Multilateral frameworks range from international organizations to loose diplomatic associations. International organizations, on one hand, are mainly built on international treaties or legal agreements such as the European Union and the United Nations. On the other hand, there is a loose framework based on conference diplomacy such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference (APEC) and the G8 Summit. The latter framework shall be called a ‘loose cooperative body’ in this article. Loose cooperative bodies are based not on legal agreements and supranational organizations, but on holding conferences at regular intervals. This article aims to provide an appropriate analytical scheme for the better understanding of this loose cooperative body.
Scholars in international organizations and international law analyze that a loose cooperative body lacks institutional aspects since it has little legal character compared with international organizations. This analysis regards institutions as legalized or explicitly stated in documents. Institutions, however, should be treated as more extensive concepts including informal aspects such as customs, conventions and unwritten standards of behavior. International regimes theory deals with informal aspects of institutions. But international regimes lack functional aspects to analyze how to organize multilateral frameworks. In this respect, studies on international organizations adapt functions of internal organs within international organizations. Therefore, regime theory needs to be developed to introduce functional aspects for loose cooperative bodies.
This article introduces ‘chairmanship’ as an analytical scheme for loose cooperative bodies. This scheme strengthens the previous studies with two points. The first point is that chairmanship is an informal institution developed with mutual understanding among members of multilateral frameworks. In particular, loose cooperative bodies are better analyzed with this informal institutional aspect because they are treated as less institutionalized from formal institutional points of view. The second point of this scheme relates the fact that loose cooperative bodies have international conferences as their core activity. In chairmanship, the Chair plays central roles in the preparation process of these conferences. The Chair is charge not by a person but by one of member countries in the loose cooperative bodies. The role of the Chair mainly consists of inviting new members, agenda-setting and consensus-building. In this way, it can be said that the chairmanship adopts a functional aspect to organize loose cooperative bodies. Taking APEC and the G8 as examples, this article investigates how loose cooperative bodies have developed throughout the role of the Chair in the preparation process of conferences.
By focusing on informal and functional aspects of institutions, it is argued that even loose cooperative bodies could have institutional aspects. Chairmanship provides a suitable analytical scheme in order to clarify this argument.

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