Regionalism in a glocal lens: a metagovernance framework

ABSTRACT

Evaluating regionalism in a glocal lens is important because it reveals the local contexts associated with cross-border endeavors in the global era. This paper seeks to extend existing literature by propounding a metagovernance framework for analyzing the inter-jurisdictional and multi-scalar nature of the concept. The model premised on the territory, place, scale, networks (TPSN) schema outlines regionalism in a glocal lens in terms of entwinements or embeddedness, hybridization, hierarchization, spatialization, temporalization and instantiation. Much of the prevailing literature on glocal regional governance primarily focuses on North America and Europe. To address this gap, a case analysis of a city-region in sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. Accra, Ghana) was employed to empirically demonstrate the proposed conceptual framework. Here, a local context of centralization and public sector-led development based on the state-centric school defines metagovernance as the government of governance. Thus, sub-national foreign relations are shaped by the national context.

KEYWORDS:

• Regionalism
• globalization
• glocalization
• metagovernance
• political economy
• rescaling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).