholars located all around the world.
The study attempts to share, from a legal and institutional perspective, the World Bank experience with regional projects in the past two decades, to assess the difficulties involved in their preparation and to look at the way of going forward.
