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 with formal structures (HF) or 2) institutions characterized by hard rules but with informal structures (HI); and 3) institutions characterized by soft rules with low degrees of precision, obligation, and delegation but with formal organization structures like a Secretariat (SF) or 4) institutions characterized by soft rules with little to no precision, obligation, and delegation and with informal organization structures and low levels of control (SI). The case studies show that most Asian institutions exhibit mostly SF and SI characteristics but can also have HI features.

In teasing out these four variations in institutional designs, the authors of various chapters have gone beyond the conventional view of Asian institutionalism and added valuable nuances to our understanding of Asia’s institutional makeup and governance patterns. The findings from the case studies present interesting trends that correct the long-held impression that Asia is under-institutionalized and/or that its institutions are weak. For instance, in 2009 the Asian Development Bank published a huge study called Institutions for Regionalism: Enhancing Asia’s Economic Cooperation and Integration that reflected the view that Asian institutions are weak. But as argued by the editor of Asian Design, such views are not only simplistic but also outdated. Asia now boasts a wide array of diverse institutional types, covering a broad range of issues and different patterns of cooperation and governance. Asia is an active builder of institutions that do not neatly fit into one single category.

A key contribution of this volume, therefore, is its comprehensive analyses of multiple pathways of cooperation and governance of regional institutions in Asia. While Asian institutions are characteristically SF and SI in design and tend to be issue specific, the studies show that these types of institutions are not unique to the region and that their characteristics are similar to many of the kinds of institutions found across the world. This analysis makes European institutional designs, which had always been held as a model, more of an exception than the norm.

Another important insight provided is the observation that while SF and SI patterns of governance are the preferred institutional design in Asia, they are not inferior to that of Europe’s. Moreover, these designs work better in practice in Asia. More specifically, the nature of design hews more to the kind of power structure in many Asian states and the states’ capacity to deal with a slew of governance challenges. That states play a dominant role in deciding the nature of institutional design and that domestic politics matter in shaping regional institutions are indeed sobering reminders for IR scholars, who tend to ignore and pay little attention to political and social realities that affect the nature of institutions across Asia. This explains why “progress” in strengthening the capacity and authority of institutions that deal with issues like human rights and the environment move slowly beyond declaratory statements and plans of actions. The case studies in this volume provide a frank view that state sovereignty is still very much the preferred normative structure that underpins most of the institutions found in Asia.

Given these material and normative constraints, do Asian designs constrain the ability of the region to have a wider voice and influence in the world order? On the one hand, the different case studies in the volume provide interesting insights concerning how states that are part of wider Asian institutions that promote regional cooperative frameworks in trade, investments, and finance (RCEP) also establish mini-lateral trade arrangements (TPP), while also pursuing bilateral free trade arrangements (FTAs). One could argue that it is precisely the flexibility built into these institutional structures that allows different types of opportunities for states to advance their interests, while continuing to promote the benefits of closer dialogue, deeper interaction, and cooperation at multiple levels.

On the other hand, the case studies on human security–related institutions to promote and protect human rights, fight infectious diseases, and work for environmental protection offer valuable insights on the multiple levels and layers of governance processes that have evolved—all geared toward addressing serious threats to state and human security. Albeit informal in nature, the institutionalized patterns of information exchange among the region’s national human rights institutions—through the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission of Human Rights (AICHR) and the building of laboratory capacities to detect outbreaks of pathogenic viruses through the ASEAN+3 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Task Force and APEC’s Emerging Infectious Network—form critical building blocks toward effective regional governance of cross-border issues. More importantly, these informal yet institutionalized state and nonstate processes underscore the fact that different actors can effect collective action without having to have hard rules and strong structures. Instead, it is the imperative of finding solutions to address common threats that naturally compels states to work together and promote cooperative practices.

This volume, therefore, is an important and timely contribution to international relations more broadly and particularly to the study of institutions. The contributors have offered interesting analyses of different types of institutions and their governance challenges that cut across issues of incentives and commitments, among others. Although the studies are already extensive, the discussion on the role of China, its growing participation in different institutions within and outside the region, and its current initiatives in creating new institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank deserved closer examination, as they impact on the issue of leadership and/or hegemony in regional and global governance. Can a stronger China provide hegemonic stability as it helps provide public goods for smaller, less developed states? Similarly, how will middle powers in the region respond to China’s leadership? To what extent does a strong China impact ASEAN-led institutions?

Finally, Asia will continue to see the proliferation of institutions as long as new issues emerge—economic, human security, or hard security domains—and as long as there are willing “builders” of institutions. But while Asia seems to accommodate a mosaic of institutions, the inevitable question of how much the push for cooperation will trump competition looms in the future.