Comparative Regional Integration: Governance and Legal Models is a groundbreaking comparative study on regional or supranational integration through international and regional organisations. It provides the first comprehensive and empirically based analysis of governance systems by drawing on an original sample of 87 regional and international organisations. The authors explain how and why different organisations select specific governance processes and institutional choices, and outline which legal instruments—regulatory, organisational or procedural—are adopted to achieve integration. They reveal how different objectives influence institutional design and the integration model, for example a free trade area could insist on supremacy and refrain from adopting instruments for indirect rule, while a political union would rather engage with all available techniques. This ambitious work merges different backgrounds and disciplines to provide researchers and practitioners with a unique toolbox of institutional processes and legal mechanisms, and a classification of different models of regional and international integration.

This book is the first comprehensive, empirically based comparative analysis of governance systems in a range of different regional and international organisations. The book draws on an original sample of institutional features from 87 regional organisations and merges political science and law approaches to provide an enriched perspective.

About the ASEAN Integration Through Law book series

Published by Cambridge University Press, this book series evaluates ASEAN’s community-building process and issues at the forefront of ASEAN law and policy. The series covers six themes: the general architecture and aspirations of ASEAN, the governance and management of ASEAN, the legal regimes in ASEAN, the ASEAN Economic Community, ASEAN and the world, and the substantive laws of ASEAN. Click here for the executive summaries of the books in this series.