ASEAN People’s Forum (APF); What Can We Expect?

Quezon City, Philippines - The Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) and Focus on the Global South organized an alliance of CSOs, including the Global Network-Asia, in preparation for the ASEAN People's Forum, which is expected to take place in Ha Noi, Vietnam in October this year.

Several meetings were held to reinforce the interaction among the members and plan for a much broader process of defining and building consensus on the ASEAN agenda as Philippine movements and what lobby points they should demand to the Aquino administration to pursue in the ASEAN.

Engagement with ASEAN is seen as a way of promoting a wide variety of policy areas to pursue not only for ASEAN leaders but for people as well. The key groups that look at APF as a democratic process push for the practice of regional governance to create spaces for the people to bargain with regional institutions. The democratization of such institutions is taken as a main feature of regionalism from the CSO's vantage point. It would entail policy diffusion which would allow for the articulation of "low" political concerns such as migration, human rights, trade, culture and identity, agriculture, rural development, women issues, labor, finance, climate issues.