Administration and Asean Regionalism

Abstract

What is our state of knowledge on the administration of regionalism in the ASEAN? The deepening integration of the Southeast Asian region in terms of economics and politics has reached some significant points such as the passage of the ASEAN Charter, implementation of AFTA and the advancing of envisioned communities such as the Economic Community, Political Security Community and the Socio-Cultural Community. However, a most glaring gap is the non-existence of provisions for implementation, monitoring and evaluation of ASEAN policies. These activities are for the most part the functions of a civil service or public administration. This lack of a bureaucracy is problematic since the call for good governance in ASEAN means that there must be continuity, accountability, transparency and predictability not only in policymaking but also in policy implementation and its concomitant activities. While bureaucracies can challenge political actors for power, nation-states have still built and sustained them for continuity in policy. Political actors come and go but without the institutional memory of a bureaucracy, governments can sometimes fail to appreciate the whole context of a given policy. In the context of the ASEAN, there is a need to know how its Secretariat has been working in the past as well as its prospects for the future. The lack of a strong ASEAN Secretariat has wide implications on the political thought of ASEAN member-states since it can be argued that this is a way of ensuring that there will not be another avenue for political competition on policy matters. To further refine this debate, it is important to look into the literature on what has been written about the ASEAN Secretariat and its prospects for the future. An institutionalist perspective on this would provide considerable insight on ASEAN’s “way of doing things.”

Keywords: ASEAN Secretariat, Regional Governance, Bureaucracy, Public Administration

JEL Classification: F40,H87,K40,