ABSTRACT
Global governance literature on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) emphasizes its autonomous impact on international politics. While this may be true with regard to security and economic issues, we argue that ASEAN has weak agency in regional environmental governance. In this chapter we first analyze the obligations, compliance, and enforcement dimensions of ASEAN in regional environmental governance. We show that commitments to ASEAN are contradictory, compliance mechanisms are misfocused, and enforcement is weak. We further argue that, while this is the current situation, attempts to mitigate these weaknesses of ASEAN need to be understood from a political economy perspective. The influence of corporate priorities on national policy-making processes create significant obstacles for ASEAN’s efficacy, but corporate influence does not go unchallenged.
