Where will the 3rd ASEAN Future Forum be held?

The forum will take place in the city of Hanoi, VNM.

What is the primary focus of the ASEAN Future Forum?

The forum aims to deliberate on the future trajectory of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, fostering regional cooperation and addressing emerging challenges and opportunities.

3rd ASEAN Future Forum (AFF 2026)

Name: 3rd ASEAN Future Forum (AFF 2026)
Start: 2026-06-09T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-06-09T00:00:00Z
Location: Hanoi

Jun 9, 2026Hanoi, VietnamIn-person

Registration open

The 3rd ASEAN Future Forum (AFF 2026) is set to convene in Hanoi, VNM, bringing together stakeholders to deliberate on the future trajectory of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This forum serves as a critical platform for strategic discussions, aiming to foster regional cooperation and address emerging challenges and opportunities within the ASEAN community. Participants will engage in dialogue focused on shaping a resilient and prosperous future for the region.

Committees & topics

Topics
Peace and Regional Security in Southeast Asia · Prosperity and Inclusive Economic Integration · People-Centred Development in ASEAN · ASEAN Resilience and Unity · Conflict Prevention in Southeast Asia · AI Applications and Governance in ASEAN · Financial Technology (Fintech) and Digital Finance Integration · Energy Security and the Regional Transition

Why it matters

The ASEAN Future Forum is instrumental in guiding the strategic direction of ASEAN, an organization that plays a pivotal role in regional stability and economic integration. By convening leaders, policymakers, and experts, the forum facilitates a collective vision for addressing complex issues ranging from economic development to geopolitical shifts. The discussions held here directly influence policy frameworks and collaborative initiatives that impact the lives of millions across Southeast Asia.

Given the dynamic global landscape, the forum's focus on future-oriented strategies is particularly significant. It provides an opportunity for member states to align their priorities and strengthen their collective response to external pressures and internal challenges. The outcomes of such high-level dialogues are crucial for maintaining ASEAN's relevance and effectiveness as a regional bloc, ensuring its continued contribution to peace and prosperity.

How to prepare

Participants preparing for the ASEAN Future Forum should undertake a comprehensive review of current ASEAN initiatives and the broader geopolitical context affecting Southeast Asia. A strong understanding of the diverse economic, political, and social landscapes of member states is crucial for effective engagement. This includes familiarity with the specific challenges and opportunities faced by countries like VNM, which hosts the event.

Delegates should consider how their national interests align with or diverge from regional objectives, preparing to articulate their perspectives constructively. Utilizing frameworks such as the Model Diplomat lesson on "Engagement Strategies" can help in formulating impactful interventions and fostering productive dialogue. Furthermore, an understanding of "Dynamic Analysis" will aid in anticipating potential shifts in regional dynamics and preparing adaptive policy recommendations. Engaging with the forum effectively requires not only presenting national viewpoints but also actively seeking common ground for regional advancement.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Vietnam

As the host nation, VNM is likely to emphasize themes of regional stability, economic resilience, and sustainable development, leveraging its position to steer discussions towards outcomes that benefit the broader ASEAN community.

Role in topic

VNM plays a central role in facilitating the forum, providing the venue in Hanoi and likely shaping the agenda to reflect its national priorities and contributions to ASEAN's collective future. Its perspective will be crucial in discussions on regional integration and cooperation.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Peace and Regional Security in Southeast Asia

ASEAN's founding 1967 Bangkok Declaration framed peace as the precondition for regional development, an ethos later codified in the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and the 1995 Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty. For decades, the bloc's 'ASEAN Way' of non-interference and consensus has helped manage intra-mural disputes, but external pressures — great-power rivalry between the United States and China, militarisation of the South China Sea, and the post-2021 crisis in Myanmar — have stretched these mechanisms to their limits. The South China Sea remains the most acute flashpoint: overlapping claims among China and several ASEAN states, repeated incidents around Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal, and a Code of Conduct negotiation that has dragged on since 2002. The Myanmar civil war, meanwhile, has exposed the limits of the Five-Point Consensus agreed in April 2021, with the junta failing to implement any of its commitments while violence and displacement escalate. AFF 2026's peace track asks how ASEAN can preserve centrality amid US–China competition, accelerate a substantive Code of Conduct, and develop credible tools — including humanitarian corridors and engagement with the National Unity Government — to respond to Myanmar without abandoning consensus norms.

Key players

Prosperity and Inclusive Economic Integration

ASEAN's economic story is one of the most successful regional integration projects in the Global South: combined GDP has risen from under USD 100 billion in 1970 to roughly USD 3.8 trillion today, making it the world's fifth-largest economy. The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), launched in 2015, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in force since 2022, anchor a network of trade liberalisation that has made the region a central node in global supply chains, particularly in electronics, garments, and increasingly semiconductors. Yet prosperity is uneven. Income gaps between Singapore and the CLMV economies (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam) remain wide, and the region faces overlapping shocks: US–China trade decoupling, the global minimum corporate tax, climate-related supply disruptions, and the looming end of preferential graduation for several middle-income members. The AEC Blueprint 2025 is being succeeded by the ASEAN Community Vision 2045, which puts digital trade, green economy, and supply-chain resilience at the centre. AFF 2026's prosperity track examines how ASEAN can convert geo-economic fragmentation into 'China-plus-one' investment gains without entrenching dependence, finance a green transition estimated to require USD 200 billion annually, and ensure that integration benefits MSMEs and lower-income members rather than only multinational hubs.

Key players

People-Centred Development in ASEAN

The 2009 ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint formally committed the bloc to a 'people-centred and people-oriented' approach, moving beyond an elite-driven integration model. Successive frameworks — the ASCC Blueprint 2025, the ASEAN Strategic Framework on Social Welfare, and the Komodo Declaration on People-Centred ASEAN (2023) — have sought to embed citizens, civil society, and vulnerable groups in policy design. In practice, however, implementation has been hampered by uneven national capacities, restrictions on civil society in several member states, and limited public awareness of ASEAN institutions. Key gaps include the protection of migrant workers (the 2017 Consensus on Migrant Workers' Rights remains weakly enforced), labour standards in platform and informal economies, gender equality, social protection coverage that still excludes the majority of the regional workforce, and the rights of persons with disabilities under the Bali Declaration. The post-pandemic recovery exposed how thin social safety nets are in much of the region, even as ageing populations in Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore add new pressure. AFF 2026's people-centred track considers how ASEAN can convert declaratory commitments into measurable outcomes — portable social protection, recognised migrant worker rights, inclusive education, and meaningful civil society engagement — without diluting the principle of non-interference that has historically constrained rights-based monitoring.

Key players

ASEAN Resilience and Unity

ASEAN centrality — the principle that the bloc sits at the heart of regional architecture through mechanisms such as the East Asia Summit, ARF, and ADMM-Plus — has been a strategic asset since the end of the Cold War. But intensifying US–China competition, the proliferation of minilaterals (AUKUS, the Quad, IPEF, trilaterals involving Japan, Korea, and the Philippines), and divergent member-state alignments have raised hard questions about whether ASEAN can still set the agenda or whether it risks being bypassed. Internal cohesion has also been tested by the Myanmar crisis, where members disagree on engagement with the junta; by uneven positions on South China Sea incidents; and by the 2012 Phnom Penh episode in which ASEAN failed to issue a joint communiqué for the first time in its history. The ASEAN Community Vision 2045, the Indo-Pacific Outlook (AOIP), and ongoing discussions on Timor-Leste's full accession all bear on the bloc's capacity to act coherently. AFF 2026's resilience track focuses on institutional reform — including possible adjustments to consensus decision-making, strengthening the ASEAN Secretariat, deepening crisis-response tools, and clarifying how AOIP can be operationalised so that ASEAN remains the convening platform of choice rather than a venue states route around.

Key players

Conflict Prevention in Southeast Asia

ASEAN's conflict-prevention toolkit rests on the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (1976), the ARF's three-stage framework (confidence-building, preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution), and the ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR) established in 2012. These mechanisms have helped prevent escalation in disputes such as the Thai–Cambodian Preah Vihear border tensions and have channelled dialogue on the Korean Peninsula and South China Sea. Yet the region has rarely moved beyond stage one — confidence-building — into substantive preventive diplomacy. Contemporary risks include maritime grey-zone incidents in the South China Sea, transboundary effects of the Myanmar civil war (refugee flows, scam compounds, narcotics), Mekong water-resource disputes driven by upstream dams, and rising cyber and disinformation threats. Climate change is an emerging conflict multiplier, particularly around fisheries, water, and displacement. AFF 2026's conflict-prevention track invites delegates to consider how ASEAN can operationalise early-warning systems, strengthen AIPR, formalise track-1.5 and track-2 dialogues, expand maritime confidence-building measures pending a Code of Conduct, and address non-traditional drivers of conflict including transnational crime emanating from ungoverned border zones.

Key players

AI Applications and Governance in ASEAN

ASEAN released its Guide on AI Governance and Ethics in February 2024, taking a deliberately voluntary, business-friendly approach that contrasts with the EU AI Act's binding risk-tiered model. The Guide was followed in 2025 by an expanded annex on generative AI. The region's strategy reflects deep heterogeneity: Singapore hosts global AI safety research and the Model AI Governance Framework, while Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand are racing to build domestic AI capacity and large-language models in national languages, and CLM states face significant infrastructure and skills gaps. Applications are spreading rapidly into public services (e.g., Singapore's GovTech, Indonesia's INA Digital), financial services, agriculture, and healthcare, while risks — algorithmic discrimination, election-related disinformation, deepfakes, and labour displacement in BPO-heavy economies like the Philippines — are mounting. ASEAN's approach must also reckon with sovereignty questions over data, compute, and foundational-model dependence on US and Chinese providers. AFF 2026's AI track explores whether ASEAN should move from voluntary guidance toward harmonised binding rules on high-risk uses, how to coordinate compute and data infrastructure investment, and how to ensure AI benefits the region's MSMEs and workers rather than entrenching digital divides.

Key players

Financial Technology (Fintech) and Digital Finance Integration

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest-growing fintech markets in the world, with mobile-first populations, high informal-economy shares, and significant unbanked segments creating fertile ground for digital wallets, BNPL, and embedded finance. Foundational moves include the ASEAN Payment Connectivity initiative launched at the 2022 Bali G20, which now links the QR-code and instant-payment systems of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the Bank for International Settlements' Project Nexus piloting cross-border instant payments with several ASEAN central banks. The region is also experimenting with central bank digital currencies (Project Dunbar, Project Mariana), tokenised assets, and regulatory sandboxes. Risks include the collapse of crypto platforms with regional exposure, the rapid growth of online scam operations run from compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, money-laundering vulnerabilities flagged by the FATF, and consumer-protection gaps in BNPL and gig-worker lending. AFF 2026's fintech track examines how ASEAN can scale cross-border payment connectivity into a genuine regional system, harmonise crypto and stablecoin regulation, strengthen anti-scam and AML cooperation, and ensure fintech advances financial inclusion — particularly for women, MSMEs, and migrant remittance corridors — rather than replicating existing exclusions.

Key players

Energy Security and the Regional Transition

Southeast Asia's energy demand is projected by the IEA to grow by roughly 25% by 2030, the fastest of any major region. Yet the energy mix remains heavily fossil-based: coal still generates the largest share of electricity in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the region imports the bulk of its oil. The 2022 global energy shock exposed vulnerabilities in LNG-dependent buyers like Thailand and the Philippines, while gas-exporter Indonesia faces tension between domestic demand and export commitments. The ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) 2021–2025 set a target of 23% renewables in the primary energy mix, which most members will miss. Progress includes the Lao PDR–Thailand–Malaysia–Singapore Power Integration Project — the first multilateral cross-border electricity trade in ASEAN — and Just Energy Transition Partnerships agreed with Indonesia (USD 20 billion) and Vietnam (USD 15.5 billion), though disbursement has lagged. Critical-minerals processing (Indonesian nickel, Philippine nickel and cobalt) is reshaping the region's role in the global EV supply chain. AFF 2026's energy track examines accelerating the ASEAN Power Grid, scaling green-finance flows including blended finance and carbon markets, managing the coal phase-down without stranding workers and communities, and balancing national resource sovereignty with regional integration in a context of US–China clean-tech competition.

Key players