The cooperative development of internationalrivers has been attracting much attention recently.However, the controversy between benefits diversificationand governance integrity caused by the characteristics oftrans-boundary and joint sharing of international rivers exists inevitably. The theory of regional governance is frequentlyemployed to conduct the research with respect to cooperativedevelopment of international rivers. In general, researchachievements by applying regional governance theory tointernational rivers爷cooperative development are able to becategorized into three aspects: the coupling betweeninternational rivers governance and regional governancetheory; the analysis of the subjects of international riverscooperative governance from the perspective of regionalgovernance theory; the cooperation policies and mechanismof international rivers. Apparently, such analysis andreview are helpful to understand the overlapping researchfeatures between regional governance theory andinternational rivers 爷cooperative governance and thedevelopment tendency of the research.