Where is the Asian Think Tank Network Forum held?

The forum is held in the city of Singapore, SGP.

What is the format of the Asian Think Tank Network Forum?

The forum is a conference format, bringing together think tanks and researchers for discussions and presentations.

Asian Think Tank Network Forum 2026

Name: Asian Think Tank Network Forum 2026
Start: 2026-10-06T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-08T00:00:00Z
Location: Singapore

Oct 6–8, 2026Singapore, SingaporeIn-person

Registration open

The Asian Think Tank Network Forum is a significant gathering for researchers and policymakers focused on Asian affairs. Hosted in SGP, this forum serves as a crucial platform for think tanks to engage in discussions and present research on a wide array of regional and global challenges. The event emphasizes the importance of collaborative research and policy recommendations to navigate the complex geopolitical and economic landscape of Asia.

Committees & topics

Topics
FDI as a Driver of Supply Chain Diversification, Resilience, and Sustainability · Efficiency-Seeking FDI and Trade Integration · FDI and Global Value Chain Upgrading · Trade Agreements (RCEP, CPTPP and Others) and Their Potential for Enabling Resilience and Sustainability · Digital FDI and Smart Supply Chains for Resilience · Policy Frameworks for Resilient Supply Chains · FDI Spillovers and Regional Development for Resilience · Geopolitical Risks and FDI Location Strategies

Why it matters

This forum is particularly relevant for understanding the evolving dynamics within Asia and its broader impact on international relations. The discussions and research presented at the forum offer insights into critical issues such as regional security, economic integration, and sustainable development. For those engaged in diplomacy and international policy, the forum provides a unique opportunity to gauge the prevailing intellectual currents and policy priorities among leading Asian think tanks.

The emphasis on networking and collaboration among think tanks underscores a growing recognition of the need for multi-faceted approaches to complex problems. By bringing together diverse perspectives from across the region, the forum facilitates the development of more comprehensive and effective policy solutions. This collaborative spirit is essential for addressing shared challenges that transcend national borders, making the forum a vital component of regional intellectual exchange.

How to prepare

To prepare effectively for the Asian Think Tank Network Forum, it is advisable to conduct thorough research on the current geopolitical and economic trends impacting Asia. Familiarity with the policy positions and research outputs of prominent think tanks in the region will provide a strong foundation for engagement. Understanding the nuances of regional cooperation and competition will also be beneficial.

Delegates should consider how their own research or policy interests align with the forum's themes, preparing concise summaries or presentations that can contribute to discussions. Engaging with the concepts of "engagement-strategies" and "dynamic-analysis" can help in framing contributions effectively. Additionally, exploring "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" and identifying "hidden-stakeholders" in regional issues can enhance the depth of participation.

Country perspectives

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

Singapore

As the host nation, SGP plays a pivotal role in facilitating regional dialogue and intellectual exchange.

Role in topic

SGP provides the neutral ground and robust infrastructure necessary for such a high-level forum, often acting as a bridge-builder in regional discussions. Its own think tanks are likely to present research on regional stability, economic resilience, and technological advancement.

Topics & background

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

FDI as a Driver of Supply Chain Diversification, Resilience, and Sustainability

The COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and escalating US-China trade tensions exposed the fragility of hyper-concentrated global supply chains, particularly in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, and energy components. In response, multinational firms and host governments have increasingly used foreign direct investment as a tool to diversify production footprints under strategies labelled 'China+1,' 'friend-shoring,' and 'near-shoring.' UNCTAD's World Investment Reports since 2022 have documented a structural shift toward greenfield FDI in manufacturing in ASEAN, India, and Mexico, even as overall global FDI flows have weakened. Asia sits at the center of this rebalancing. Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and India have absorbed substantial relocation investment in electronics, EV batteries, and solar manufacturing, while Japan and Korea have subsidised outbound FDI to reduce dependence on single suppliers. At the same time, sustainability considerations — including ESG disclosure rules, the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and net-zero supply chain pledges — are reshaping where and how investors locate facilities. The core debate is whether FDI-led diversification genuinely builds resilience and sustainability, or merely reshuffles dependencies while raising costs and emissions during transition.

Key players

Efficiency-Seeking FDI and Trade Integration

Efficiency-seeking FDI — investment motivated by cost optimisation, scale, and access to integrated production networks — has historically driven Asia's emergence as the 'factory of the world.' From Japanese investment in ASEAN in the 1980s to Korean and Taiwanese investment in coastal China in the 1990s and 2000s, multinationals built fragmented production networks that depended on low tariffs, predictable logistics, and deep trade agreements. The WTO Information Technology Agreement, ASEAN's tariff liberalisation, and bilateral FTAs created the policy scaffolding that made this model viable. Today efficiency-seeking FDI is being recalibrated. Rising wages in China, automation, and geopolitical frictions are pushing labour-intensive segments toward Bangladesh, Vietnam, and parts of Africa, while higher-value assembly clusters in Mexico, Malaysia, and Thailand. The interaction between FDI and trade integration is now contested: tariffs, export controls, and local-content rules increasingly distort the cost calculus, raising questions about whether 'efficiency' still means lowest unit cost or a blended metric incorporating political risk and tariff exposure.

Key players

FDI and Global Value Chain Upgrading

Global value chains (GVCs) have allowed developing economies to industrialise by inserting into specific tasks rather than building entire industries. Yet the developmental promise of GVCs depends on 'upgrading' — moving from low-margin assembly toward higher-value functions such as design, branding, R&D, and systems integration. The experiences of Korea and Taiwan, which transitioned from contract manufacturing to leading firms in semiconductors and displays, are often cited as success cases; many ASEAN economies and India remain stuck in middle segments. FDI plays an ambivalent role. It can transfer technology, train workers, and build supplier ecosystems, but it can also entrench a 'headquarters economy' abroad while locking host countries into low-value tasks. Current policy debates focus on conditionalities attached to investment incentives — local content, technology transfer, joint ventures, and skills development — and on how host governments can use industrial policy alongside FDI to capture more value, particularly in semiconductors, EVs, and digital services. The OECD and UNCTAD have flagged that without complementary domestic capabilities, FDI-driven upgrading often stalls.

Key players

Trade Agreements (RCEP, CPTPP and Others) and Their Potential for Enabling Resilience and Sustainability

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in force since 2022, is the world's largest free trade agreement by GDP, covering ASEAN, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), in force since 2018, sets higher standards on labour, environment, state-owned enterprises, and digital trade, and has expanded to include the United Kingdom. Together with the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and a dense web of bilateral FTAs, these agreements form overlapping rule systems shaping investment and trade in Asia. The central debate is whether these agreements can move beyond classical market-access functions to actively support supply chain resilience and sustainability. RCEP's harmonised rules of origin facilitate regional value chains but contain limited environmental and labour provisions. CPTPP offers stronger sustainability disciplines but covers a narrower membership. New initiatives — IPEF's supply chain pillar, critical minerals partnerships, and digital economy agreements — attempt to fill gaps on early-warning mechanisms, decarbonisation, and trusted data flows. Whether overlapping frameworks produce coherent resilience or fragmented 'noodle bowls' is an open question.

Key players

Digital FDI and Smart Supply Chains for Resilience

Digital FDI — investment in data centres, cloud infrastructure, fintech, e-commerce platforms, and digital services — has become one of the fastest-growing categories of cross-border investment. UNCTAD has documented surging greenfield investment in data infrastructure across Southeast Asia, India, and the Gulf, driven by AI demand, cloud localisation requirements, and digital sovereignty policies. At the same time, 'smart' supply chain technologies — IoT sensors, blockchain traceability, AI-based demand forecasting, and digital twins — are reshaping how multinationals monitor and adapt their production networks. The resilience case rests on visibility and adaptability: digitalised supply chains can detect disruptions faster and reroute around shocks. But digital FDI also creates new vulnerabilities, including cybersecurity exposure, dependence on a small number of cloud and chip providers, and contested cross-border data flows. Diverging regulatory regimes — China's data security laws, the EU's GDPR, ASEAN's Model Contractual Clauses, and India's DPDP Act — complicate the operating environment for digital investors and raise the policy question of how to balance openness, trust, and sovereignty.

Key players

Policy Frameworks for Resilient Supply Chains

Since 2020, governments across Asia and beyond have introduced an array of policy tools to strengthen supply chain resilience: stockpiling of critical goods, reshoring and friend-shoring incentives, export controls on strategic inputs, screening of inbound investment, and industrial subsidies. The US CHIPS and Science Act, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, Japan's Economic Security Promotion Act, Korea's supply chain stabilisation law, and India's Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes all reflect this shift from efficiency-first to security-conscious policymaking. These frameworks raise difficult coordination questions. Subsidy races risk distorting investment and breaching WTO disciplines; investment screening can deter beneficial FDI; export controls invite retaliation. Multilateral and plurilateral initiatives — including IPEF's supply chain agreement, the Mineral Security Partnership, and OECD work on supply chain due diligence — attempt to align approaches, but coverage remains patchy. For Asian economies, the challenge is to design policies that genuinely build redundancy and diversification without undermining the open trading system that enabled their development.

Key players

FDI Spillovers and Regional Development for Resilience

FDI's developmental impact extends beyond direct employment and exports to spillovers — productivity gains in domestic suppliers, knowledge diffusion to local workers, and agglomeration effects that create industrial clusters. Empirical literature, including OECD and World Bank studies, finds that spillovers are largest when there are strong absorptive capacities locally: skilled workers, capable suppliers, supportive infrastructure, and competitive markets. Without these, FDI can remain enclave-like, producing limited regional benefits. In the resilience context, regionally diversified FDI is increasingly viewed as a hedge against shocks. Concentrating production in a few coastal megacities creates vulnerability to natural disasters, congestion, and geopolitical targeting; distributing investment across secondary cities and inland regions broadens the industrial base. Governments are using special economic zones, industrial corridors (such as India's Delhi-Mumbai corridor and Indonesia's outside-Java strategy), and regional FDI incentives to promote spatial diversification. The policy question is how to combine targeted incentives with broad investments in education, logistics, and governance to maximise spillovers and resilience together.

Key players

Geopolitical Risks and FDI Location Strategies

Geopolitical risk has re-emerged as a primary determinant of FDI location after three decades in which economic fundamentals dominated. US-China strategic rivalry, the war in Ukraine, sanctions regimes, tensions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, and growing use of economic statecraft have all increased the political risk premium attached to cross-border investment. UNCTAD and IMF analyses show rising 'geo-economic fragmentation,' with FDI flows increasingly aligning along geopolitical blocs rather than purely economic logic. Multinationals are adapting through strategies including dual supply chains ('in China for China' versus production elsewhere for other markets), legal entity reorganisation, and explicit political risk hedging in site selection. Host countries perceived as geopolitically 'neutral' or non-aligned — including parts of ASEAN, India, the Gulf, and Mexico — have benefited, while sanctioned economies and frontline states face withdrawal of investment. The core policy question for Asian economies is whether to position themselves as connectors that bridge blocs, or to pick sides in exchange for preferential access to technology, markets, and capital.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Asian Think Tank Network Forum 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Trump's Economic Reset

GOP Promotes Trump's Tax Savings on Deadline

Howard Lutnick's Senate Testimony on 2027 Bud

India, South Korea Forge Five-Year Plan

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Engagement Strategies

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Policy Brief Writing

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Singapore October 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Asian Think Tank Network Forum 2026

Oct 6–8, 2026Singapore, SingaporeIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
FDI as a Driver of Supply Chain Diversification, Resilience, and Sustainability · Efficiency-Seeking FDI and Trade Integration · FDI and Global Value Chain Upgrading · Trade Agreements (RCEP, CPTPP and Others) and Their Potential for Enabling Resilience and Sustainability · Digital FDI and Smart Supply Chains for Resilience · Policy Frameworks for Resilient Supply Chains · FDI Spillovers and Regional Development for Resilience · Geopolitical Risks and FDI Location Strategies

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

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

Singapore

As the host nation, SGP plays a pivotal role in facilitating regional dialogue and intellectual exchange.

Role in topic

Topics & background

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

FDI as a Driver of Supply Chain Diversification, Resilience, and Sustainability

Key players

Efficiency-Seeking FDI and Trade Integration

Key players

FDI and Global Value Chain Upgrading

Key players

Trade Agreements (RCEP, CPTPP and Others) and Their Potential for Enabling Resilience and Sustainability

Key players

Digital FDI and Smart Supply Chains for Resilience

Key players

Policy Frameworks for Resilient Supply Chains

Key players

FDI Spillovers and Regional Development for Resilience

Key players

Geopolitical Risks and FDI Location Strategies

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Asian Think Tank Network Forum 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Trump's Economic Reset

GOP Promotes Trump's Tax Savings on Deadline

Howard Lutnick's Senate Testimony on 2027 Bud

India, South Korea Forge Five-Year Plan

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Engagement Strategies

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Policy Brief Writing

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Singapore October 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Regional Outlook Forum 2026 – Confronting Chaos: The Future of International Order in Southeast Asia

Raffles Policy Dialogue 2026

International Conference on Privacy and Information Security Law (ICPISL)

IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026: Managing Regional Tensions Amid Global Competition

SISMUN Conclave 2026

International Conference on Public Policy, Globalization, and Democratic Rights (ICPPGDR - 26)

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Regional Outlook Forum 2026 – Confronting Chaos: The Future of International Order in Southeast Asia

Raffles Policy Dialogue 2026

International Conference on Privacy and Information Security Law (ICPISL)

IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026: Managing Regional Tensions Amid Global Competition

SISMUN Conclave 2026

International Conference on Public Policy, Globalization, and Democratic Rights (ICPPGDR - 26)

Frequently asked questions