1st Edition
Regional Governance in Post‐NAFTA North America Building without Architecture
Twenty years after NAFTA, the consensus seems to be that the regional project in North America is dead. The trade agreement was never followed up by new institutions that might cement a more ambitious regional community. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), launched with some fanfare in 2005, was quietly discontinued in 2009. And new cooperative ventures like the US‐Canada Beyond the Border talks and the US‐Mexico Merida Initiative suggest that the three governments have reverted to the familiar, pre‐NAFTA pattern of informal, incremental bilateralism. One could argue, however, that NAFTA itself has been buried, and yet the region somehow lives on, albeit in a form very different from regional integration in other parts of the world.
A diverse group of contributors, from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with experience in academia, government service, think tanks and the private sector bring to bear a sophisticated and much needed examination of regional governance in North America, its historical origins, its connection to the regional distribution of power and the respective governments’ domestic institutions, and the variance of its forms and function across different issue areas. The editors begin by surveying the literature on North American regional politics, matching up developments there with parallel debates and controversies in the broader literatures on comparative regional integration and international policy coordination more generally. Six contributors later explore the mechanisms of policy coordination in specific issue-areas, each with an emphasis on a particular set of actors, and with its own way of characterizing the relevant political and diplomatic dynamics. Chapters on the political context for regional policy coordination follow leading to concluding remarks on the future of North America.
At a time when scholarly interest in North America seems to be waning, even while important and interesting political and economic developments are taking place, this volume will reinvigorate the study of North America as a region, to better understand its past, present and future.
1. Building without Architecture: Regional Governance in Post-NAFTA North America Brian Bow and Greg Anderson 2. “Bundled Transgovernmentalism” and Environmental Governance in North America Debora VanNijnatten and Neil Craik 3. New Directions in North American Border Security Governance Jason Ackleson and Yosef Lapid 4. Faraway So Close: Territorial Security and Regionalism in North America and Europe Ruben Zaiotti 5. The Government Designed Architecture of North America's Disaggregated Trade and Investment Arbitration Regimes Stephen Clarkson 6. Lacking Linkages: Labor, Civil Society and Sub-Federal Trade Policy in North America Christopher Kukucha 7. Security, Technology and Market Restructuring in North America’s Energy Industries and the Demise of Mexico’s State-Oil-Monopoly Regime Isidro Morales 8. ‘Exceptional,’ Immovable, Adaptable: Congress and the Limitations of North American Governance Geoffrey Hale 9. Polls, Parties, Politicization and the Evolution of North American Regional Governance Brian Bow and Arturo Santa Cruz 10. How Do We Get to North America? Stephen Blank 11. Conclusions: Without Architecture, but Not Without Structure Greg Anderson and Brian Bow
Biography
Brian Bow is Associate Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University. He is the author of The Politics of Linkage: Power, Interdependence and Ideas in Canada-US Relations (2009), which was awarded the Donner Prize as the best public policy book published in Canada that year. He has also published a number of articles and chapters on US-Canada relations, Canadian foreign policy, and regional integration, and has co-edited volumes on North American security cooperation and Canadian foreign policy.
Greg Anderson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He is the author of numerous articles on North American integration, international political economy, and US foreign economic policy. He was co-editor, with Christopher Sands, of Forgotten Partnership Redux: Canada-US Relations in the 21st Century (2012).
