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Although the role of organized business in regional economic integration is well documented, extant scholarship portrays them as mere legitimizers and partners of regional policy. This neat categorization fails to capture the complicated, ‘multiscalarity’ of business and overall civil society's role in regional governance. Drawing insights from social constructivism and empirical evidence from fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013 on the interactions between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and region-wide business associations and advocacy networks since the early 1990s, this article shows that although African business groups are relatively new actors at the regional stage, their impact on regional governance is substantial. This is not only in terms of getting governments to adopt particular policies or the ability to hold the state accountable, as functional institutionalists might argue, but also in terms of the regional socialization effects, namely the willingness and ability to frame issues that influence the choices of political decision-makers. Business regional governance roles also straddle competing conventional roles, and sometimes counter the neoliberal vision of regional integration, even among those that owe their emergence to regional organizations. The study also challenges the pervasive view of business actors (especially in Africa) as simply profit-seekers by highlighting the ways business actors have deployed and acted on principled beliefs about regional identity collectively or individually to forge denser and relatively effective policy coalitions that signal unfolding changes in the direction of regional policy in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on environmental governance and its role in the global political economy. The article reviews three books on environmental governance outlining the challenges it offers both for the regional economies and the international political economy. The article also discusses the pros and cons of Malthusian perspective on environmental science.

This work argues that the formation of an economic union requires that the homogeneity of domestic economic institutions and the process of regional integration reinforce each other. Granger causality tests on four cases of regional integration in the Americas, Asia and Europe (1975 through 1995) confirm our thesis. These cases include the Andean Pact, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Central American Common Market and the European Union. The most successful case of integration - the European Union - does evince a pattern of positive interaction between the two variables, while less successful cases, found in Latin America, are lacking in this mechanism of mutual influence. We further discuss several regional groups that have recently emerged and use our theoretical implications to assess their future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideology of neo-liberalism is currently dominant at the elite level. This has profound implications for how development is viewed as best pursued. Currently, a process of regionalization projects, at both the macro- and micro-level, are reconfiguring parts of Africa as the continent's elites seek to promote economic integration as a means of latching onto what is perceived as the globalization juggernaut. However, such processes, and the case of the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC) is provided as a case study, cannot simply be defined as top-down projects to reconfigure spatial areas along neo-liberal lines: globalization and regionalization stimulates reactions involving the re-organization and re-territorialization of spaces in order to meet the challenges posed. Though existing regionalist projects, such as the MDC, reflect the impulses of a neo-liberal world, space for contesting alternatives exists and is nascent, with counter-reactions being continually generated, with diverse forms of regional connectivities being constructed. Analyses of the new regionalisms must be cognisant of such pregnancy within such ongoing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1997, cooperation initiatives involving Asian countries have become more visible and ambitious. These initiatives reflect incentives for regional cooperation in Asia that are the product of prior levels of regional integration and international developments. While many countries in the region stand to gain from more substantive cooperation, they are likely to find certain cooperative goals difficult to achieve. This difficulty cannot be ascribed to the commonly cited obstacles to cooperation in Asia: economic diversity, inter-state political rivalry and the influence exercised by the US. Rather, parts of the new regional agenda are complicated by the kind of government organizations that exist in some countries. Government organizations that lack domestic regulatory capacity are poorly equipped to participate in some regional initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]