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Asian Designs: Governance in the Contemporary World Order. Edited by Pekkanen Saadia M.. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 400 p. $89.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.
As Asia continues to become the engine of global economic growth and major Asian states grow in military strength, how much of the region’s material and ideational power translate into shaping regional governance and influencing the global international order? Does Asia punch below its weight with its weak institutions? Is Asia still under-institutionalized?
This volume, edited by Saadia M. Pekkanen and aptly titled Asian Designs, revisits many of the questions raised about Asian institutionalization in the early 2000s when the region, particularly East Asia, turned to multilateralism. With the establishment of a web of regional institutions like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Plus Three, ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit, questions abound about the nature of Asia’s institutions and how different they are from their European counterparts.
Asian Designs is therefore timely in that it forces scholars and analysts who study Asian institutionalism to once again examine pertinent questions about the nature of institutional governance and compare it with others found across the world. Set against an impressive database of 2,800 diverse global institutions from its ASIABASE-1, established along economic, political and security domains, the volume provides a comprehensive listing of types of institutions across the Asian sub-regions: from Southeast and Northeast Asia to Central and South Asia. From this sweeping view, and supplemented by nine case studies of institutions that cover economic, traditional security, and nontraditional/human security issues, the volume offers a typology of these institutions based on two underlying and observable dimensions. These are its legal rules (hard or soft depending on some combination of precision, obligation, and delegation) and its organizational structure (formal or informal depending on degree of centralization, control, and flexibility). These two dimensions lead to four ideal types of institutional design: 1) institutions characterized by hard rules...