IGDC Research Seminar Series: Latin America and the study of regions: Moving forward through the lenses of regional regulatory governance

The long history of Latin American regionalism has fuelled significant theoretical debates. Today, the region exhibits a plural, complex and heterogenous mosaic of old, new, and newer regional projects addressing broad agendas through a multiplicity of mechanisms. Theoretically, the proliferation of qualifiers or ‘regionalism with adjectives’ raises issues of conceptual stretching and unclear boundaries to accommodate new cases, while consensus remains elusive concerning the drivers and impact of existing institutional diversity and overlap. To move beyond the apparent complexity and chaos of contemporary regionalism, I suggest the notion of regional regulatory governance to capture the structural aspects of governance and the processes underlying the articulation of regional policies and regulations, and which can be perceived as transnational regional fields.

Regional regulatory governance underscores fields as socially and politically constructed spaces that reach beyond confined formal regional organizations. This notion offers an analytical and heuristic tool to unearth the range of formal and informal governance mechanisms and the process through which constellations of state and non-state, public and private actors interact, relate and negotiate ideas, interests and resources at various levels and sites, thus producing, contesting or changing regional regulations and policies. I thus challenge current analytical approaches that because of their strong reliance on the toolkit provided by international relations and international political economy have a strong focus on formal organizations and on trade as the locomotive of regional integration. Regional regulatory governance as field is intended to provide a better understanding of current regional practices and to strengthen comparative regionalism research across time, policy areas and regions. I discuss the case of social policy in MERCOSUR as an illustration of what the regional regulatory governance approach can deliver in practice when used in the Latin American context but also beyond.