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 theoretical debates as scholars attempted to come to grips with new realities. Today, and after its quantitative expansion in the 1990s, regionalism exhibits a plural, complex and heterogeneous mosaic of old, new, and newer projects of regional cooperation addressing wider agendas through a multiplicity of mechanisms. Moreover, there is increasing overlap of organisations both in terms of memberships and agendas. Whereas there is no scholarly agreement regarding the analytical conceptualisation of this new regional wave of regionalism, there is no consensus in terms of the drivers and impact of such institutional diversity. This rich literature has more strongly relied on the toolkit provided by international relations and international political economy (IPE). Yet, it shows limited explanatory power because of the strong focus on formal organisations in the case of the former, and on trade as the locomotive of regional integration, in the case of IPE. In this paper, I propose the notion of regional regulatory governance as an analytical device better equipped to capture regionalism today. By focusing on the practices, institutions and constellations of state and non-state actors that underpin the spread of regional regulatory processes, the notion allows for comparative research across formal and informal dynamics and across a variety of policy areas in Latin America, but also beyond.