Locating regional health policy: Institutions, politics, and practices

Poverty reduction and health became central in the agendas of Southern regional organisations in the last two decades. Yet, little is known about how these organisations address poverty, inclusion and social inequality, and how Southern regional formations are engaging in power constellations, institutions, processes, interests and ideological positions within different spheres of governance. This article reviews academic literatures spanning global social policy, regional studies and diplomacy studies, and the state of knowledge and understanding of the ‘place’ of regional actors in health governance as a global political practice therein. It identifies theoretical and thematic points of connection between disparate literatures and how these can be bridged through research focusing on the social policies of regional organisations and regional integration processes. This framework hence locates the contributions of each of the research articles of this Special Issue of Global Social Policy on the regional dimension of health policy and diplomacy in relation to Southern Africa and South America. It also highlights the ways in which the articles bring new evidence about how social relations of welfare are being (re)made over larger scales and how regional actors may initiate new norms to improve health rights in international arenas engaging in new forms of ‘regional’ diplomacy

Social Policy in Post-Neo-liberal Latin America: The cases of Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia

P�a Riggirozzi analyzes the challenges of embracing new models of citizenship and social development in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela. Together with a new spirit of change, the spectacular economic recovery after 2003 allowed for the introduction of a new range of anti-poverty policies and social protection. She suggests that contingency and contextual circumstances also mean that as an approach it is vulnerable to the swinging moods of the international economy and/or from political opposition from domestic elites.

Latin America’s new regional architecture : a cooperative or segmented regional governance complex?

In Latin America the repercussions of the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations are discussed widely. This article examines the opposing views on this process. Some authors postulate that an exhaustion of integration in Latin America will end up in segmented regionalism and hemispheric disintegration. Others endorse a variable geometry of integration that facilitates intraregional cooperation and minimizes the risk of veto players and zero-sum politics. The article takes Latin America as a vantage point to analyse the topic of interacting and overlapping regional organizations from a more general perspective. It asks about the conditions under which the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations might have positive or negative effects (on regional integration and cooperation). Additionally, it advocates broadening the analytical focus and replacing the analytical concepts of regional integration and cooperation with the analytical concept of regional governance. Regional governance more adequately captures and integrates different patterns of regional cooperation and different regional projects that result in overlapping regional organizations. Instead of looking at the proliferation of regional organizations from a perspective of fragmentation, this article contends that the focus should be redirected to analysing how different regional organizations interact. Regional interaction patterns can vary between synergistic, cooperative, conflictive, or segmented regional governance (complexes). In an initial application of this analytical scheme, the article summarizes the changing regional cooperation patterns in South America since 1990. In the conclusions it outlines some preliminary ideas for a future research agenda on regional governance (complexes)