By Mehmet Enes Beşer
Development assistance to Southeast Asia has long come from the Global North: bilateral donors, international financial institutions, and multilateral organizations molding the region’s infrastructure, health systems, and governance framework. Although such assistance at times has delivered spectacular success it has also imposed a price: agendas of donors, unpredictable commitments, and conditionality that restrict policy space. Thus, Southeast Asian states turn ever more to intra-regional aid as a plausible substitute—a partnership of cooperation, political solidarity, and regional fraternity. Purposively fostered intra-ASEAN aid, in fact, can provide the instrumentally convenient and symbolically expressive conduit along which states might seek more freedom in their respective paths of development.
Intra-regional assistance is not new, but it has increasingly been assuming increasing significance in the context of shifting geopolitics and increasing disenchantment with North-South aid disparities. ASEAN nations, for instance, leveraged regional capital—financial and technical—to implement vaccine rollout, exchange public health information, and craft economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vietnam and Thailand were now among those nations that sent medical assistance to neighbors, not as donors but as allies to a regional emergency.
It was made clear in this experience that, apart from intra-regional solidarity, development responses could be localized.
Compared to the conventional development assistance, assistance within a region is more accurately referred to as “cooperation” rather than charity. It forms a horizontal partnership and not a vertical dependency. Southeast Asian countries also have quite comparable development experiences—most have undergone radical shifts from agricultural to manufacturing economies, grappled with cultures of authoritarianism, and grappled with the attendant issues of globalization and inequality. Such experience can generate empathy and also context-specific support mechanisms that the Western donor community has difficulty duplicating.
ASEAN already has institutional frameworks that can be used as instruments for offering intra-regional support. ASEAN Development Fund, ASEAN Disaster Management and Emergency Response Fund, and bodies like the ASEAN Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA) have gestational examples of funds pooling and disbursing. These institutions can be rooted and redirected not only towards relief in cases of disasters but more towards medium-term development cooperation—digital governance capability building, climate resilience, vocational skill development, or SME development.
True, mega scale regional aid remains eclipsed by the OECD donors’ financial flows and by China’s Belt and Road. But while intra-regional aid may not be able to match the quantum in some ways, it can compensate in other ways: flexibility, context-awareness, and symbolic legitimacy. Even modest initiatives—transborder scholarships or policy fellowships, itinerant technical teams—are titanic effects if framed as regionally owned solutions.
Above all, intra-regional support would be a geopolitical asset. As the Southeast Asian states become increasingly sandwiched between the rival agendas of the US, China, and other extra-regional powers, regional autonomy is a geopolitical asset. ASEAN development cooperation would allow states to escape reliance on one donor and have policy space on matters from digital sovereignty to food security. It also squares with ASEAN’s historical policy of non-alignment and “centrality” in regional affairs.
But there are real challenges. Political sensitivities on sovereignty still limit the willingness of some states to accept or offer aid, especially in area considered to be within. Overseas aid is infinitesimally small as a percentage in national budgets and institutional capacity, even to cope with flows, never mind influence relevant programs, still develops. Furthermore, while ASEAN’s consensus-based approach is rewarded in intergovernmental negotiation, it works against action for matters that must be faster coordinated.
To overcome such shortfalls, ASEAN will need to approach intra-regional aid as a political challenge and not a technical one. The members can employ multi-level models of accountability where the more advanced economies like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand carry out the lead roles of project design and financing and the newer or less-competent members provide manpower, ground-level knowledge, or hosting capacity to the mix. Diaspora communities and regional think tanks can also be harnessed as co-performers within this new architecture of aid.
Conclusion
Southeast Asian regional intra-aid is not a development finance modality—but one of regional sovereignty. ASEAN countries through building their own regional mechanisms of cooperation can frame a development model less reliant on foreigners, more context-sensitive to locals, and ultimately more self-sustaining.
As the region confronts a tumultuous geopolitical environment and rising development challenges—from climate change to digital divide—the need for intra-regional support becomes increasingly urgent. It will not replace global support, and it must not. But it can be an essential booster shot—on the grounds of solidarity, driven by kinship, and powered by the belief that Southeast Asia’s future must be shaped in Southeast Asia.