EMBEDDED COOPERATION AND THE DURABILITY OF REGIONAL COOPERATION IN SOUTH ASIA

Explaining Durable Cooperation Beyond Institutional Authority Regional cooperation is widely understood to depend on institutional arrangements that stabilise expectations among participating states. A substantial body of scholarship, prominently Koremenos (2005), argues that cooperation becomes durable when it is embedded within frameworks that reduce uncertainty, structure interaction, and constrain opportunistic behaviour. The underlying premise is that without credible assurances regarding the continuity of commitments, cooperation remains fragile, whereas institutional mechanisms enable it to persist over time (Abbott & Snidal, 2000). From this perspective, durability is not simply a function of shared interests, but of institutional conditions that render those interests reliable across time.