Comparing Regional Organizations

Overlapping regionalism around the world: Introducing the overlapping regionalism dataset

“…RIOs are organizations with a set of primary rules, headquarters or a secretariat, that consist of at least three states that cooperate in more than one specific issue area. Contrary to international organizations, the membership criteria of RIOs relate to geographical considerations (Goltermann et al, 2012;Panke et al, 2020). This definition of RIOs discriminates against organizations that are emanations from other organizations (following Pevehouse et al, 2020) and organizations with members other than states.…”

“…To assess patterns and trajectories of RIO development as well as overlapping regionalism, we draw on the Regional Organizations Competencies (ROCO) datasets (Panke et al, 2020). The datasets cover all 73 RIOs for the time period between 1945 and 2020 or since their establishment.…”

“…In Asia, regional cooperation started later than in other regions in general and was not highly dynamic in terms of member state enlargements and policy scope expansion (Panke et al, 2020). The very first instance of overlapping regionalism occurred in 1954 between SEATO and the SPC.…”

“…In the Americas, overlaps are less pronounced (16.8%). At the other end of the spectrum, only 9.9% of overlapping dyads are located in Asia, which likely is the result of the late traction of regionalism in the region (Panke et al, 2020).…”

“…This also reflects the fact that RIOs are located in all regions of the world and their numbers have multiplied over time. They have become larger with respect to their member states and more encompassing with respect to the number of policy competencies (Panke et al, 2020). As a consequence of these developments, RIOs often share one or more members and are equipped with identical policy competencies and mandates at the same time, which we refer to as overlapping regionalism (OVREG) (Malamud, 2019;Nolte, 2018;Panke and Stapel, 2018a;Russo and Gawrich, 2017;Yeo, 2018).…”