Does Regionalism Diffuse? A New Research Agenda for the Study of Regional Organizations

Why do some international institutions contain strong dispute settlement provisions? New evidence from preferential trade agreements

“…Perhaps governments are beginning to mimic one another when designing agreements? Some have suggested that institutional design features are likely to diffuse (Jetschke and Lenz 2013). Indeed, recent empirical work shows that treaty language is often replicated from one treaty to the next (Allee and Elsig 2014) and that a handful of models may exist (Baccini et al 2015a, b).…”

The Bologna Process Goes East? from “Third Countries” to Prioritizing Inter-regional Cooperation Between the ASEAN and EU

“…Hence, understanding what does not diffuse should be as important as understanding what does (Solingen 2012). With regard to outcomes of policy diffusion, for instance 'regional institution building', the diffusion approach is only attentive to the formal structure, such as the emergence of regional organizations, but without explaining the efficacy of the organizations (Jetschke and Lenz 2013). It also focuses narrowly on the idea of policy convergence as the end result of a diffusion process, with little attention to policy implementation, wider consequences and variation in institutional outcomes at the receiving end (Dale and Robertson 2012;Peck 2011).…”

“…Most regional studies on ASEAN and the EU favour the theory of policy diffusion, which describes the EU-style institutions as a putative paradigm for ASEAN regional integration (Allison 2013;Jetschke and Lenz 2013;Jetschke and Murray 2012). Some scholars in educational sociology also claim that regionalization of higher education in Asia aspires to replicate the Bologna Process (Chao 2014a;Vögtle and Martens 2014).…”

European Civil Security Governance

“…Aside from questions of subsidiarity and formal institutions the EU may, therefore, seems a reasonable basis to assess how specific aspects and understandings of civil security governance emerge as global 'best practice' and how this emanates from and trickles back down to the regional and national levels. The established literatures on comparative regionalism and the diffusion of the EU model of regional integration (Jetschke and Lenz, 2013) as well as on the EU's global role in multilateral and interregional fora (Söderbaum and van Langenhove, 2006;Jørgensen, 2009) may offer helpful insights. From a theoretical perspective, it might be useful to explore whether civil security governance can and should be conceptualized as a 'regime complex' (Raustiala and Victor, 2004), 'organizational field' Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2009) or 'community of practice' (Adler, 2008;Bremberg, 2010) in order to move beyond the narrow focus on single organizations and actors and take a broader look at cross-cutting institutional and ideational developments in this field.…”