Four years since the 10th ASEAN Summit in Vientiane in 2004, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) — one of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community — has remained as elusive as ever. The ASCC, as articulated in the Vientiane Action Programme (VAP), embodies the ultimate ASEAN aspiration to improve the quality of life of its peoples, promote equity in sharing the benefits of growth, and foster a shared cultural identity. To be sure, the VAP was unequivocal in specifying the strategies to fulfil these aspirations — building a community of caring societies that address the issues of poverty and equity, promoting sustainable management of the environment and natural resources, managing the social impacts of economic integration, and promoting an ASEAN identity. But the ASEAN process that would implement these strategies has not been easy to put in place.

From the outset, it was envisaged that each of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community — political, economic and socio- cultural — would be guided by a blueprint that would set concrete and time-bound targets. While the blueprint of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has been completed, that of the ASCC is still a work-in-progress, and ASEAN countries have yet to agree on its structure and implementation modality. Some countries have expressed unease about having to commit to specific milestones; others have suggested that an update of the VAP would be sufficient in lieu of having a blueprint.

The unease about having an ASCC blueprint, which implies some degree of precision in terms of targets and timing, is rooted in a number of reasons. Social sector initiatives have been carried out primarily through project-based (functional) cooperation since the early years of ASEAN. In many cases, functional cooperation projects have been designed without the benefit of rigorous sector analysis, often resulting in poorly designed projects with limited and largely unsustainable benefits. Countries realize that a blueprint that would simply compile or aggregate these projects will not be meaningful. Furthermore, the number of ASEAN functional cooperation areas (sectors) has increased considerably, making it difficult to prioritize projects. The lack of a unifying sector framework in most cases has diminished the coherence and focus needed to plan for a strategic trajectory of cooperation.