By Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood

At the 46th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur in May 2025, regional leaders adopted ASEAN 2045: Our Shared Future – a comprehensive vision for the region’s development over the next two decades.

It is a carefully crafted document that reflects a welcome sense of ambition and confidence.

But even as it aspires to build a more “resilient, innovative, dynamic and people-centred ASEAN,” it leaves important questions unanswered about the foundations upon which such aspirations rest.

Having spent much of my career working on regional and global challenges, and as a firm believer in the importance of international and regional cooperation, I recognise the value of vision-setting.

It galvanises collective effort. It signals priorities. It invites us to imagine a future worth striving for. But the real measure of such a vision lies not in its length or elegance, but in its capacity to reckon with complexity, to centre people meaningfully, and to commit to structural change. On these fronts, Our Shared Future offers both promise ... and pause.

The document’s most visible structural feature is its division into four strategic pillars: political-security, economic, socio-cultural and connectivity.

While this reflects ASEAN’s established architecture, it is increasingly out of step with the interlinked challenges we face today.

Issues such as climate change, pandemic preparedness, digital governance, and rising inequality do not respect institutional boundaries.

Yet Our Shared Future gestures only briefly towards integrated, cross-pillar responses – confined to a single, isolated bullet point on “a green ASEAN” straddling the economic and socio-cultural pillars.

Need for unified approach

Entirely absent is the need for a unified approach that places health and wellbeing at the core of regional prosperity, peace, and the structural transformations essential for long-term security.

Planetary health determines the wellbeing of all life in this region, yet this essential relationship is not acknowledged in the document. It outlines aspirations for coordination but offers no mechanisms to deliver it.

If ASEAN is serious about addressing the systems-level threats it identifies, including climate, conflict, and displacement, it must move beyond working in silos.

The economic ambitions are clear: to become the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045. There is pride in this trajectory, and rightly so. The region’s dynamism is a global success story.

But the blueprint’s economic narrative leans heavily on traditional growth indicators – productivity, integration, scale – without enough interrogation of their sustainability or inclusiveness.

Environmental concerns are addressed, but often as secondary considerations. One paragraph on the “green economy” does not compensate for the lack of clear commitments to decarbonisation, circular economy models, or phasing out fossil fuels.

Nor is there an explicit recognition of planetary boundaries. In a region already bearing the brunt of climate impacts, from sea-level rise to extreme heat and biodiversity loss, this is not just a technical omission. It is a strategic gap. Economic planning for 2045 must be built on ecological realism, not market optimism.

The document rightly reaffirms ASEAN’s commitment to democracy, good governance, and human rights. These are essential values for any future that seeks to be genuinely people centred.

Addressing ASEAN’s response

But as the region continues to navigate complex political dynamics, including the ongoing crisis in Myanmar, it is striking that the vision does not address how ASEAN will respond when these values are under threat within its own community.

Avoiding difficult issues may (arguably) keep the peace, but it erodes ASEAN’s credibility -at home and abroad. A resilient ASEAN must live its Charter, not just cite it, and must stand for something more than branding in calm times and silence in crises.

“People-centred” is one of the most repeated phrases in the vision – welcome, and long overdue. But the document would be stronger if it showed how people’s voices shaped its development or how they will be included in its implementation.

There is little indication that ASEAN’s citizens were consulted in any structured way in preparing this vision.

Meanwhile, across Southeast Asia, people are already building the future – through climate activism, informal care networks, and digital innovation.

The 4th ASEAN Youth Statement reflects this energy, explicitly calling for planetary health to bridge existing divides. But it raises a question: is this vision only the youth’s, and why is it missing from the ASEAN 2045 Vision?

ASEAN’s political class must see people not as passive recipients of policy, but as co-creators of regional identity and progress. Without that, “people-centred” risks becoming a slogan, not a principle.

The call to strengthen the ASEAN Secretariat is, by now, a familiar one. It features in almost every major regional declaration. Yet little progress has been made in translating that sentiment into real investment or reform.

Need for an institutional engine

If ASEAN is to deliver on the commitments laid out in this document, it needs an institutional engine that is fit for purpose; analytically robust, politically empowered, and properly resourced by its 10 Member States. This is not about bureaucracy. It is about credibility.

ASEAN 2045: Our Shared Future is an important and timely document. It articulates a vision of prosperity and cohesion and reflects a maturing regionalism that many of us who have worked across ASEAN for years welcome.

But it also reflects the challenges of a multilateral system that remains cautious – sometimes excessively so – in confronting hard truths.

A shared future cannot be built through declarations alone. It requires difficult conversations, courageous leadership, and deeper engagement with the people whose lives these plans will shape. It demands a willingness to shift power – not merely reassert process.

If ASEAN can rise to this challenge – by investing in institutional reform, embracing ecological stewardship, and engaging its people more directly – it will not only chart a path for itself.

It may offer the world a compelling model of regional cooperation fit for our turbulent times. That is a future worth striving for. And one ASEAN still has time to realise.

-- BERNAMA

Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, is the Executive Director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, Malaysia. She is the founder of MERCY Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She was the 2019 recipient of the ASEAN prize.