As globalization advances, driven by shared goals of development and crisis management, regions have evolved to create new institutions that address the demands of economic governance within the Bretton Woods institutions. This paper focuses on the asymmetry between the regional and global institutions and the governance boundaries of each, exploring the intricate interconnections between regional and global institutions such as competitive cooperation, complementary cooperation, decoupled competition, and hierarchical institutions. The heterogeneity of power configurations within global governance bodies, coupled with variations in multi-level needs among global governance, collectively contribute to the intricate vertical complexity of institutional dynamics. The article specifically examines the hierarchical, competitive-cooperative, and cooperative relationships among institutions like the Asian Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank. Additionally, the study identifies the wobble nature of European-global institutional cooperation and the decoupling trend in Asian institutions within the International Monetary Fund framework. In practice, the United States, motivated by its pursuit of hegemony, engaged in geopolitical competition, while emerging market nations sought to establish a new global political-economic order. These interactions inherently shaped the development of global governance and its equilibrium interaction with regionalism. This article contributes to understanding the aforementioned complex reality and inspires solutions for global-regional governance.

Acknowledgments: The author wish to express her thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments in the earlier version of this paper. The author declares that she have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

This article was submitted 26.09.2024