Introduction: Regional Governance in South America

Abstract

Regional public policy-making develops in flexible institutional environments. Every public policy field, be it health, social development, infrastructure, culture, or science, has an own rationality of action and own objectives. The introduction to the book Regional Governance in South America elaborates on this hypothesis along the lines of regional integration studies and policy studies. The foundational question to this book is how policy fields develop differently, although being embedded into the same regional structure, and is based on the empirical observation of South American regionalism. In the context of UNASUR, a variety of policy fields institutionalized in a short time. However, these processes are not new. On the contrary, they rely on long enduring developments. By adopting the analytical lens of regional governance, the institutionalization of policy fields in UNASUR will be studied. Regional governance captures flexible institutional structures and implies an actor-based perception, which is useful for the study of regional public policy-making.