The transnational issues in Southeast Asia provides the legitimacy to seek regional governance because they have huge impacts on political, economic and sociocultural dimensions and are also urgent problems to be solved in short future. Along with the...
The transnational issues in Southeast Asia provides the legitimacy to seek regional governance because they have huge impacts on political, economic and sociocultural dimensions and are also urgent problems to be solved in short future. Along with the significance of the issues, since 1997 when the ASEAN Vision 2020 was taken in the second ASEAN unofficial summit meeting, agreed rules of behavior and cooperative measures have been earnestly formed to deal with the transnational issues among the ASEAN countries.
The core arguments of researchers about the transnational issues in Southeast Asia are summarized as followed. Firstly, effective measures to prohibit the human trafficking are not put into practice because of the lack of common insight about the human trafficking and the difficulty of consent to deal with it. Secondly, the migrant labor issue within Southeast Asia brings complicated problems as migrant workers increase every year even though it contributes to socioeconomic welfare of the Southeast Asian countries. Regional governance for the migrant labor is not sufficient because migrant workers easily move across the borders and informal economic benefit are largely hidden. Thirdly, terrorism is perceived as the most serious issue so that ASEAN countries agree to take anti-terrorism measures and make a cooperative system. But they have passive attitude domestically. Due to the different domestic environments and conflicting political perspectives, it is no use building an effective anti-terrorism system in the region.
Fourthly, the poverty issue is recently solved much in terms of absolute poverty, but many problems still exist in terms of relative poverty among Southeast Asian countries. It is evaluated that significant regional governance has been developed through various efforts to eradicate poverty with common recognition of importance of poverty reduction in the less development countries in Southeast Asia. Fifthly, the epidemic issue like AI is handled with national measures following the WHO strategy, but the system varies among the countries. It is argued that a substantive strategy should be implemented with step-by-step measures suggested by the WHO and a reciprocal strategy should be set up within ASEAN to deal with AI.
Sixthly, the water resource issue in Southeast Asia is related with the Mekong river which runs through the mainland Southeast Asian countries. Compared with other issues, the necessity to manage the Mekong river was risen early. Several regional organizations were made to supervise it. But it should be indicated that the deficiency of regional capacity deteriorated them into parochial development organizations. The importance of the role of the civil society and the cooperative relationship with the state should be needed for the sustainable development of the Mekong river. Seventhly, the haze smoke issue is clearly distinguished in terms of afflictive country and afflicted country. As the afflictive country to break out the haze, Indonesia's political economic problems are explained within the sociocultural context. The difficulty of regional governance to stop the haze smoke comes from the different approaches between Indonesia which focuses on surveillance and ASEAN which emphasizes prevention of the haze smoke.