Intro: Good morning and welcome to this podcast on re-imagining regional resilience in ASEAN.
My name is Denis Hew and I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Resilience has become a familiar term in recent years, especially after COVID-19, supply chain disruptions, rising geopolitical tensions and rapid technological change. But today resilience is no longer just about recovery. It is about how countries and regions adapt and rethink how they operate in a more uncertain and fragmented world.
For ASEAN, this challenge is particularly complex. Resilience looks different across emerging technologies, global value chains and health and other non-traditional security issues. And policy choices in one area can create vulnerabilities in another.
Today we will explore what resilience really means for ASEAN and what it will take for the region to remain competitive, resilient and secure.
I'm delighted to be joined by Associate Professor Chang Pao Li from the Singapore Management University, Associate Dean Research and Industry Engagement, Director of the SMU Centre for Research and International Trade, whose research focuses on global value chains and international trade.
Our second speaker is Dr Miguel Gomez, my colleague. He's also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, whose research focuses on the geopolitics of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence.
Our third speaker is Professor Mely Anthony, Associate Dean, International Engagement and Head of the Centre for Non-traditional Security Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at NTU, who is a leading expert on health security and non-traditional security studies in the region.
So let me begin by asking each of you a broad - same question. So, from your perspective and expertise, when we talk about reimagining regional resilience, what does that mean to you and why is it so important within the context of Southeast Asia?
Let me start with Pao-Li.
Chang Pao-Li: From my perspective as an international trade economist, working on global value chain, regional resilience refers to the ability of a region to withstand, adapt to and reorganise production and trade relationships in response to major external shocks without excessive disruptions to income and long-term growth. This rating is especially important for ASEAN today as it sits at the intersection of multiple overlapping shocks.
For ASEAN economies that remain deeply embedded in the global value chain, the central question is not whether to integrate but how to integrate the preserved openness while reducing exposures to concentrated risks. Understanding regional resilience in this economic network-based sense is therefore crucial for designing policies that preserve and support both competitiveness and stability in the current environment.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Pao-Li.
So Miguel, what does it mean to you?
Miguel Gomez: Well, I think for me, especially in the context of both technology as a strategic enabler for the region, I believe that the question really is not broadly what regional resilience or resilience is in general, but rather what resilience means for each of the particular members of ASEAN.
And especially within the context of digital technology, the fact that you have varying levels of development across the different regional states would suggest that their perspective of resilience can actually either correspond or be misaligned with one another, which then raises the big question of if these alignments are non-existent or are sparse.
How do we actually come up with a unified version of regional resilience? In my perspective, it's a two-step process.
First, figure out what resilience means for the different regional states and then figure out whether there are points of cooperation, collaboration that allows them to bridge potential differences. And it's only once you do that, then we can start talking about regional resilience, at least within the digital perspective, in this larger cohesive sense.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Miguel.
Mely, what's your perspective on this?
Mely Caballero-Anthony: From the perspective of health security, you can draw the very close relationship between what it means to be secure and what it means to and what it means to be resilient.
In the context of health security, it's to be able to first, to detect and to prevent, and to respond to health issues. Particularly, those that actually impact heavily on, or severely on the health and security of individuals, communities and states.
So, if you're able to prevent things like pandemics, detect them and to respond immediately, then you will think that you're secure. But health crises, if you think about it as a poly-crisis, that it actually can spawn other crises.
The COVID pandemic is a very good example. It was not only a health crisis. Soon after it escalated to become an economic crisis of global proportion, worse than the 1930s. I mean similar to the 1930s economic recession. And then its impact on employment, on food security, etc. Then you need to be able to see health as a part of a bigger component of other elements. You cannot have a siloed approach to health security, economic security. So, they all have to be seen as an integrated, interrelated issues.
And when you then move into the concept of resilience, you must then say, well, resilience could be, as you say, ability to again, prevent, to be able to endure and recover with dignity. You're not able to do that unless you see the interconnectedness of all these issues. Particularly, when it comes to systems response.
So, health security and resilience is to allow or to enable different countries in their own domains to have systems that are efficient, that are able to adapt and adjust to crisis as agile as they can, and to be able to have that connectivity among systems within the states and across the states so that it can be a regional response.
So to me, a regional resilience in health could mean the ability of different systems within a region at the national level, at the sub-regional level to be able to connect. There has to be improved connectivity and interoperability of systems so that they can as broadly define health resilience to be or regional resilience to be able to adopt quickly, to respond quickly, and to be able to recover with dignity.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Mely. Let's drill down a bit more.
Pao Li, with pandemics, trade wars and geopolitical tensions becoming more frequent, what lessons can Southeast Asia draw from past disruptions to prepare for the next one?
Chang Pao-Li: One big lesson is that firms and economies have options such as multiple supplier flexible logistics and regional production links recover faster. During the US-China trade tensions and the pandemic, we saw productions shift within Southeast Asia instead of returning to the advanced economies.
This suggests that resilience is less about reassuring or decoupling, but more about strategic rebalancing within the global and regional production network. For small open economies, blanket reassuring and duplicating entire supply chains is often costly and ineffective. What tends to work better is targeted diversification at specific bottlenecks so that disruptions in one location doesn't hold the entire chain.
Similarly, in logistics, improving redundancies at key ports and customs nodes can enhance resilience without replicating the whole transport networks. These targeted strategies preserve scale and efficiency while reducing vulnerability, making them far more practical than broad economy-wide reassuring efforts.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Pao-Li.
Miguel, AI-enabled crisis decision support is spreading fast but how do we make it resilience-enhancing rather than a new single point of failure?
Miguel Gomez: So, I think the question here is not whether it will become a single point of failure, but how do you actually use these decision support tools or decision aids appropriately?
So, it's not surprising that AI features heavily when it comes to these types of crises, mainly because these tools allow us to circumvent or to complement existing issues with regards to human decision making. So, the critique has always been that humans are slower, biased, emotional.
And with this in mind, AI does provide some leverage that allows us to make more objective decisions when it comes to crisis situations. The problem though, is that you also have to look at the inherent limitations of artificial intelligence, and we look at this through two key dimensions.
First, is the quality of data that we have, and the other is the difficulty of the task or the judgment that you're expecting from AI. So, if we expect that the judgment task is relatively easy, you have quality data, then there's no problem offloading everything to artificial intelligence. So, in tasks such as logistics, for instance, where you know what you need, when you need it, and where you need it, then that's not a problem. You can easily deploy AI tools for those types of tasks.
The problem though, happens when in the case of a disaster, for instance, when you have a lot of uncertainties, the availability of past data to train the model on is questionable, then we run into the inherent limitations of artificial intelligence. You can have situations where the AI does perform well, but only under very narrow conditions. In that case, if the situation that it's eventually applied to does not neatly match what it was trained on, then AI becomes quite brittle and unpredictable. So, it becomes a trade-off essentially.
Understanding when AI, as a tool, can best support the decision maker during these periods. So, it's a matter of figuring out the judicious use of these novel technologies in order to aid us to become more resilient. And if we fail to do that, then we basically add another issue that we need to deal with on top of other issues that are already problematic.
Denis Hew: All right, thanks Miguel.
So, Mely, the COVID-19 pandemic really changed how we think about health risk. From your perspective, how should health security be rethought as a broader regional resilience strategy rather than a standard loan issue?
Mely Caballero-Anthony: I think what COVID-19 has shown, or perhaps COVID-19 is what we call a definitive proof of concept of a poly-crisis.
So, when you look at that as an issue or a problem that generates multiple crises, you cannot afford to look at a problem in a siloed way. So, when you respond to a crisis like this, or when you anticipate the emergence of another pandemic, for example, because now after the lessons of COVID has taught us that it's a matter of time, it's not if, but when the next pandemic is going to come. So, everybody is now trying to prepare for 'Disease X'.
But in doing so, it allows you to be more anticipatory in the kind of issues that come first when it comes to surveillance of diseases, for example. I mentioned earlier about the need to ensure that your systems are in place, and that requires systems for information sharing. Detection and information sharing. And when you talk about information sharing to prepare for a pandemic, you then link it to what is available or you want to examine the current infrastructure and technology, for example.
So, when it comes to resilience in terms of digital resilience, you look at the ability of the systems to actually have credible information, to avoid problems of misinformation so that our countries or communities that are affected will not be hesitant in sharing this information.
And then when you talk about integrating it, not just with your technology, but even down to your economic planning, what needs to be done. COVID-19 has shown us how devastating a pandemic is. It's not just the loss of lives, but it stops business, stops employment.
So, how do you pandemic-proof your economy? And especially since as what COVID has taught us, health crises like this are really transnational in nature. You cannot afford to look at it from a national perspective. Your response is going to be national. You have to be effective in your national response, but how the others respond, other countries respond is also very critical.
Hence, at the regional perspective, you need to be able to encourage not just the information sharing in technology, but also expertise. You have to be able to get resources, source for these resources and coordinate how these resources are going to be distributed.
And to be able to do that, you also need to emphasise, re-emphasise the importance of cooperation and regional trust. So, when you look at the health crises and its relationship with the other crises, poly-crises that could emerge in a hyper-connected world, it's very important to look at existing institutions, the norms that define it, because this then defines the relationship of different agencies, governments to work effectively so that it's not just the response during the crisis. But to enable the system to be more resilient.
I mentioned earlier the need to be able to learn. There has to be a transformative element to resilience. That's why we talk about re-imagining it, because what we learned in the past should then be able to tell us that we have to get the systems ready.
We have to have these norms of cooperation, which includes, amongst others, transparency. And if you don't have trust among different agencies, among different countries, then you cannot have these goals of disease surveillance, immediate response, etc. And you're not able to encourage a multi-sectoral and a multilateral approach to this, particularly in an environment that is also challenged by geopolitical tensions.
We saw how COVID, was actually, became a victim of geopolitical rivalries. So, all of these institutional norms, norms of cooperation, are part and parcel of an integrative approach to a health crisis. It's not just a medical crisis, it’s a crisis that requires multi-sectoral responses.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Mely. Let's move on to the next question, which is going to be a very broad, strategic question. The same question I will ask all three of you.
As we look ahead and take into account the challenges we have discussed today, what are one or two priorities that ASEAN policy makers should really focus on if it's really serious about strengthening regional resilience?
Let's start with Mely first.
Mely Caballero-Anthony: Within the context of ASEAN, I mean, we have a lot of work plans out there that will give you an idea of the thinking of policymakers.
So as you know, ASEAN has come up with this Vision 2045. And it's anchored on three pillars, political, security, economic, and social-cultural. Now, within the context of health security, which I said earlier on must be seen as an integrated, interrelated issue that cuts across the political, the security, and the economics.
One priority that I think policymakers should focus on is to see the extent to which existing mechanisms can be leveraged, can be optimised. So, that if you're talking about an integrated multi-sectoral approach when it comes either to preventing the next economic crises or its relationship to, for example, ensuring that your health systems are secure to get the right resources or that you want to secure your global value chain, you have to be able to see what are the existing mechanisms out there. And talk about perhaps looking at living structures that ASEAN has and the existing networks so that you can then map out. With all of your plans, what do you have as existing networks, existing institutions, and identify where are the weak points. The weakest chain, for example, and then focus your attention on that.
And this is very pertinent in the context of health. Is it strengthening health systems, for example? At the national level. Providing not just infrastructure, but providing the expertise and the resources or ensuring that your health systems are connected to the wider systems. You're talking about technology, for example, do they have access to all of this technological development when it comes to expertise. How can AI, for example, help in strengthening disease surveillance and disease response, for example. So, that's one.
And when you're then able to identify where the weakest points and when I talk about an integrated approach, that will then strengthen regional resilience because it has to be, when you talk about regional resilience, you are talking about the ability of individual ASEAN countries working together, to build that regional resilience.
So, how can you therefore bridge, create different nodes that will connect your health systems, your environmental systems, your social systems, and your economic systems. To then, to have a more transformative approach, if you like. To deal at their own specific domains, to deal and address the problems that affect them.
And that is very pertinent in the health because, as we saw in the case of COVID, it was not just the health systems or the health sector working together, they had to coordinate with the economic sector when it comes to responses, they had to coordinate with the defense and security sector when it comes to preventing looking at border controls, facilitating the movements of people. And then they have to coordinate with the foreign ministry so that they can arrange for diplomatic arrangement when it comes to affected individuals and communities.
So, all of this, it's very hard to think about, it's very ambitious to think about it in a more integrated way, but this is what the ASEAN Vision 2045 is all about. Getting all the communities to work together. So that you can have not just a silent approach, but a more comprehensive approach. And hence, hopefully you're able to have a more reimagined, strengthened resilience.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Mely.
Miguel, what should ASEAN focus on?
Miguel Gomez: Yeah, I think building on what Mely said earlier about these issues being interconnected, it's the same with the digital domain in this case. So, digital taps into the political security dimension, into the economics, into the social as well.
But the problem is that if we look at how ASEAN has looked at the question of digital, it seems to concentrate more often on the question of capacity and capability building, which is all well and good, that's fine. But the problem is that if we focus solely on that, there is this inherent assumption that everyone views digital technologies in much the same way.
So, this links back to my earlier point that everyone has different perspectives of what resilience actually means. And in the case of digital, this may be related to both their latent capabilities within this domain, as well as pre-existing economic or social processes that are leveraged using digital technologies.
So, I think the first thing that ASEAN has to contend with is to accept the fact that not everyone views digital in the same way. Not everyone has the same priorities when it comes to achieving resilience in the digital domain. And once you realise that, you can start figuring out what individual countries need and planning around that so that everyone integrates well with each other's systems.
Now, I'm not calling for an ASEAN-wide digital network where everyone is on the same playing field. That's, I believe, overly aspirational. But at the very least, I think as the ASEAN leadership needs to acknowledge the fact that not everyone has the same view as everyone else. And that's fine. That's perfectly acceptable. But we need to plan along those lines of differences in order to try to have one unified approach towards the question of digital resilience.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Miguel. Pao-Li?
Chang Pao-Li: I think one clear priority is to build the foundations that allow firms to adjust quickly across borders, including trade facilitation, logistics, connectivity and regulatory harmonisations.
These are not headline-grabbing policies, but they matter enormously for resilience because they determine whether production can shift quickly across borders when shocks hit.
At the ASEAN level, this means pushing harder on reducing custom frictions, harmonising regulatory standards, and improving digital trade infrastructures so that firms can refigure supply chain quickly within the region more easily. ASEAN can play a central role by sharing information, aligning incentives, and reducing policy uncertainty that discourage firms from spreading activities across member states.
Denis Hew: Thanks, Pao-Li.
The key takeaway from today is that resilience in Southeast Asia and ASEAN as a regional institution will be increasingly be shaped by how well the region adapts its technology and value chain and health security strategies.
We see from the discussions today that it's all very interconnected and cross-cutting in nature. Collaboration, policy alignment, and responsible innovation will be essential as challenges become more complex.
Thanks to our panelists for their valuable insights, and thank you for listening to Policy Unpacked.
See you next time.