The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

Abstract

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.

Keywords:

• East Asia
• economic governance
• regionalism

Notes

1. The guest editors thank the participants at the workshop on Regionalisation, Regionalism and the Rescaling of Economic Governance in Asia, held at Murdoch University in October 2013, for their contributions. We would especially like to thank the Asia Research Centre administrator Sia Kozlowski for her assistance in organising the workshop. We thank the reviewers and editors of the Australian Journal of International Affairs for their helpful comments on all of the papers, as well as Anna Chapman and Ashlee Jones for their help preparing the manuscript for publication.

2. The East Asia 15 group includes the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the People's Republic of China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Additional information

Funding

his work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Securitisation and the Governance of Non-Traditional Security in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific’ [grant number DP110100425]. We are also grateful to the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University for funding to the workshop on Regionalisation, Regionalism and the Rescaling of Economic Governance in Asia, held on October 3, 2013.