Rethinking ASEAN Cooperation: Fewer Words, More Action

Every year, officials spend considerable diplomatic effort negotiating lengthy joint statements ahead of ASEAN summits and ministerial meetings. The final documents project an image of unity, but the negotiating process often reveals as much divergence as consensus, especially on major economic and political-security issues. The annual ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) joint communiqué illustrates the point. The grouping should focus more on practical outcomes and building capabilities than spending time and effort wrangling over a form of words.

In 2012, ASEAN faced a political crisis when the AMM in Phnom Penh failed to issue a joint communiqué due to intra-ASEAN disagreements on how to express concerns over China’s behaviour in the South China Sea (SCS). Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa’s subsequent shuttle diplomacy secured a six-point consensus that helped restore a semblance of unity, but the face-saving exercise did little to bridge the underlying divisions. The SCS-related paragraphs in subsequent years’ communiqués consistently note that “some ministers expressed concerns” over developments in the contested waters. Such language does not project ASEAN unity so much as it highlights its absence. Yet year after year, ASEAN continues to expend diplomatic capital negotiating over reams of text that all parties know are qualified, while the harder work of building actual collective capacity gets deferred.

This phenomenon is not confined to the AMM. ASEAN has become prolific at making declarations across its many sectors, but often struggles with implementation. So absorbed is the grouping in producing these documents that it risks treating them as an end in themselves, prioritising the appearance of consensus over the delivery of substantive cooperation. One wonders whether this would help maintain ASEAN’s relevance, at a time when multilateral institutions worldwide are under growing pressure to prove their value in the face of fast-moving disruptions.

Indeed, there is a broader trend in the global multilateral landscape that invites ASEAN to rethink how it measures diplomatic success. The G20 has failed to produce a joint communiqué at three consecutive finance ministers’ meetings in India (2023), Brazil (2024), and South Africa (2025). In such instances, the grouping resorted to a chair’s summary in lieu of a joint communiqué, as divisions over Ukraine, climate finance, and trade proved impossible to bridge.

NATO, despite its more homogeneous membership and treaty obligations, has not been immune either. Faced with escalating transatlantic tensions under the second Trump administration, the alliance significantly scaled back its 2025 Hague Summit Declaration. The final document was brief, with the primary focus on increased defence spending by NATO members.

These cases are not entirely analogous to ASEAN’s situation, but the lesson holds: across the multilateral landscape, comprehensive political declarations are becoming harder to produce and less useful as measures of institutional achievement. Multilateral institutions are recalibrating their deliverables in a more contested global environment, shifting towards more practical, concrete outcomes. The question for ASEAN, then, is whether it has been investing too much diplomatic capital in negotiating words and too little in building capabilities.

The argument here is not that joint statements should be abandoned, but that they should be more focused on actionable commitments for real impact.

Looking back at its history, some of ASEAN’s significant achievements stemmed from practical efforts to address shared vulnerabilities. The Chiang Mai Initiative, born of the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis, established a network of currency swap arrangements that later evolved into the USD240 billion Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation to alleviate the vulnerability of regional currencies to speculative attacks. The ASEAN Covid-19 Response Fund and related coordination mechanisms, while imperfect, represented genuine efforts to pool resources, coordinate action, and build collective preparedness against pandemics.

ASEAN should pursue more of this, systematically and purposefully. It should facilitate arrangements among willing and capable member states, organised around specific deliverables and open to others when they are ready to join. Such initiatives should focus on strengthening national and regional resilience against the growing headwinds of economic shocks, supply-chain disruptions, climate-related disasters, and geopolitical coercion. These are priorities of the ASEAN Community Vision 2045. Strategically important and practically actionable areas include, for example, regional fuel stockpiles, the ASEAN power grid, and the uninterrupted flow of essential supplies during emergencies. These areas should draw on models such as the recent Singapore-New Zealand arrangement to keep critical supplies flowing amid crises. If followed through, they would strengthen ASEAN’s credibility by producing tangible outcomes that may help the ASEAN people, especially in times of crisis.

ASEAN joint statements should encompass tangible outcomes rather than become an end in themselves. Such statements work best when they express clear collective intent and commit member states to concrete action, rather than merely restating broad aspirations and principles or trying to manage disagreements through qualified language. ASEAN officials and leaders should spend less diplomatic capital on wordsmithing and more on confronting the difficult issues currently facing the region, and forging measures that member states can take together to strengthen regional capacity and resilience.

Such a shift should begin with the ASEAN Chair. Rather than measuring success by the number of declarations issued during its tenure, the country holding the chairmanship should have the initiative and political courage to break ASEAN’s long-standing habit of prioritising document production over problem-solving. This will not be easy. The old way is familiar, safe, and institutionally entrenched – and there are genuine diplomatic reasons why member states invest in the communiqué process, including its value of signalling collective positions, sustaining habits of consultation and the give-and-take diplomacy. The argument here is not that joint statements should be abandoned, but that they should be more focused on actionable commitments for real impact.

The zeitgeist — global frustration with institutions that deliberate endlessly but deliver too little — demands this recalibration. The annual State of Southeast Asia survey by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute has persistently recorded the biggest concern about ASEAN: that it is “too slow and ineffective to cope with fluid political and economic developments”. For many decades, ASEAN’s institutional inertia could be forgiven when the external environment was more forgiving. That environment no longer exists. As the region navigates accelerating geopolitical competition, climate disruption, and supply chain vulnerability, ASEAN must rethink what it is for and reinvent how it delivers.

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