Regional governance by the South Asia Cooperative Environment Program (SACEP)? Institutional design and customizable regime policy offering flexible political options

International governance by global, and especially by regional environmental regimes, is increasingly gaining attention in both political practice and academia. Such regimes may be clearly geared towards a specific environmental issue, which is at the core of the institutional design. Over time, regimes may also develop environmental regime policies. Using the case of the regional South Asia Cooperative Environment Program (SACEP), and based on 1982–2017 qualitative data from key regime policy documents and interviews, we pose the empirical question of whether the SACEP regime has been capable of developing a strong environmental regime policy in the period since 1982. We do so by pursuing the following research questions: What is the institutional design of SACEP making up the regime structures? Which policy issues, goals, instruments and implementing actors can be identified within the regional environmental SACEP regime? Our findings suggest that the institutional design is the result of a UNEP spin-off for more effective cooperation on environmental issues in South Asia. While serving the bureaucratic interests of UNEP, this design was in line with the interests of India as a regional power, through which it advanced its hegemony within South Asian environmental cooperation. The environmental policy developed within the SACEP regime is characterized by the very large number of issues covered, a lack of concrete and substantial policy goals, short-term and limited donor projects as the only instruments, and the vague mention of Member States as implementing actors. We conclude that the absence of a meaningful, streamlined and/or politically highly visible regime policy renders the SACEP regime policy an ad-hoc assortment of policies, which is, for strong donor countries, a “menu to choose from”.