Regional Governance in Post-NAFTA North America

Greg Anderson, Brian Bow

"Twenty years after NAFTA, the consensus seems to be that the regional project in North America is dead. The trade agreement was never followed up by new institutions that might cement a more ambitious regional community. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), launched with some fanfare in 2005, was quietly discontinued in 2009. And new cooperative ventures like the US-Canada Beyond the Border talks and the US-Mexico Merida Initiative suggest that the three governments have reverted to the familiar, pre-NAFTA pattern of informal, incremental bilateralism. One could argue, however, that NAFTA itself has been buried, and yet the region somehow lives on, albeit in a form very different from regional integration in other parts of the world. A diverse group of contributors, from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with experience in academia, government service, think tanks and...