ASEAN’s crisis plans end where the coastline begins

ASEAN does not start from zero. Institutional development since 2004 has been substantial. AADMER provides a regional framework for disaster cooperation, the AHA Centre facilitates regional coordination, and ASEAN-ERAT provides deployable assessment capability. Exercises such as the ASEAN Regional Disaster Emergency Response Simulation Exercise (ARDEX (Opens in new window)) bring multiple sectors together.

The question is therefore whether ASEAN’s disaster-management architecture can function when a crisis simultaneously degrades several systems on which the response itself depends.

Exercises should test these dependencies. Can maritime surveillance information reach civilian responders in a usable form? If the principal port is disabled, how quickly can an alternative be identified across the organisations that depend on it? What happens when communications themselves fail?

As Lowell Bautista and I argued previously in The Interpreter (Opens in new window), Southeast Asia’s crisis-management problem is often less about creating institutions than improving the “plumbing” connecting them – the channels through which information, authority and decisions move.

The 2004 tsunami helped motivate much of ASEAN’s present disaster-management architecture. The challenge now is ensuring its connections can withstand crises crossing boundaries that institutions ordinarily treat separately.

Three shifts would help.

First, maritime scenarios need a more explicit place in regional disaster planning, including mapping critical cross-domain dependencies and stress-testing scenarios in which maritime systems are degraded while still needed for the response.

Second, exercises should move beyond multi-agency participation towards testing those dependencies. Putting disaster agencies, militaries, humanitarian responders and maritime authorities in the same exercise is different from testing whether they can continue when a port, communications network or transport system fails.

Third, preparedness requires investment in relationships (Opens in new window), as well as procedures. Responders need to know who holds information, who has authority to act, and who will answer when formal channels are overloaded.

This is what moving upstream towards anticipatory action should mean: not merely seeing hazards earlier, but understanding how failure can propagate through interconnected systems and ensuring the organisations responsible already know how to work together.

The next challenge is ensuring that when the warning comes, information becomes decisions, decisions become coordinated action, and action continues even as the surrounding systems begin to fail.

Because when the water rises, on land or at sea, that is a poor time to start exchanging business cards.