When civil war erupted in Liberia in 2003, it wasn't UN peacekeepers who first established order—it was Nigerian-led forces operating under the Economic Community of West African States. When military coups destabilize African nations, the African Union typically suspends membership and imposes sanctions faster than the Security Council can schedule a debate.

This pattern repeats across continents. ASEAN mediates South China Sea tensions. The Organization of American States monitors elections throughout Latin America. The European Union manages crises on its borders while global institutions struggle with vetoes and procedural delays.

The conventional wisdom holds that global problems require global solutions. Yet the evidence increasingly suggests that regional organizations often deliver faster, more legitimate, and more sustainable outcomes than their universal counterparts. Understanding why reveals important truths about how international cooperation actually works—and how it might work better.

Regional organizations possess something the UN never can: skin in the game. When conflict erupts in West Africa, neighboring states face immediate consequences—refugee flows, economic disruption, potential spillover violence. This proximity creates urgency that distant powers simply cannot match.

Beyond material stakes, regional bodies benefit from what political scientists call cognitive proximity. Member states share historical experiences, cultural frameworks, and often common languages. They understand local power dynamics, ethnic tensions, and economic structures without requiring lengthy briefings from external experts. When the African Union mediates a dispute, its representatives often know the principals personally and understand unstated assumptions that outsiders would miss entirely.

This advantage extends to legitimacy. Intervention by neighbors rarely triggers the same sovereignty concerns as involvement by former colonial powers or distant superpowers. When ECOWAS deployed troops to Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the operation faced less resistance than a hypothetical Western intervention would have encountered. Regional actors are seen as having a legitimate interest in regional stability—an assumption that doesn't automatically extend to the Security Council's permanent members.

The proximity advantage also shapes institutional design. Regional organizations can develop specialized expertise in their specific challenges. The African Union has built sophisticated mechanisms for responding to unconstitutional changes of government because that's Africa's recurring governance challenge. ASEAN has developed consensus-based diplomacy suited to Southeast Asia's diverse political systems. The UN, by contrast, must design one-size-fits-all frameworks that inevitably fit no one perfectly.

Takeaway

The most effective intervention often comes not from the most powerful actor, but from the one with the deepest understanding of local context and the strongest stake in long-term regional stability.

The principle of subsidiarity—handling problems at the lowest level capable of addressing them effectively—has deep roots in Catholic social teaching and European governance. It's now reshaping how the international system allocates responsibility. The UN Charter itself acknowledges this in Chapter VIII, which encourages regional arrangements for dealing with matters relating to international peace and security.

In practice, a layered system of governance is emerging. Regional organizations serve as first responders, with global institutions providing backup when regional capacity proves insufficient. The African Union might deploy an initial peacekeeping force, with the UN later authorizing support missions or taking over operations once they've stabilized. This division of labor leverages each level's comparative advantages.

The evolution reflects hard-learned lessons. Universal institutions struggle with implementation because they lack enforcement mechanisms beyond member-state cooperation. Regional bodies can often act faster because they require fewer approvals and face less distance between decision and deployment. When the European Union imposes sanctions on a neighboring regime, the bureaucratic path from decision to implementation is dramatically shorter than routing the same action through New York.

Subsidiarity also addresses the Security Council's structural limitations. The veto power of permanent members can paralyze global action on conflicts where major powers have competing interests. Regional organizations face no such constraint. The African Union can respond to crises that would trigger Chinese or Russian vetoes at the UN. ASEAN can address regional tensions without waiting for American and Chinese interests to align.

Takeaway

Effective global governance increasingly means knowing which level should handle which problems—not assuming that bigger or more universal automatically means better.

The regional-global relationship isn't always complementary. When organizations have overlapping mandates, confusion multiplies. During the 2011 Libya intervention, the African Union pursued a negotiated settlement while NATO conducted military operations authorized by the Security Council. The result: a military victory that the AU felt undermined its diplomatic efforts, breeding resentment that still shapes Africa's relationship with Western-led interventions.

Resource competition creates additional friction. Regional organizations often depend on the same donor funding as UN operations. When the European Union deploys a mission to the Sahel, it may draw personnel and equipment that would otherwise support UN peacekeeping. The international system lacks clear protocols for deconflicting these competing demands on limited resources.

Perhaps most challenging are situations where regional and global norms conflict. ASEAN's emphasis on non-interference clashes with emerging global standards on humanitarian intervention. The African Union has been more willing than the UN to authorize military action against member governments—as its intervention framework explicitly permits under certain conditions. These normative differences create genuine dilemmas when crises require coordinated responses.

The solution isn't choosing regional over global or vice versa—it's building better interfaces between levels. This requires clarity about when regional approaches take precedence, consistent funding mechanisms that don't force competition, and regular dialogue between institutional leaders. Some progress has occurred: the UN and AU now hold annual consultations, and Security Council resolutions increasingly reference regional organization roles. But the architecture remains incomplete, and coordination failures continue to undermine effectiveness.

Takeaway

The greatest challenge in contemporary global governance isn't building strong institutions at any single level—it's designing the connections between levels so they reinforce rather than undermine each other.

The future of global governance lies not in strengthening the UN at the expense of regional bodies, nor in retreating to pure regionalism. It lies in building a genuinely multilevel system where each layer handles what it does best.

This requires abandoning the fiction that any single institution can solve global problems alone. Regional organizations will continue addressing crises where they have advantages in speed, legitimacy, and local knowledge. Global institutions will remain essential for setting universal standards, mobilizing resources, and intervening when regional capacity fails.

For practitioners in international affairs, the implication is clear: effectiveness increasingly depends on navigating between levels, understanding which institution to engage when, and building the relationships that make coordination possible.