Socioeconomic challenges for the ASEAN People's Assembly

Eric Teo Chu Cheow, Singapore

The 4th ASEAN People's Assembly (APA) was held in Manila May 10-13, bringing together more than one hundred ASEAN participants from NGOs, the academia, the media, peoples' organizations, civil society and civic groups. There were also some fifty foreign observers from regional countries and international players.

This is the 4th in a series of APAs, which began with the Batam Assembly in November 2000, organized to coincide with the 2000 ASEAN Summit in Singapore. The 2nd APA was held in Bali in July 2002 and the 3rd in Manila in September 2003.

From the 2nd APA came the initiative to do the human rights and gender scorecards, whereas the 3rd APA launched a human development report for ASEAN, which was presented this year at the 4th Assembly.

The convening of APA is based on the rationale that community- building in ASEAN must include all sectors of society, as ASEAN must be made relevant to the ordinary citizens of each of the member states, as it is already to the elite communities of the organization.

In this perspective, for ASEAN to build a genuine Southeast Asian Community, it must be based on a wider and deeper understanding of ASEAN amongst its citizens. The ASEAN Vision 2020 in fact seeks to build a community of caring societies, the component elements of which target the currently unsatisfactory socio-economic conditions affecting its population at the grassroots level.

At the core of this initiative is ASEAN-ISIS, a network of nine ASEAN think tanks, which conceived this project way back in 1996. In the Vientiane Action Plan adopted at the last ASEAN Summit, both APA and ASEAN-ISIS were mentioned as initiatives ASEAN governments are supporting in order to bring the peoples of ASEAN closer, together with the ASEAN Business Advisory Council, the ASEAN Parliamentary Organization and the ASEAN University Network.

Moreover, APA has an important role in the current ASEAN efforts to build its three communities, as "the pillars of ASEAN's future". These three communities include the ASEAN Security Community, ASEAN Economic Community and the ASEAN Social and Cultural Community, commonly known as the three "P"s, for peace, prosperity and people respectively. APA is thus an integral part of the ASEAN Social and Cultural Community, which should 'bond' the peoples of ASEAN together more tightly.

But the challenges for ASEAN are enormous in the socio- economic arena, as well as in social justice and good governance. ASEAN's human rights and democracy scorecards were presented at the recent Assembly, as well as the gender scorecard and its human development report.

There is still much progress to be made here, as peace and reconciliation still need to be enhanced within ASEAN. In on- going religious, economic and communal conflicts, the common and indigenous peoples of ASEAN are perceived to be at the mercy of diverse interest groups, as numerous panelists at the Assembly had pointed out. Refugees, displaced persons and human trafficking still constitute a scourge across vast areas of ASEAN.

Human security and conflict prevention remain a hope for many amongst the ASEAN poor, just as social justice and good corporate and public governance still remain elusive for them.

In fact, the 'responsibility to protect' is now a slogan ringing across ASEAN too, but ASEAN governments need to adopt this approach and mindset more in order to effectively put this into practice. The role of the media and civil society was examined, just as natural disaster relief and management came to the fore at the Assembly, given the Dec. 26 tsunami and the subsequent earthquake that shook Nias in Indonesia.

The Assembly thus provided a useful platform to discuss all aspects of comprehensive and human security, especially from ASEAN NGOs' perspective.

As regionalism gathers momentum, ASEAN's peoples must be given more say and a greater stake in ASEAN, especially as the future Southeast Asian Community's principal share-holder.

But as ASEAN governments are so diverse and differ greatly in accountability to their people, there is also a wide range of differences in the level of participatory politics within the organization; moreover, the levels of people's participation within ASEAN are still subjected to different interpretations and implementation, just as Myanmar poses a direct political problem to the organization; in fact, Myanmar has been completely absent from APA thus far, as no Myanmar delegate has frequented APA for obvious political reason.

But popular socio-economic participation must form the crux of ASEAN peoples' participation in the organization's decision- making process, as ASEAN seeks not only to enlarge the economic pie with sound growth and sustainable policies, but also to implement a greater and wider social redistribution of the fruits of growth, progress and prosperity across the region and within individual countries.

Therein lies perhaps ASEAN's greatest challenge ahead, as socio-economic imperatives could eventually also contain the seeds of social and political instability in the region. It is thus for this reason that socio-economic problems and challenges constituted, rightly so, the main crux of the APA's agenda.

A more even social redistribution, with a strong implementation of social justice, is thus necessary to help ensure economic sustainability, as well as social and political stability.

Therein lies the fundamental and most important challenge for ASEAN, as it builds a true Southeast Asian Community of "caring societies".

The peoples' voice must be heard in this regard and APA provides the useful platform for ASEAN to voice out. Only with the consensus of the ASEAN peoples would social redistribution and social justice be effectively implemented across ASEAN lands, so as to provide political and social stability for continuous economic growth and progress.

The writer, a business consultant and strategist, is Council Secretary of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs (SIIA), and a role-player and participant at the 4th ASEAN Peoples' Assembly.