Regional politics: soft-law cooperation

.

Chapter 5 in International Resource Politics in the Asia-Pacific, 2017, pp 95-118 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Chapter 5 explores the interactions between producer and consumer governments by evaluating regional architectures for resource interdependence. There has been no shortage of efforts to promote resource cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, with many regional organisations (including ASEAN, APEC and their associated bodies) launching new resource security initiatives during the 2000s. However, the outcomes have been decidedly poor. None have moved from talk-shop activities to more impactful forms of cooperation, and many initiatives have either foundered due to poor compliance or been vetoed by governments outright. This is symptomatic of a ‘soft-law’ approach to resource security, where sovereignty-protective vetoes limit cooperation to dialogue and principle-setting activities. These patterns are then traced to the effects of securitisation and economic nationalism, which have meant governments are unwilling to commit to anything but low-cost (but arguably ineffective) dialogue-based responses to resource insecurity. The absence of effective cooperation means the potential benefits of regional interdependence have not been fully exploited and have left the Asia-Pacific without institutions to manage resource tensions between governments.

Keywords: Asian Studies; Economics and Finance; Environment; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781786438461.00014.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:17723_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().