The emergence of ASEAN 2.0 can best be appreciated through the lenses of international institutions. This study looks at the institutional design of ASEAN 2.0 as part of the broader effort to understand the linkage between the design features of regional institutions and regional integration and community building. It also gives special attention to the constitutive role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the institutional design of a network organization.

Institutions

International institutions are “explicit arrangements, negotiated among international actors that prescribe, proscribe, and/or authorise behaviour”. The term “institutional design” is understood as “those formal and informal rules and organisational features that constitute the institution and that functions as either the constraints on actor choice or the bare bones of the social environment within which agents interact or both”.

For Klijn and Koppenjan, “Institutional design is aimed at deliberate changes in institutional characteristics of networks.” They are wilful activities that are not tied to “(re)interpretations of actors (creating gradually different understandings of the rules) or more or less conscious ignoring or changing the application of rules”. Institutional design “refers both to the activity of trying to change the institutional features of policy networks, as [well as] to the content of the institutional change that is aimed for”. (italics in the original)

Although actors consciously (and rationally) change the design of institutions (as ASEAN did in signing and implementing the Charter), institutional designs are not “rational designs”. Rather they are:

The actual “shape” of the design of ASEAN 2.0 will be determined by a series of actions and activities by designated actors, as well as the interplay of these actions and activities.