Trade, Competitiveness, Regional Arrangements and the Environment:
A political economy approach
Working Paper Nr. 2000.1
Abstract
The generic question that all the papers in this collection address
(albeit somewhat differently) is whether a regional governance layer
in the form of regional arrangements can help African countries
to overcome both the challenge of survival in a highly competitive
global economy and the environmental challenge that the continent
is facing. As such, an important subquestion for all the papers,
is what role formal regional arrangements can play on a continent
where the informal sector employs about 60% of the urban work force
and informal trade/barter is often much more important than formal
intra-continental trade. The contributors to this collective Working
Paper therefore attempt to go beyond the narrow economic realm to
embrace what we chose to coin a political economy approach to the
relationship between trade, competitiveness, regional arrangements
and the environment.
These papers do not address all the problems and challenges that
African regionalism is faced with, but seen as a collective body
of work they do represent an attempt to take the study of regional
arrangements in Africa into a more nuanced and policy relevant field.
For too long both the practice and the study of African regionalism
have been too influenced by the European experience. We must leave
behind universalistic approaches to regionalism, and accept that
regional arrangements are not developed within the framework of
just one rationality, but in several localised rationalities. The
way forward is therefore to develop broad approaches that combine
historical and socio-economic factors. We need to not only understand
the historicity of the actors involved (both state and nonstate),
but also how they think about themselves and their relationship
to the various manifestations of the global political economy.
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