Managing Security as a Regional Public Good; A Regional-Global Mechanism for Security

Recent decades have seen a fast growth in regional and sub-regional organisations, together with a (slower) increasing recognition by the international community of the need for greater involvement of regional agencies in peace and security. At the same time an enhanced cooperation between the two levels – the regional and the global, is more and more visible.The ambition of this paper, in the context of the overall theme of examining the role of regionalisation as a mediating level and strategy for global governance, is to assess the growing relationship between the UN and the regional organisations in security, and the consequent opportunities inherent to thisconception for UN reform.To this end, regional security will be treated as a regional public good, to be managed at the regional level, and the development of a framework for cooperation between the UN and the regional organisations will be analysed. Also, the meaning and opportunities of these developments for global governance will be addressed, suggesting a multilevel approach to security governance.