22 August 2024
NTS Bulletin August 2024
Strengthening ASEAN-UN Relations for a Sustainable Multilateral Rules-Based System?
By Alistair D. B. Cook
The United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to host the Summit of the Future in New York from 22nd to 23rd September 2024. Over the past year, negotiations have taken place between member states to draft the Pact for the Future, Declaration on Future Generations, and the Global Digital Compact. This process has been co-facilitated by Germany and Namibia through their permanent missions to the UN in New York.
Around the world political elites are engaging in various discussions on the future of the international system. In Southeast Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is today one of the successful regional organisations worldwide. In 2021, ASEAN began preparing the ASEAN Community Vision 2045. It is a Vision document that builds on the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and aims to intensify integration and enhance connectivity across the economic and socio-cultural sectors. The discussions around Vision 2045 provides insight into the regional priorities such as sustainable development, digital transformation and tackling social inequities.
In 2021, ASEAN undertook its mid-term review of the ASEAN Vision 2025 on disaster management and published it as the ASEAN Disaster Resilience Outlook. The comprehensive review covers many aspects of disaster management. This article focuses on those most relevant to humanitarian concerns – institutionalisation, partnerships and anticipatory action – with implications for the forthcoming Summit of the Future.
In the most recent draft of the Pact of the Future, it notably includes, as Action 57, strengthening United Nations engagement with local and regional authorities within countries, as well as the enhancing of cooperation between the United Nations, regional and sub-regional organisations. In the latter effort, it is already included within the UN Charter as Chapter VIII: Regional Arrangements but has remained underdeveloped and deprioritised.
With the rise of successful regional organisations such as ASEAN notably in the realm of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, inclusion of this action item and a commitment to building on successful arrangements like the UNASEAN Summit and the enactment of efforts like the ASEAN-OCHA Interoperability Brief signed in 2016 to promote ‘dynamic simplicity’ to reduce overlap and aims to identify commonalities and complementarities between the two organisational efforts in the humanitarian realm. If such efforts can be moved towards a more institutionalised footing to redistribute power and decision-making, enhance predictability, further reduce redundancies, and promote greater collaboration then these would be measurable progress between the two entities.
In terms of the refocus on relations between the United Nations and local and regional authorities within countries, this has long been argued for as an important focus of development studies since the 1970s and more recently in discussions on localisation in the humanitarian community in the early twenty-first century. This will become more pronounced as international humanitarian action no longer meets identified needs, and the strength of local nongovernmental organisations in conflict situations like that witnessed in Myanmar becomes recognised. This will necessarily twin with the second focus on partnerships.
There has been a rise in interest on the importance of partnerships, but these have often fallen into structural issues where local organisations are treated as service providers by their larger international partners and are excluded from designing strategies and policies upstream in the decisionmaking process. While there has been some movement in this area through efforts like the START Network, the wider humanitarian community remains relatively reluctant to more substantively engage local organisations. The Pact of the Future should address such structural issues.
Finally, the role of anticipatory action has played an important dynamic in the evolution of the humanitarian system. However, it’s impact has been limited to understanding it as a financial accounting mechanism that releases monies when certain triggers are activated, like reaching thresholds in Early Warning Systems for natural hazards. While in itself a welcome development, it has stymied the need for anticipatory action to focus on shifting mindsets towards alternative scenario development in the humanitarian sector to better prepare for future challenges.
Overall, many of the ideas under discussion in the preparatory meetings ahead of the UN Summit of the Future, particularly in humanitarian affairs, have long been discussed in Southeast Asia, and the wider global discussions would benefit from a greater focus on the experiences and lessons learnt that the region has to offer in recommitting to a sustainable multilateral rules-based system.
Strengthening ASEAN-UN Relations for a Sustainable Multilateral Rules-Based System?
By Alistair D. B. Cook
The United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to host the Summit of the Future in New York from 22nd to 23rd September 2024. Over the past year, negotiations have taken place between member states to draft the Pact for the Future, Declaration on Future Generations, and the Global Digital Compact. This process has been co-facilitated by Germany and Namibia through their permanent missions to the UN in New York.
Around the world political elites are engaging in various discussions on the future of the international system. In Southeast Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is today one of the successful regional organisations worldwide. In 2021, ASEAN began preparing the ASEAN Community Vision 2045. It is a Vision document that builds on the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and aims to intensify integration and enhance connectivity across the economic and socio-cultural sectors. The discussions around Vision 2045 provides insight into the regional priorities such as sustainable development, digital transformation and tackling social inequities.
In 2021, ASEAN undertook its mid-term review of the ASEAN Vision 2025 on disaster management and published it as the ASEAN Disaster Resilience Outlook. The comprehensive review covers many aspects of disaster management. This article focuses on those most relevant to humanitarian concerns – institutionalisation, partnerships and anticipatory action – with implications for the forthcoming Summit of the Future.
In the most recent draft of the Pact of the Future, it notably includes, as Action 57, strengthening United Nations engagement with local and regional authorities within countries, as well as the enhancing of cooperation between the United Nations, regional and sub-regional organisations. In the latter effort, it is already included within the UN Charter as Chapter VIII: Regional Arrangements but has remained underdeveloped and deprioritised.
With the rise of successful regional organisations such as ASEAN notably in the realm of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, inclusion of this action item and a commitment to building on successful arrangements like the UNASEAN Summit and the enactment of efforts like the ASEAN-OCHA Interoperability Brief signed in 2016 to promote ‘dynamic simplicity’ to reduce overlap and aims to identify commonalities and complementarities between the two organisational efforts in the humanitarian realm. If such efforts can be moved towards a more institutionalised footing to redistribute power and decision-making, enhance predictability, further reduce redundancies, and promote greater collaboration then these would be measurable progress between the two entities.
In terms of the refocus on relations between the United Nations and local and regional authorities within countries, this has long been argued for as an important focus of development studies since the 1970s and more recently in discussions on localisation in the humanitarian community in the early twenty-first century. This will become more pronounced as international humanitarian action no longer meets identified needs, and the strength of local nongovernmental organisations in conflict situations like that witnessed in Myanmar becomes recognised. This will necessarily twin with the second focus on partnerships.
There has been a rise in interest on the importance of partnerships, but these have often fallen into structural issues where local organisations are treated as service providers by their larger international partners and are excluded from designing strategies and policies upstream in the decisionmaking process. While there has been some movement in this area through efforts like the START Network, the wider humanitarian community remains relatively reluctant to more substantively engage local organisations. The Pact of the Future should address such structural issues.
Finally, the role of anticipatory action has played an important dynamic in the evolution of the humanitarian system. However, it’s impact has been limited to understanding it as a financial accounting mechanism that releases monies when certain triggers are activated, like reaching thresholds in Early Warning Systems for natural hazards. While in itself a welcome development, it has stymied the need for anticipatory action to focus on shifting mindsets towards alternative scenario development in the humanitarian sector to better prepare for future challenges.
Overall, many of the ideas under discussion in the preparatory meetings ahead of the UN Summit of the Future, particularly in humanitarian affairs, have long been discussed in Southeast Asia, and the wider global discussions would benefit from a greater focus on the experiences and lessons learnt that the region has to offer in recommitting to a sustainable multilateral rules-based system.
