The study of international cooperation has emerged and evolved over the past few decades as a cornerstone of international relations research. The strategy here for reviewing such a large literature is to focus primarily on the rational choice and game theoretic approaches that instigated it and have subsequently guided its advance. Without these theoretical efforts, the study of international cooperation could not have made nearly as much progress—and it certainly would not have taken the form it does in the 21st century. Through this lens, we can identify major themes in this literature and highlight key challenges for future research
There is a widespread consensus that China's growing network of regional trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific has crucial strategic and economic implications for states in the region. Yet despite the recognition that China's agreements are initially limited and then expanded substantially over time, few accounts explore the strategic and economic implications of this aspect of China's approach. This article addresses this flaw by drawing attention to the relation between regional power dynamics and China's gradualist approach to negotiating regional trade agreements. It presents a new framework which suggests that due to China's steadily improving economic position visa -vis its regional counterparts and the growing economic dependence of these partners on it, China's negotiating approach increases opportunities to maximize its growing bargaining leverage and influence over time and thereby improve its regional position still further. This article concludes by drawing out the implications of this for the region.
China has expressed its dissatisfaction with aspects of the international development finance regime for many years, related to issues such as its lack of voting power and an insufficient focus on infrastructure spending by traditional multilateral development banks. To address these dissatisfactions, China has utilised a range of approaches, from the application of pressure inside existing institutions, to building outside pressure in the form of using alternative institutions or creating new ones. But how has the combination and timing of these different measures impacted its success in ultimately securing reforms? Applying insights from the institutional choice literature, we find that China has pursued both inside and outside measures to try to secure its objectives in development finance with varying degrees of success. Simply combining these measures has been insufficient to secure success however. In cases where China has exerted internal leverage prior to utilising outside options, it has been the most successful. We conclude that combination and sequencing of these approaches is an under-appreciated factor in determining success of dissatisfied states in securing changes to institutions.
When a state is dissatisfied with an international institution it has different strategies available to it to secure change. These strategies are increasingly well understood due to research in the areas of regime complexity and institutional selection. But while there is an understanding of how the structure of a regime can influence the chances of success of different change proposals, there is less clarity on how the content of proposed changes impacts their success. In this article we decompose proposed institutional changes into two sub-types: Status-quo challenging and status-quo enhancing. Status-quo enhancing changes promote reforms that advance the objectives of the existing regime and so serve to drive change that would otherwise be limited by the inertia of existing institutions. Conversely, status-quo challenging changes undermine the stated goals of the existing regime. We develop these sub-types by comparing China’s attempts to secure changes in the global finance and trade regimes and find that for China status-quo enhancing changes have met with more success than status-quo challenging approaches because they have created more opportunities for productive coalition building.
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