Kanishka Jayasuriya

Globalization and the changing architecture of the state: The regulatory state and the politics of negative co-ordination

Globalization is reconfiguring the modern state. Differences in types of co-ordination are pivotal to understanding the changing nature of the state. These changes are best captured in Scharpfs distinction between positive and negative co-ordination which can be used to explore the mutations of the state. In place of those state structures which provided a framework for bargaining - be it corporatism or the developmental state - it is argued that emergent forms of coordination of economic behavior provide a procedural foundation for the self-regulation of economic governance. One significant exemplar of the emergence of this new state architecture is the growing importance of independent central banks in the management of monetary policy. The article explores these issues through an analysis of changes in central bank independence in Western Europe and East Asia.

Beyond Hybrid Regimes: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia

Transition theory literature has been preoccupied with either identifying why democracy has not arrived or with how it can be consolidated where it has emerged. Most recently, arising out of the interest in consolidation, attention has turned to scrutinizing institutions for their democratic quality or lack thereof, not least within so-called hybrid regimes. However, such approaches obscure important political regime dynamics in Southeast Asia. This article argues that the definitive features of a political regime pertain to how social conflict is organized, managed or ameliorated through modes of political participation. Modes of participation encompass institutional structures and ideologies that shape the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in the political process. The paradox in Southeast Asia over the last decade has been that increasing political participation has often been accompanied by a narrowing of the channels for political contestation. The article argues that modes of participation in the region have militated against the organization and mobilization of collective actors around socio-economic cleavages. The emergence of such modes of political participation is also related to neo-liberal globalization and late industrialization, which have been more hostile to collective class-based political mobilization than was true of the experience in Western Europe when representative democracy consolidated.

Regulatory Regionalism in the Asia-Pacific: Drivers, Instruments and Actors

This essay introduces the special issue on ‘Risk, Regulation and New Modes of Regional Governance in the Asia-Pacific’ and provides an analytical framework to understand the emergence, consolidation and resistance to these modes of governance. The article proposes the concept of ‘regulatory regionalism’, which points to the creation of new state spaces of regional governance, transforming—rather than transcending—the national space of the state. In particular, the essay explores the creation of these governance spaces through the mobilisation of political projects of risk management. The strength of this framework of regulatory regionalism is that it facilitates an understanding of new modes of regional governance within the context of political projects of market-making and state transformation in individual countries. This approach to the understanding of regional governance takes us beyond the moribund debates on Asian integration which dominate the international relations literature.

Regionalising the state: political topography of regulatory regionalism

In recent years new modes of regional governance such as peer review, policy networks, and multi-level governance, have emerged not only in the European Union but in other regions such as the Asia Pacific. This article explains the rise of these new modes of governance in terms of the framework of regulatory regionalism. It suggests that these new modes of governance constitute distinctive forms of regionalised governance within the state. Hence emerging practices of regional governance are not above the national state, but instantiated within it. Just as much as the national territorial state was consolidated over the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is likely to see the consolidation of new forms and practices of regional governance in which the ‘regional’ becomes incorporated within the political space of the state.

Beyond institutional fetishism: From the developmental to the regulatory state

What became of that great debate between the revisionists or the ‘statists’ and neoclassical economists on the causes of the Asian miracle on which so much ink was spilt? Something curious happened. In the wake of the Asian economic crisis, neoclassical economists crossed the floor and discovered in what they had previously termed ‘market-conforming intervention’ the existence of malevolent political interference in the economy.1 But, if neoclassical economists had uncovered the effects of malign state intervention in the now distinctly tarnished Asian miracles, their erstwhile opponents underwent an equally remarkable conversion and discovered that the much vaunted policy capacities of East Asian developmental state had in fact been sapped by progressive financial liberalisation.2 East Asian political economies, after all, were much more market-oriented than claimed by the statists. All of this confirms the insight of Lakatos that declining research programmes will strive to protect their hard core – the key assumptions of their theory – from falsification through ad hoc hypotheses.3 And one of the things the Asian crisis produced was ad hoc hypotheses by the dozen...

The Political Rationalities Of Regionalism: APEC And The EU In Comparative Perspective

The essay is a comparative analysis of APEC and the EU, which looks at the particular sorts of economic orders these institutions are helping to create. It is argued that the two regions display some noteworthy differences that result from different approaches to the problem of economic governance. These differences reflect much more than the relative degree and level of regional institutionalization; they flow from different ‘political rationalities’ that are themselves a function of the very different liberal and illiberal polities in Europe and East Asia. Our key theoretical innovation is to use the framework of political rationality to explain different regional approaches to economic governance; more specifically we argue that the EU and the East Asian members of APEC may be understood as respectively subscribing to broadly conceived liberal and cameralist approaches to economic governance which are in turn reflected in the design of regional institutions.

The technocratic politics of administrative participation: case studies of Singapore and Vietnam

In the last decade in Southeast Asia there has been a trend towards new modes of political participation for citizens to provide feedback to government officials or to provide new methods for holding public officials to account. Regimes in Singapore and Vietnam have to differing degrees pioneered and embraced this direction through various such new administrative modes of political participation. But the paradox is that these modes of political participation have not replaced but complemented tight controls on political expression. It is argued here that these new modes work against independent collective political action through: the state defining what issues are available for participation; the state controlling who gets access to administrative institutions involving political participation; and the state shaping the form that this access takes. The end result is political rule by administrative means. Politics is not so much suppressed as transformed into a set of technocratic processes and ideologies intended to narrow the scope and nature of contestation.

The new regulatory state and relational capacity

Globalisation has transformed the internal architecture of the state, leading to the emergence of a new form of regulatory state that operates through mechanisms of metagovernance – that is, the governance of governance. This has important implications for various models of policy capacity. Conventional accounts of policy capacity embody an that seeks to identify a set of transformative powers over policy and structure. In contrast, the new regulatory state requires that capacity be understood as a that structures various sites of governance and links dispersed regulatory resources and agents.

The antipolitics of good governance

This article sets out to understand the relationship between the complex process of structural change and the proliferating political strategies and programs implemented to manage the process of political and social change. More particularly the authors examine how in the wake of the Asian economic crisis international financial institutions advocated a new global policy through programs such as Social Investment Funds. The thread that runs through the global social policy is a distinctly political project that uses the liberal language of participation and empowerment as a strategy of “antipolitics” that marginalizes political contestation. The authors argue, however, that the antipolitics of technocratic social policy gave way to a more populist form of antipolitics of a new government led by Thaksin Shinawatra. This article examines the nature of governance projects and seeks to explain the shift between them. This new populism may be a precursor to a new “authoritarian statist” mode of political regulation that could come to dominate Southeast Asia, buttressed by the requirements imposed by the “war on terrorism.”

Regulatory Regionalism and the Dynamics of Territorial Politics: The Case of the Asia‐Pacific Region

This article examines the emergence and politics of new modes of regional governance understood as a form of regulatory regionalism. Regulatory regionalism is defined in terms of the institutional spaces of regional regulation functioning within ostensibly national policy and political institutions. The central insight of this essay is that the politics of this regulatory regionalism can be conceptualised as a system of territorial politics fought out and accommodated across the institutional space of the state. The emphasis on territorial politics highlights the fact that strategic moves within institutional space are shaped by the political context in which the regional and ‘regionalising’ actors operate. From our perspective regulatory regionalism is a distinctive method of boundary control over overlapping political arenas, which brings into play a system of territorial politics within the state. We test this argument through an examination of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific region which is often thought of as being inhospitable to such governance innovation.