This week Dr.
Surin Pitsuwan conducted the last major briefing before the end of his term as
ASEAN Secretary General next month.
Dr. Surin repeated calls to strengthen the ASEAN Secretariat and his
office, referring to a report that he presented to the ASEAN leadership last
year called “ASEAN’s
Challenge: Some Reflections and Recommendations on Strengthening the ASEAN
Secretariat.” The subtitle is somewhat
of a misnomer, as Dr. Surin’s proposal encompassed all of the ASEAN
institutions, not just the ASEAN Secretariat.
Dr.
Surin’s report reportedly proposes a comprehensive review of the roles of the
ASEAN institutions, including the Secretary General, Deputy Secretaries
General, Secretariat, Committee of Permanent Representatives, National
Secretariats and Sectoral Ministerial Bodies, establishing a hierarchy of
responsibilities for the entities, rules of procedure, as well as mechanisms
for resolving disputes among the ASEAN institutions. The report suggests that roles and
relationships are currently blurred, resulting in confusion as to which entity
is responsible for which aspect of ASEAN’s governance. Although I understand that Dr. Surin’s report
did not specifically mention the relationship between the ASEAN Chair and the
other ASEAN institutions, that relationship also would appear to need rules of
procedure and governance to avoid a repeat of the July 2012 impasse at the
ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting.
The
report also appears to call for additional capacity for the Permanent
Representatives to deal with economic and socio-cultural matters. This reflects a sentiment among many ASEAN
observers that the Permanent Representatives have a focus on political-security
matters, limiting their ability to take on other work and preventing a shift in
responsibilities from the many intra-ASEAN meetings to the Permanent
Representatives. For example, the Permanent
Representatives could take on the role of SEOM in the EDSM and other
procedures. Others have noted that the
Permanent Representatives have concentrated on administrative and budgetary
matters at the ASEAN Secretariat, perhaps an instance of work filling the void
left by an absence of responsibility.
However, I believe that if the Permanent Representatives are assigned
economic matters, the ASEAN member states will respond by assigning more
economically trained officials to their Jakarta missions. In other words, the
ASEAN member states would respond to the needs of the situation. Also, giving the Permanent Representatives
more work would help reduce their current focus on less critical internal
administrative and budgetary matters. In any event, although there are Terms of
Reference for the Committee of Permanent Representatives, they are rather
loosely drafted and could use some clarification.
Dr.
Surin’s report also reportedly calls for greater use of Article 20.2 of the
ASEAN Charter, which allows the ASEAN Summit to decide how a decision can be
made in the absence of consensus. By
extension, this would allow the ASEAN Summit to use majority or supermajority
voting to decide matters. Hence Dr.
Surin’s report apparently proposes that voting should be used for routine and
operational issues.
With
regard to the ASEAN Secretariat, Dr. Surin’s report suggests that the legal
division should be strengthened. For the
entire ASEAN Secretariat, salaries and career development should be competitive
(e.g., higher compensation), and the
ASEAN Secretariat should have formalized regulations to govern staff and
finances, Dr. Surin’s report apparently proposes. According to reports, Dr. Surin also proposed
a “Chief-of-Staff” for the Office of the Secretary General, and that all Deputy
Secretaries General should be hired on open recruitment and not based on the
rotation system as currently happens for two of them. He also reportedly asked for better
information technology, project management, a stronger system for managing
donor funds and the possibility of the ASEAN Secretariat establishing
commercial entities for training and consultancy services on ASEAN (which might
appear controversial but some ASEAN member states such as Singapore have had
such government-sponsored consultancy operations).
Although
Dr. Surin’s report may appear to involve small stakes, institutional reform is
the natural result of ASEAN’s efforts to formalize its operations, as started
by the passage of the ASEAN Charter. Even daily operations, as noted previously
in this blog, have been affected by the lack of legal and institutional clarity
in the ASEAN institutions. Hence Dr. Surin’s report raises issues which, if not
addressed properly, will continue to hamstring the ASEAN institutions. ASEAN leaders should thus seriously consider
what Dr. Surin has raised in his report.
Beyond
what Dr. Surin has proposed, there are other administrative reforms that could
improve the operations of the ASEAN institutions, particularly for AEC matters.
- The ASEAN Deputy Secretary General for the AEC, or perhaps one or more of the ASEAN Secretariat division directors who are responsible for the AEC, should have a background in the private sector. Personal understanding of the issues arising from the private sector’s interactions with the AEC, particularly among the SME community, would help the ASEAN institutions better administer the AEC.
- A secured virtual network of officials from ASEAN institutions and ASEAN member states could be established on the Internet, allowing for electronic interchange of data and documentation. With that, the current practice of using unofficial (and unrecognized) Gmail and Yahoo! e-mail for intra-ASEAN communications would end.
- Also, the ASEAN member states could temporarily second up and coming officials to serve in the ASEAN Secretariat. The EU currently operates a similar program. Not only would this improve the talent pool for the ASEAN Secretariat, it could impart greater understanding of ASEAN within the ASEAN member states.
- Recordkeeping in the ASEAN Secretariat should be completely given over to an electronic system, with a larger, full time staff. For years the ASEAN Secretariat relied solely on a very small group of individuals who administered paper records. When the paper and personnel passed on, so did the institutional memory. This cannot be allowed to continue. The institutional memory is necessary not only to understand and interpret ASEAN agreements, but to avoid repeating past mistakes or even unnecessarily re-doing past decisions (I am aware of an ASEAN initiative for the automotive industry that actually repeated a virtually similar ASEAN initiative undertaken in the Nineties; this was discovered only after an accidental discovery of the original paperwork in the ASEAN archives).
- For that matter, the ASEAN Secretariat needs to maintain a database of its former officials so that they can be recalled to service when necessary. The European Commission does this, yet the ASEAN Secretariat is hard pressed to contact former staff who have only recently departed.
- The current practice of limiting the service of ASEAN Secretariat staff (except for clerical staff recruited from Indonesia) should also end. If ASEAN Secretariat staff wish to make a career with the ASEAN institutions, this should be encouraged, as the human resources are irreplaceable.
Most of
the ideas in Dr. Surin’s report and elsewhere are frankly basic and would have
been adopted by any ASEAN member state on its own or even fairly large sized
corporations. The fact that they have
not yet been adopted by the ASEAN institutions themselves is due largely to
lack of funding and political will by the ASEAN member states to support them. However, the increasingly complex nature of
running a 21st Century regional economic bloc dealing with issues of
border and post-border market access needs 21st Century ASEAN
institutions.
Finally, thank you, Dr. Surin, for your service
to ASEAN. And good luck to your
successor Le Luong Minh, and to the entire ASEAN Secretariat staff who labor in
support of a noble and difficult cause.
