Asia's new regionalism: government capacity and cooperation in the Western Pacific

Abstract

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.