The workshop focused on exchanging real life experiences and debating concrete cases of regional cooperation/integration. The dialogue also looked at the implications for policy and action by multiple stakeholders, including external actors such as the EU. A series of short video briefings providing insights into the latest thinking on regional integration have been produced from this meeting:
Regional Integration Part 1, with Dr Bruce Byiers of the ECDPM: Overview of key issues
Regional Integration Part 2, with Ambassador Kaire Mbuende: Market and functional integration, and how national interests drive the regional integration agenda
Regional Integration Part 3, with Michele Ruiters of DBSA: Infrastructure planning, and the need for a SADC industrial plan
Regional Integration Part 4, with Gus Mandigora of Oxfam: Involving non-state actors in the Tripartite Free Trade Area negoitations
Papers and programme from the event
- Download the programme
- Download the paper for Session 1: Development Corridors in Southern Africa: A dialogue on economic and political drivers and constraints of regional integration
- Download the paper for Session 2: Southern African Private Sector Drivers of Regional Integration
- Download the paper for Session 3: The Complexities of Regional Infrastructure Planning
- Download the paper for Session 4: The Management of Regional Public Goods in Favour of Regional Integration
- Download the presentation by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA): JICAs activities for supporting regional integration within SADC
This meeting was part of a process – funded under the EU-South Africa Strategic Partnership – to facilitate effective multi-stakeholder dialogue on the politics of regional integration in Southern Africa.
The dialogue was a final step in a larger research and dialogue project on the political economy of regional integration, which included a scoping study, an inception workshop and more in-depth political economy analysis of specific research questions.