ABSTRACT
As rightly pointed out by Manmohan Singh, Former Prime Minister of India “We have created institutions for regional economic cooperation but we have not empowered them adequately to enable them to be more proactive.” 1 Contextually, despite regional integration being a cornerstone for achieving a prosperous, inclusive, resilient and sustainable development in South Asia, it has remained grappled with constrictions. Time and again newer theoretical frameworks have emerged to sustain multilateral cooperative structures that more often than not, moved towards stagnation and the lack of consensus generation among the respective stakeholders. Consequently, this chapter aims to identify sub-regionalism in South Asia with BIMSTEC in focus, attempting to understand why the sub-region is potent enough for such collaborations to succeed and what might be assessed as a better way to move forward, despite the bottlenecks.
