Although the COVID-19 pandemic had claimed over one million lives globally by late 2020, Africa had avoided a massive outbreak. Patterson and Balogun analyze pandemic responses by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and various states collaborating with civil society. They argue that responses display forms of agency rooted in contextually relevant expertise, pan-African solidarity, and lessons learned about health messaging and community mobilization from previous health crises. Yet collaboration has not always been harmonious, as actors have adopted various approaches in their interactions with global health institutions and civil society partnerships, and they have actively debated the use of traditional medicine as a COVID-19 treatment.

Abstract The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) both recently adopted and institutionalized the norm of people-centric governance. This is potentially transformative for both, signalling a reorientation away from their private and elite-led normative foundations. In practice, however, the norm is understood and enacted in different ways by officials at each organization and with radically different effects. In ASEAN, the norm is understood and enacted in a limited and defensive way. Its institutionalization has led only to selective engagement with civil society and has not altered established modes of regional governance. In ECOWAS, however, the norm is understood as a means to render the organization more inclusive of civil society groups and has transformed the regional project in important ways, shaping the logic and form of regional intervention and conflict prevention. To explore these experiences—convergence in adoption and institutionalization of a norm and variation in its practice and effect—we develop a practice theoretic framework and rely on 76 interviews with regional and state officials. We show that each organizational case is usefully conceptualized as a community of practice wherein external norms are understood and practiced in particular ways and with particular effect.

This article investigates how practitioners in the West African Health Organization (WAHO) obtain and exercise autonomous political agency in the development of regional health policy. While many process-driven accounts of African agency focus on the freedom and ability of African governments and regional organisations to act and not be acted upon, the article finds that it is necessary look within these agents to examine how they are constituted and the processes in which they acquire the capacity to be agents in their external interactions. This article shows that practitioners in WAHO rely on three institutional strategies that constitute them as agents within the organisation: networking with extra-regional partners; the inclusion of civil society in regional social policy; and the development of intra-organisational linkages to create insulation from political control. Through these strategic interactions, WAHO practitioners constitute themselves as agents within the organisation as well as autonomous agents in the broader global health theatre.

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The study of regionalism has experienced numerous transformations and focal points. Comparative regionalism has emerged as the next wave of scholarship on regional cooperation and integration in international relations. What differentiates comparative regionalism from this earlier scholarship? There are three research themes that characterize the field of comparative regionalism: (a) an empirical focus on regional identity formation as a way of distinguishing between autonomous regions, (b) decentering Europe as the main reference point of comparative regionalism, and (c) defining what is truly “comparative” about comparative regionalism. These research themes emerge in a global context, where regional cooperation and integration are being tested from all sides by events such as Brexit in Europe, elusive global cooperation in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and challenges to democratic stability across the globe. While the development of regionalism has primarily been concerned about the defining of regions and the world order context in which regional cooperation emerges and sustains itself, the interrelated themes of regional identity formation and the decentering of Europe in comparative regionalism drive the comparative regionalism agenda, giving substance to the identification and measurement of the “local” and other context-specific mechanisms of regionalism. While these three themes are helpful in discerning the state of the comparative regionalism research agenda, they also have some limitations. While comparative regionalism is progressive in its integration of constructivist ideas of identity formation, its project of withering Eurocentrism, and its methodological flexibility, comparative regionalism research would be well served to incorporate more reflexive and interpretivist research practices and methods, particularly to serve the goal of offering new knowledge and theories of regional cooperation in the Global South that are not tethered to Europe.