About the Workshop
The 2025 edition explores how ASEAN can reassert or reclaim its agency and strategic autonomy in an unsettled world rife with geopolitical tensions and rivalries. While strategic competition now dominates dialogue partner relations, ASEAN can push through its collaborative programmes as a way forward to break deadlock. This would require a strong discourse of ‘open’ and ‘inclusive’ cooperation as well as functional areas to implement projects. As Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan recently said, “the key strategic challenge for ASEAN in such an unsettled world [is to] remain united, remain coherent, focus on economics, and not fall into … the very severe fundamental problems which have beset [other regions].”[1] The workshop builds on this spirit. It focuses on exploring ASEAN’s transformative strategies that further advance the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) and boost collaboration in green initiatives and 4IR technologies.
In 2019, the Organization issued the AOIP to guide cooperation and reassert ASEAN’s principles of external engagement to uphold the rules-based regional architecture. While the AOIP has been concretely implemented through tangible projects in the areas of maritime cooperation, connectivity, sustainable development, and economic cooperation, it faces several challenges. For example, the attention on the AOIP lost steam as the Covid-19 pandemic, Myanmar’s military coup, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine subsequently crowded ASEAN member’s priority lists. Also, the Outlook has minimal success in achieving buy-ins from external partners and in shaping constructive rhetoric in the region. Moreover, the emergence of parallel forums, namely ‘minilaterals’ has potential to dilute the AOIP’s role in guiding the cooperation. Therefore, observers have called for greater strengthening, implementation, and operationalisation of the Outlook to bolster the ASEAN Centrality and ASEAN’s relevance and significance in shaping the regional rules-based order.
Beyond the AOIP, ASEAN needs new strategies to promote technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). This carries both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, AMS leverage these innovations to boost the region’s resilience and attractiveness as a destination for trade, investment, and relocating regional and global supply chains. 4IR also offers new opportunities for businesses and countries to spur the digital economy. On the other hand, the technologies challenge ASEAN’s current economic models. Their mobile nature offers little locational advantage and fewer local job opportunities, rendering the old paradigms obsolete. Embracing these technologies can widen inequalities and create new faultlines in societies, jeopardising inclusive and sustainable growth and development. The tech adoption can also risk entangling ASEAN in international technological competition as geopolitical rivalries deepen. Hence, these issues necessitate a rethinking of ASEAN’s frameworks and mechanisms that ensure the Organization reach its inclusive and sustainable economic future.
In light of the worsening climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, energy security and food security issues have become more pressing than ever. The deployment of cutting-edge technologies to monitor and safeguard the environment enhances an opportunity for ASEAN to achieve sustainability and develop a ‘circular economy’. What remains to be done is to better strategise how to form coalitions among ASEAN and like-minded entities to formulate multilateral principles on matters such as sustainable trade and E-commerce, while also embarking upon cross-cutting initiatives to reduce carbon footprint in production processes. On 9 October 2024 at the recent ASEAN Summit, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong called for collective action to accelerate a transition towards low-emission growth and renewable energy solution as well as the creation of clear regulatory frameworks for the ASEAN Power Grid. This underscores the importance of joint effort to meet the Organization’s sustainability goals to bolster ASEAN’s competitiveness and resilience.
[1] Transcript of Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan’s Doorstop Interview in Laos Following His Attendance at the 57th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and Related Meetings, Vientiane, Laos, 27 July 2024. https://www.mfa.gov.sg/Newsroom/Press-Statements-Transcripts-and-Photos/2024/07/20240727-57th-AMM-Doorstop