What’s in the New ASEAN-EU Environment Mechanism?

In early July, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU) launched a new high-level dialogue on environment and climate change. While the development may not have made many international headlines, it nonetheless deserves emphasis within the ongoing collaboration between the two institutions as well as the wider regional and global trends at play.

Collaboration between ASEAN and the EU on the environment is not new. The EU, the largest donor and a leading investor and development partner in Southeast Asia, has long seen this area as a priority in its ties with individual states and ASEAN as a bloc since their dialogue partnership was established in 1977. Meanwhile, ASEAN countries have sought opportunities to collaborate with outside actors, recognizing their vulnerability to climate change and environmental management issues and disasters, despite domestic sensitivities in some areas. This has occurred amid the development of broader frameworks, including the advancement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

But the impetus for collaboration has risen over the past few years due to a range of issues, including slowing progress on global climate change efforts as well as the rising focus on some environmental matters within Southeast Asia. In particular, maritime waste and plastics have become bigger issues in the region. There have been various signs of an increased emphasis on these issues within both the EU and ASEAN, with the EU adopting its first-ever Europe-wide strategy on plastics in 2018 and ASEAN finally approving the bloc’s first-ever multilateral declaration on combating marine debris along with an accompanying framework of action earlier this year.

One of the manifestations of this rising impetus for collaboration is the establishment of the High-Level Dialogue on Environment and Climate Change. The dialogue was among the initiatives supported within the existing structure of EU-ASEAN collaboration, including via the Enhanced Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument (E-RADI), which facilitates interactions between the two blocs on areas of common interest.

The dialogue was seen by both sides as a tangible example of efforts to intensify cooperation on this front. The mechanism was formally agreed to at the 22nd iteration of the ASEAN-EU ministerial meeting in January 2019, where the two blocs also agreed in principle to elevate their ties to the level of a “strategic partnership” – the highest level of relations between ASEAN and any outside entity.

At the time, the EU in particular signaled that a high-level dialogue was an important manifestation of efforts to advance what was billed as an EU-ASEAN “partnership for sustainability.” The dialogue itself was framed as an effort to help pave the way for greater cooperation in fields such as exchanges of best practices, assessments of progress toward environmental- and climate-related goals, and the advancement of new joint projects. The EU and ASEAN also jointly adopted objectives and working arrangements for the dialogue, with a view to formally launching it later in 2019.

In July, the mechanism was in the spotlight again with its formal launch. The launch involved senior officials from both the EU and ASEAN and was held back-to-back with the ASEAN Senior Official Meetings on the Environment. According to the formal readout of the meeting held on July 7, topics discussed included climate change strategies such as mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable finance; management of natural resources, water, waste, plastics, and marine litter; and sustainable cities and communities including smart cities and digitalization.

Unsurprisingly, within this list of issues, among the highlights in the official account of the meeting was a focus on waste management and the circular economy. The meeting saw the presentation of an analysis conducted by experts from the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) that included actions to promote EU-ASEAN collaboration on circular economy approaches to plastics issues.

There are many questions about how the new mechanism will affect the evolution of tangible cooperation between the EU and ASEAN on environmental issues. Some of these have to do with the structure of collaboration: with the EU being a political and economic union of 28 member states and ASEAN being an organization with 10 members, this makes getting alignment on issues difficult between the two wide-ranging blocs. Other questions relate to the nature of the issues themselves. On environment and climate change in particular, some Southeast Asian states see certain issue areas as needing to be managed bilaterally or even unilaterally at the domestic level due to sensitivities that may arise.

Nonetheless, the launching of this new mechanism in EU-ASEAN relations deserves emphasis. It speaks to a common acknowledgement by both sides that the rising concerns on environmental and climate change issues deserve attention, whatever obstacles there may be to forging collaboration. And at the very least, discussion at the regional level can hopefully catalyze conversations at other levels between government and nongovernmental actors to make progress on matters that need urgent attention.