Introduction

Since entering its second decade, APEC has lost a great deal of the enthusiasm that accompanied its arrival. APEC reached its apex in the mid-1990s following the first Leaders’ Meeting in Seattle in 1993, a period of “heightening” of APEC, in the words of Morrison (1998). At the Leaders’ Meeting in 1996, APEC governments adopted the Manila Action Plan for APEC (MAPA), which was to provide further guidelines for implementing the Osaka Action Agenda (OAA) towards achieving the Bogor goals that was agreed upon in 1994. Since then, APEC appears to have lost its appeal. Among the very thin audience it has, the number of people that continue to pay serious attention to APEC seems to have dwindled rapidly. APEC is no longer the talk of the town in Asia-Pacific capitals. APEC events are no longer seen as newsworthy by the international media. Should APEC worry about this?

APEC is definitely not dead. There continue to be hundreds of APEC meetings annually, particularly at the working levels. These meetings have proliferated over the years, and are being encouraged to promote the habit of consultation and co-operation. As such, they serve a particular purpose, but the many processes at the working levels have perhaps become too absorbed in the technical details, and there seems to be a lack of clear understanding of how the different activities contribute to APEC's overall goal of community building.

There was also a suggestion that APEC might have been derailed from its track. Initiatives at the higher levels have also become too diffused. This was perhaps the case during the Canadian chairmanship. The agenda was seen as too ambitious while the process by which it was pursued was weak. One lesson to draw from this experience is that a broad and ambitious agenda, as proposed by Canada, can be undertaken successfully only when the co-operation process is supported by an institutional infrastructure that is capable of implementing it. This is still lacking in the APEC process. There is another important lesson. Following Manila's chairmanship a year earlier that successfully mobilized the participation of other region-wide actors (PAFTAD, PECC, PBEC and other such groups) in the process, the year under Canadian chairmanship saw the process being run exclusively by its own bureaucracy.