Sovereignty scripts and regional governance: ASEAN’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article seeks to advance our understanding of the role of sovereignty for regional governance, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). We argue that important insights into this issue can be gleaned by analyzing how ASEAN has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. Most existing research on ASEAN considers sovereignty an obstacle to effective regional governance without further interrogating it conceptually. Such a monolithic understanding fails to account for ASEAN’s variegated response to the pandemic. To develop a fuller account of the relation between sovereignty and regional governance, we engage with scholarship on sovereignty that emphasizes its performative and contextual character, and develop a framework that distinguishes four different sovereignty scripts. Drawing on expert interviews and document analysis, we show that ASEAN’s multifaceted Covid-19 response is a result of member states’ parallel enactment of diverging and overlapping sovereignty scripts, which engender competing modes of governance. Our study shows that typical governance problems – institutional proliferation and incoherence as well as implementation gaps – can be understood as emerging from diverging imperatives for practicing sovereignty and statehood. We suggest that our framework can be tested in other policy fields and regional organizations beyond ASEAN.

Keywords:

• ASEAN
• Coronavirus
• global health
• regional governance
• Southeast Asia
• sovereignty

1. Introduction

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of how regional governance is shaped by diverging imperatives for practicing sovereignty and statehood. It does so by investigating the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) response to the Covid-19 pandemic. When the Coronavirus began spreading in the region, many policy analysts expressed hopes that Southeast Asian governments would act jointly to address the crisis (Kliem, 2020; Tsjeng, 2020; Wanandi, 2020). Such expectations did not seem unreasonable, given that the organisation had ramped up its mechanisms for dealing with infectious diseases after the SARS and H5N1 outbreaks in the 2000s. Calls for a coordinated ASEAN response also mirrored appeals made to other regional organizations, such as the European Union and the African Union.

Therefore, it was not a complete surprise that ASEAN member states quickly launched a multitude of cooperation initiatives that ranged from coordination in ministerial meetings and a specifically appointed working group to novel regional policy frameworks and a dedicated financial instrument. The organization both activated existing governance mechanisms for public health emergencies and initiated the establishment of new ones. However, actual regional cooperation has been uneven and fragmented across these areas (Omar & Zengeni, 2022, p. 130). Some aspects have seen tangible albeit limited results, for example the sharing of relief items through the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Relief (AHA Centre). In others, implementation has been slow and—according to many observers—inadequate, as seen in the difficulties to set up a joint response fund (Kashyap & Bhattacharya, 2021; Omar & Zengeni, 2022, p. 130; Rüland, 2021). Overall, what materialized was a ‘patchwork of actions’ rather than a consistent and coherent strategy (Ly, 2020).

While existing literature on health governance in ASEAN argues that the increasing framing of infectious diseases as a security threat has opened possibilities for closer regional cooperation on public health issues, there is a wide-spread belief that the grouping’s emphasis on national sovereignty prevents implementation of such initiatives (Amaya, Rollet, & Kingah, 2015; Caballero-Anthony, 2008, 2018; Maier-Knapp, 2011). This view reflects a familiar pattern in ASEAN research, where scholars have frequently observed a gap between rhetorical commitments and formal institution-building on the one hand and a lack of practical implementation on the other. National sovereignty has been the standard explanation of this gap, defined either as a regional norm or a strategic concern of member state governments (Jetschke, 2009; Jones & Smith, 2007).

Despite this consensus on the importance of sovereignty for regional governance in Southeast Asia, its nature and effects remain poorly understood. The literature on ASEAN tends to employ a monolithic understanding of sovereignty and therefore has a hard time accounting for its variegated effects on regional governance. Scholars usually equate sovereignty with conventional notions of state-centrism—i.e. the territorial organization of society and political authority under the sovereign state—which explains why they have identified it as an obstacle to regional cooperation, including more integrated pandemic management (Rüland, 2021). A limitation of this approach is that sovereignty is selectively invoked as a constraint whenever regional cooperation seems insufficient, which ultimately reproduces a one-sided understanding of how sovereignty and regional governance hang together.

To provide a more nuanced account, in this paper we develop a theoretical framework based on the idea that regional governance in ASEAN is shaped by member states’ enactment of different sovereignty scripts. We define sovereignty scripts as sets of practices that are recognized as expressing the idea that supreme political authority should be vested in the state. Different scripts reflect competing ideas about how sovereignty is legitimately enacted. Agents may draw on these repertoires of practices in different ways depending on the setting or audience they are addressing. From this point of view, which is rooted in literature on performativity and sociological theories of International Relations (IR) like the world polity approach and cultural theory, the relationship between sovereignty and regional governance can manifest in different ways.

Our analytical framework distinguishes four sovereignty scripts. Reading ASEAN’s Covid-19 response through this lens, we demonstrate that the diverging modes of governance that member states have engaged in can be interpreted as enactments of the different sovereignty scripts. Our analysis relies on expert interviews with a variety of stakeholders working with ASEAN in the health and humanitarian sectors, and an analysis of documents produced by ASEAN. We find that while ASEAN’s Covid-19 response partly conforms to internal, state-centric notions of sovereignty, its multifaceted and ambiguous nature also points to the significance of sovereignty scripts that propose more people-oriented purposes of statehood and the need to manage interdependence. This multidimensional perspective provides a counterpoint to research on ASEAN that understands sovereignty in a monolithic way and as necessarily thwarting regional cooperation. Sovereignty holds a variety of potential meanings and can be associated with vastly diverging ideas about and practices of regional governance. Our study shows that typical cooperation problems surrounding ASEAN—such as gaps between rhetoric and implementation, institutional proliferation, policy incoherence, and cross-sectoral inconsistiences—can be understood as emerging from competing imperatives for practicing sovereignty and statehood. Beyond the empirical focus of the study, we argue that an analysis of sovereignty scripts lends itself to further theory-building on regional governance through comparison across policy-fields, regions and time.

The article proceeds as follows: Section 2 situates research on ASEAN’s regional health governance in broader debates about sovereignty in ASEAN and identifies shortcomings in this scholarship. Sections 3 and 4 present our theoretical framework and methodological approach, respectively. We use those in Section 5 to interpret ASEAN’s Covid-19 response. Section 6 summarizes our arguments and discusses their implications for the study of sovereignty and regional governance in ASEAN and beyond.

2. ASEAN, sovereignty and health governance

The idea of sovereignty as a constraint on cooperation is a longstanding theme in ASEAN scholarship. Authors have identified sovereignty-related norms like non-interference, consensus-seeking and non-bindingness as hallmarks of the ‘ASEAN Way’, and located its origins in anti-colonial struggles as well as the desire of postcolonial nation-states to safeguard their autonomy internally against communist challengers and externally against major powers (Haacke, 2003; Jorgensen-Dahl, 1982). Governments’ sovereignty concerns are used to explain why ASEAN member states often fail to implement regional cooperation and integration initiatives even if they acknowledge transboundary challenges and rhetorically commit to collective solutions (Henderson, 1999, pp. 75–79; Jetschke, 2009; Jones & Smith, 2007).

The literature on ‘regulatory regionalism’ offers a more complex variation of the same perspective. Its proponents argue that the emergence of ASEAN-centric governance networks oriented around transboundary challenges constitutes a form of regionalism that does not require a supranational pooling of state authority. Still, it argues that regulatory regionalism compromises sovereignty as the spatial horizons of state activity increasingly transcend territorial boundaries, domestic entities commit themselves to implementing regionally agreed standards, and private governance actors challenge the state’s claim to undivided authority (Hameiri & Jones, 2015; Jayasuriya, 2009). Ultimately, the notion of sovereignty as an essential property of the state and a constraint on cooperation is thereby confirmed: ‘The shift towards regulatory regionalism reflects attempts to get around the limitations of national sovereignty that some view as restricting the capacity to address transnational problems’ (Jones & Hameiri, 2020, p. 221, our emphasis).

While research on ASEAN’s mechanisms for governing infectious diseases and other matters of public health does not usually engage in theorizing at such a foundational level, it mostly mirrors the dominant argumentative patterns in ASEAN research about functional demands and implementation gaps. Caballero-Anthony (2008, 2018; see also Amaya et al., 2015) has argued that an emerging discourse that frames public health issues as a non-traditional security (NTS) threat has contributed to stronger cooperation in ASEAN and related formats (ASEAN Plus Three, East Asia Summit) specifically on those aspects of health governance that relate to infectious diseases, such as surveillance, risk communication, and capacity building. She notes that many ASEAN mechanisms were initiated as control measures of ‘emerging and reemerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential, including but not limited to SARS (2003), H5N1 (2005-2006), H1N1 (2009), and H7N9 (2013)’ (Caballero-Anthony, 2018, p. 73; see also Koga, 2022). In the ASEAN Plus Three format, the surveillance of emerging disease outbreaks became increasingly institutionalized from 2010 onwards, and ASEAN established a network for information sharing between its member states’ Public Health Emergency Operations Centres in 2016 (Koga, 2022, p. 50; Nodzenski, Phua, Heng, & Pang, 2016, p. 96–97). Although these developments attest that ASEAN member states increasingly recognize a need to deepen regional cooperation in the field of health, there is a rich literature on the discrepancy between rhetorical commitments and the actual implementation of response measures. To explain this gap, scholars have pointed to limited internal resources but importantly also the ASEAN Way and the constraining effects of sovereignty (Caballero-Anthony, 2008; Maier-Knapp, 2011, p. 544; Nodzenski et al., 2016, p. 96). Similarly, scholars interested in the region’s role in global health governance have cited sovereignty concerns—epitomized by Indonesia’s refusal to share samples of Avian Influenza (H1N1) with the WHO, which it justified by invoking its ‘viral sovereignty’—as the main obstacle to more effective regional governance (Stevenson & Cooper, 2009, p. 1390; see also Fidler, 2008; Lamy & Phua, 2012).

Researchers have reverted to the same arguments when analyzing ASEAN’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Rüland (2021) finds that ‘ASEAN’s collective responses to the virus outbreak have been late, mainly declaratory and slow in implementation’ (p. 73), and identifies the path-dependent adherence to sovereignty norms as the main factor preventing more effective regional governance. Similarly, Omar and Zengeni (2022, p. 137) have argued that, even though the pandemic has reinforced the notion of health as a security threat that warrants regional cooperation, ASEAN’s response has remained ineffective because ‘[s]tates continue to prioritize respect for state sovereignty at the expense of their regional community interest.’ Koga (2022, p. 53) writes that adherence to the ASEAN Way and emphasis on sovereignty explain the incongruence among member states’ responses to Covid-19 as well as other infectious diseases.

While the existing literature rightly points to the importance of sovereignty in governing the pandemic, it fails to make sense of the multifaceted nature of ASEAN member states’ responses, which has seen different modes of governance—ranging from unilateral action and symbolic shows of solidarity to regional resource pooling and partnering with external actors—in play at the same time. We argue that this is due to the underdeveloped conceptualization and theorization of sovereignty in large parts of ASEAN research. Scholars rarely problematize sovereignty explicitly, assuming instead that it is either an attribute of states or a shared norm, the meaning of which can be taken for granted (Jones & Smith, 2007; Ng, 2021, p. 55). Sovereignty, in this reading, prescribes a specific type of state behaviour and therefore has an a priori defined relationship with regional governance, usually acting as a constraint. Accordingly, sovereignty can be guarded or ceded to regional organizations; and it can be respected or violated by means of intervention (Coe, 2019; Henderson, 1999; Narine, 2005; Southgate, 2019). This view is also evident in studies that interpret institutional developments such as the signing of the ASEAN Charter as signposts for the relative persistence or decline of state sovereignty in the region (Desierto, 2011; Tay, 2008).

With their monolithic understanding of sovereignty, these works reflect dominant conceptualizations in the literature on regionalism more broadly. (Neo-)functionalist approaches understand regional integration as a gradual rescaling of political authority to the supranational level, which is based on the assumption that states’ sovereignty concerns constrain regional integration (Haas, 1961). According to intergovernmentalist approaches, states will conditionally cede some sovereignty if they expect cooperation gains (Moravcsik, 1998). Postfunctionalist literature has also pointed to nationalist discourses about sovereignty as impediments to regional governance (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). Most mainstream perspectives, especially those of European provenance, thus think of sovereignty and cooperation as mutually exclusive (Jabko & Luhman, 2019, pp. 1038–1043). This way of thinking has led to a focus on studying when, why and under what conditions sovereignty can be instrumentally traded for cooperative gains. By contrast, literature on and from the Global South often perceives of regionalism as ‘boosting’ sovereignty, which suggests that the relationship between cooperation and sovereignty is not as straightforward (Söderbaum, 2004). With regard to ASEAN, Acharya (2014, 2016; see also Narine, 2005) has prominently made the case that it was precisely their commitment to sovereignty-protecting norms that enabled regional cohesion among the organization’s member states. This line of argument dovetails with literature that locates the main impetus for regional cooperation among ASEAN states in their continual state-building projects (Ayoob, 1986). Even some research on the European Union has shown that regional integration can be driven and justified by concerns about sovereignty (Jobka & Luhman 2019, pp. 1041–1042; Milward, 1992).

Insofar as researchers have probed the role and meaning of sovereignty in Southeast Asia, this usually comes in the form of tracing shifting normative discourses that have compromised the exercise of sovereignty or made it conditional on certain governance principles, as in the notion of a Responsibility to Protect (Bellamy & Beeson, 2010; Bellamy & Drummond, 2011; Ng, 2021; Tan, 2011; Yukawa, 2018).¹ Examples are the debates about ‘constructive engagement’, ‘flexible engagement’ and ‘enhanced interaction’ with Myanmar (Acharya, 2009; Caballero-Anthony, 2005; Haacke, 2003). While looking at sovereignty as a norm or discourse provides valuable insights, the scholarship on the rhetoric-implementation gap in ASEAN regionalism reminds us that we cannot take what actors say or write about it at face value. As Ng (2021, p. 6) notes, ‘[t]he relationship between regional integration and sovereignty in the Global South has always been complex.’ Jones’s (2012) work on intervention practices in Southeast Asia offers a step in the right direction, as it investigates how domestic struggles over ‘what counts as sovereignty’ have generated contingent sovereignty regimes in the region and thus acknowledges that it can be practiced in multiple ways (p. 16, emphasis in original). However, Jones’s inquiry focuses on how elites mobilize sovereignty claims to legitimize or delegitimize intervention, not on the broader kinds of state practices that different understandings of sovereignty engender on the regional level. Untangling these relationships is the purpose of the analytical framework we develop in the following section.

3. Studying sovereignty scripts

We interpret ASEAN’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as a result of ASEAN member states’ parallel enactment of different sovereignty scripts. This conceptualization takes inspiration from two sets of literature. First, scholars working on sovereignty from a critical, feminist and/or anthropological angle have conceptualized sovereignty not as a fixed attribute of states but something that is constructed through performances (Ashley, 1988; Butler, 1990; Campbell, 1992; Weber, 1998). This scholarship highlights that statehood is not a pre-given subjectivity that comes with essential qualities but, in the words of Jeffrey (2012, p. 178), ‘is secured through repeated performances of power’. Seen from this vantage point, the question, ‘what must a state “do” in order to “be” sovereign’ (Weber, 1998, p. 92), becomes a central focus of investigation.

This question also indicates that, for their performances of sovereignty to be understood and accepted, actors must follow certain ideas or repertoires of what counts as legitimate state behavior. Thus, our second theoretical point of reference is research inspired by sociological and organizational theory, sometimes referred to as world polity or cultural theory, which claims that ‘the state’ and its behaviour is not a self-contained entity (as claimed in conventional state-centric theory) but constituted through the enactment of global cultural templates for societal organization (Boli, 2001; see also Verwej et al., 2011). Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez (1997, p. 145) argue that ‘[w]orldwide models define and legitimate agendas for local action, shaping the structures and policies of nation-states.’² Such models, or scripts, carry powerful ideas about modernity, rationality and normativity that actors are compelled to follow regardless of whether the practices they entail are functionally effective (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999; Zürn & Gerschewski, 2021). Conceptually, the notion of scripts is close to that of norms but differs from it in that scripts are constituted by practices, i.e. patterns of rule-guided, meaningful interactions (Adler-Nissen, 2013). Whereas looking at norms implies a focus on discursive articulations of expectations, the meaning of practices can remain tacit, as agents may not explicitly identify specific practices as enactments of sovereignty scripts.

Accordingly, by sovereignty scripts, we mean sets of practices that are recognized as giving expression to, and being justified by, the idea that supreme political authority should be vested in the state. A historical example of a sovereignty script is the ‘standard of civilization’ colonized polities had to meet to become accepted as sovereign entities (Gong, 1984), which came to displace local non-Westphalian principles of political order in Southeast Asia (Milner, & Kasim, 2018). More recently, sovereignty scripts have often entailed the notion that a state’s legitimacy is tied to responsibilities vis-à-vis its population (Thakur, 2002). Scripts of sovereignty define the standard of legitimate power in a world organized in nation-states, and thus have constraining and enabling effects. To claim sovereignty, political actors must follow its prescribed repertoire of legitimate action. At the same time, doing so allows access to symbolic and material resources only available to recognized states (Adler-Nissen, 2013; Boli, 2001; Krasner, 1999; McFaul, 2001). The logic of action in this perspective is neither decidedly instrumental-rational nor structural-deterministic, but follows a logic of practice (cf. Meyer et al., 1997, p. 150; Pouliot & Mérand, 2013, pp. 30–32). Sovereignty scripts do not determine how states act in a positivist causal sense but offer state agents repertoires of recognized behaviour from which they can choose. In Kurki’s (2008) terms, scripts are thus causal in a ‘formal’ sense, as they enable certain meaningful interactions, while agents’ choices of enacting one or another of the competing scripts are causal in a ‘final’ sense as they are guided by strategic considerations.

In cooperating (or not) through ASEAN, then, we can see policy-makers of its member states orienting their behaviour towards common ideas about what sovereignty implies. However, we do not assume that there is a single, fixed script of sovereign statehood. To avoid reifying any particular notions of sovereignty, we read our empirical material against a framework we have developed on the bases of an engagement with a range of existing conceptualizations of sovereignty (Boli, 2001; Krasner, 1999; Lenz, Krösche, & Schirmer, 2019; Reus-Smit, 1999; Söderbaum & Spandler, 2020; Sylvester, 2004). The framework distinguishes ideal type³ sovereignty scripts based on two axes (see Table 1). First, practices of sovereignty tend to have a primary referent object (cf. Boli, 2001, p. 54), i.e. that which actors who claim sovereignty are supposed to empower and/or protect in order to be considered legitimate. The two potential referent objects of sovereignty are the state and the people living under its rule (cf. Tan, S. S. 2011; Thakur, 2002). Second, as Christine Sylvester (2004, pp. 182–206; see also Marchand, 1994) has pointed out, sovereignty practices can contain different notions of autonomy. The state can either be perceived to be gaining its sovereignty by demonstrating its independence as a self-contained unit (reactive autonomy) or by virtue of the ties it forms in the larger international society (relational autonomy). For each of the four resulting sovereignty scripts, fulfilling specific functions and roles—the moral purpose of the state, in Reus-Smits’ (1999) words—appear as crucial prerequisites for legitimate enactments of state sovereignty.

Table 1. Ideal type sovereignty scripts and corresponding modes of governance.

		Referent object
		State apparatus	People
Autonomy	Reactive	1. State-reactive script: State as embodiment of the nation Principle of enactment: protecting the state apparatus against internal & external challengers Mode of governance: reluctance to pool resources and cede decision-making authority, projection of non-intervention norms.	2. People-reactive script: State as protector of the people Principle of enactment: providing public goods for citizens Mode of governance: bilateral or regional approaches when instrumental for popular well-being
	Relational	3. State-relational script: State as interdependent actor Principle of enactment: managing interdependence to bolster state apparatus Mode of governance: strategic and symbolic engagement with other actors	4. People-relational script: State as part of a community of providers Principle of enactment: providing public goods for people in and beyond state boundaries Mode of governance: partnering with external organizations

1. In the state-reactive script, the state appears as the sole representative or embodiment of the nation. Sovereignty is enacted through practices that build and sustain the integrity and capacity of the state apparatus against internal challengers and external intervention.

2. In the people-reactive script, the state obtains its legitimacy as the protector of the people living under its rule. This script engenders practices centred on state agents’ ability to provide of public goods for its citizens.

3. The state-relational script is concerned with the authority of the state apparatus, but at the same time it emphasizes the state’s embeddedness in the international environment and views it as an interdependent actor. Practicing sovereignty thus entails managing interdependence with external actors for the purpose of strengthening legitimacy or obtaining resources bolstering the state apparatus.

4. In the people-relational script, finally, the state’s role as a provider and protector is set against its embeddedness in a transnational web of interaction. As a member of an international community, it works in partnership with external actors and participates in mechanisms for providing transboundary public goods.

The principles based on which the four scripts are enacted are to some extent mutually reinforcing: Building and protecting the capacity of the state apparatus enhances the state’s ability to effectively provide public goods to its citizens, which in turn may deflect ambitions by external actors to intervene. However, the different scripts also formulate contradictory demands that require strategic action by state actors, which may result in incoherent policies and apparently dysfunctional organizations (Krasner, 1999; Meyer et al., 1997, p. 154).

Based on the scripts, we can identify four competing modes of governance: In the state-reactive sovereignty script (state as embodiment of the nation, Box 1), governance is driven by national actors, and their practices are characterized by a reluctance to pool resources and cede decision-making authority to regional governance mechanisms, as well as an outward projection of non-intervention norms. In the people-reactive script (state as protector of the people, Box 2), by contrast, some limited amount of pooling resources among regional states—in addition to bilateral approachs—can appear as suitable as long as it facilitates the states’ role as providers for their respective citizens. Governance in the state-relational script (state as interdependent actor, Box 3) is characterized by a strategic engagement with intra- or extra-regional actors for the purposes of obtaining symbolic or material benefits strengthening the state apparatus. Meanwhile, the people-relational sovereignty script (state as member of a community of providers, Box 4) entails something akin to ‘open regionalism’, i.e. cooperation through partnering with international organizations to provide relief and, potentially, providing public goods not just within member states but also beyond state boundaries.

Although explaining the emergence of specific sovereignty scripts is not the primary concern of our paper, a brief note on their origins is in order because it affects our claims regarding the generalizability of our framework. In contrast to world polity theory, which emphasizes isomorphism as a result of the global diffusion of governance templates, our conceptualization leaves room for regional agency in developing the different scripts through processes of localization as well as endogenous construction (Acharya, 2009). As Milner et al. (2018) demonstrate with regard to Malaysia, historically rooted ideas on political authority and the state influence foreign policy practices of Southeast Asian states to this date. We should assume, therefore, that the scripts we identify are constituted by global patterns as well as regional inflections.

How does this framework help us interpret ASEAN’s Covid-19 response? Like existing approaches, it acknowledges the importance of sovereignty for how the grouping has tackled the pandemic—but it does not assume that there is a fixed meaning to sovereignty independent of how states enact it. This distinguishes our analysis from path-dependence arguments (Rüland, 2021)⁴, which usually focus on expressions of sovereignty that land in Box 1 of our Table 1 table by seeing it as a norm that is ultimately geared at protecting Southeast Asian state apparatuses and thus necessarily constrains cooperation. We argue that the governance mechanisms employed by ASEAN enact competing ideas about sovereignty and how it is supposed to look in practice. The overall ambiguous response and its (partial) disregard for functional requirements then appears as a result of member states’ efforts to satisfy these competing ideas. This corresponds to Meyer et al.’s (1997, p. 148–150; cf. Jetschke, 2009) argument that what states do in the name of sovereignty is shaped less by functional demands than by transnationally shared cultural models of statehood.

4. Methodological considerations

Against this conceptual background, the overarching goal of the case study is to reconstruct ASEAN’s diverse practices of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic on a regional level as enactments of sovereignty scripts. In using the pandemic response as an empirical site for observing enactments of sovereignty scripts, we follow Jabko and Luhman (2019), who have argued in the case of European integration that crisis responses can produce different regional understandings of how sovereignty is practiced. It is plausible to assume, therefore, that ASEAN governments’ initiatives for dealing with the pandemic were characterized by the will to assert sovereignty in light of an exceptional challenge that existing ASEAN mechanisms were unable to deal with. Looking at the pandemic is also instructive given that some researchers have in the past identified communicable disease outbreaks like the SARS epidemic as drivers of deepened cooperation between ASEAN member states, while also noting that such crises did not ease governments’ sovereignty concerns (Caballero-Anthony, 2008; Lamy & Phua, 2012).

Because of the comprehensive nature of ASEAN’s Covid-19 response, we further narrow our analytical focus on initiatives regarding the matter of vaccine procurement and distribution. This selection follows an empirical logic, in that vaccines were the issue that our interview respondents most frequently brought up as a crucial focal point in ASEAN’s response (see in more detail below).

We conducted interviews and document analysis to understand how ASEAN mechanisms were used as part of individual member states’ responses, and to what extent there was what would be considered an ASEAN regional response to the pandemic. To do so, we interviewed international and regional stakeholders involved in public health and emergency issues.⁵ We asked them how they had engaged in the Covid-19 pandemic response, which regional mechanisms were used and how effective they were, and about their reflections as to what drives cooperation within ASEAN. While we were investigating how these stakeholders made sense of the practices they observed, the primary purpose of this exercise was not to reconstruct discourses about the meaning of sovereignty as a norm. Instead, the responses helped us make inferences about the existence of different sovereignty scripts through an indirect observation of practices (cf. Pouliot, 2013, p. 49). Even though empirically observing intentionality is not possible, our approach also made it possible to glean insights into the strategic nature of member states’ choices of enacting different scripts.

Our semi-structured interviews were conducted between October 2021 and March 2022. The recruitment of interviewees initially targeted both internal and external ASEAN stakeholders, including Ministries of Health and Ministries of Foreign Affairs from individual ASEAN member states, representatives of ASEAN regional mechanisms, such as the AHA Centre, as well as international partner organisations, including UN and UN affiliated agencies, civil society organisations etc. We eventually conducted Zoom interviews with 11 representatives of ASEAN regional mechanisms and international organizations that were involved in regional public health issues. To complement the interviews, we conducted analysis of official documents, news reports and grey literature including reports, meeting outcome documents, news etc. coming out of the ASEAN region covering the period between February 2020 and March 2022. The official documents included statements by ASEAN and member state representatives both within and outside of the organization’s formal mechanisms, e.g. Chairman’s statements, communiqués, and ASEAN declarations.

In our analysis, several key aspects of the response consistently emerged as examples of cooperation or lack thereof. The main aspects that our interview respondents mentioned when asked about the ASEAN regional response concerned initiatives around vaccine procurement and distribution, parallel funding and coordination structures between public health and disaster management mechanisms, the use of regional emergency stockpiles, and the ASEAN response to the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. Among those issues, vaccine procurement and distribution was the most frequently brought up and therefore is the focus of the empirical analysis in the following section. We also consider initiatives for regional funding mechanisms insofar as they relate to vaccine procurement and distribution. The use of regional emergency stockpiles and the lack of coordination between public health and disaster management structures were only mentioned by respondents whose main focus of work was on disaster management, and was not mentioned by public health experts. We also exclude the complex issue of ASEAN’s Covid-related aid in Myanmar as it is inextricably bound up with ASEAN’s broader actions relating to the humanitarian crisis. Through the example of vaccine procurement and distribution, we will explore how the different sovereignty scripts come into play.

5. Empirical analysis

As mentioned in the Introduction, ASEAN’s Covid-19 response has been characterized by numerous sectoral and ministerial level meetings, specifically appointed working groups, the deployment of existing mechanisms and a wide range of new initiatives for the regional governance of public health. The first part of this section summarizes these developments to contextualize the analysis of vaccine procurement and distribution. In the second part, we apply our ideal types of sovereignty scripts and its corresponding modes of governance to make sense of the response.

5.1. Overview of the response

In the first half of 2020, the world was struggling to get on top of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this time, a series of ASEAN and ASEAN + 3 ministerial meetings were conducted, and the Special ASEAN Summit on Covid-19 and the 36^th ASEAN Summit took place (ASEAN Secretariat, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; ASEAN Vietnam Information Portal, 2020). Through these sectoral and Summit-level meetings, member states affirmed their commitment to a collective and cohesive Covid-19 response, and shared technical and research related experience. They also mobilized existing regional mechanisms specifically relating to surveillance, scientific cooperation and preventative measures, e.g. coordinating risk analyses and information-sharing between member states, the ASEAN Health Sector, and the public (Koga, 2022, p. 51). An example is the ASEAN BioDiaspora Virtual Centre (ABVC), which published situational updates on the spread of the disease, vaccination uptake and outlook.

In March 2020, the ASEAN Coordinating Council’s Working Group on Public Health Emergencies (ACCWG-PHE) was established. The ACCWG-PHE and the ASEAN Health Cluster 2 (a body in the organization’s Health Sector tasked with providing strategic guidance on emerging health threats) subsequently developed a variety of initiatives focusing on different aspects of governing Covid-19 and future pandemics, including:

• Resource pooling and stockpiling (ASEAN Regional Reserve of Medical Supplies for Public Health Emergencies, RRMS);

• Standardization and guidelines (ASEAN Standard Operating Procedures for Public Health Emergencies, SOP-PHE, later renamed ASEAN Strategic Framework on Public Health Emergencies);

• Response coordination (ASEAN Centre for Public Health Emergencies and Emerging Diseases, ACPHEED);

• Financing the procurement of supplies, including vaccines (COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund).⁶

The new initiatives have mainly been financed by voluntary contributions from dialogue partners. For example, the government of Japan supported the establishment of ACPHEED (JAIF, 2021).

Early on, ASEAN leaders identified cooperation on providing citizens with access to vaccines as part of the organization’s joint response (ASEAN Secretariat, 2020c, 2021a). The COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund was set up to, among others, finance the procurement of vaccines, and the RRMS was intended as a stockpile mechanism comprising ‘earmarked assets of medical supplies […] equally accessible to all [ASEAN member states]’ (ASEAN Secretariat, n.d.-a, see also n.d.-b). However, it appears that ASEAN regional mechanisms have not been utilised for vaccine procurement until rather late and then in limited scope. Overall, progress on several of the cornerstones of the response has been slow. Despite being officially launched at the 37^th ASEAN Summit in November 2020 (ASEAN Secretariat, 2020e), statements by member state representatives and our respondents reflect that the operationalization of both the COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund and the Regional Reserve of Medical Supplies (RRMS) was exceedingly drawn-out. The ACPHEED was not launched until August 2022. As detailed below, cooperation on vaccine procurement did hardly yield tangible results as member states have prioritized bilateral avenues. While the ASEAN Strategic Framework on Public Health Emergencies provides a comprehensive coordination plan of regional and national public health mechanisms, it is difficult to assess to what extent it has been implemented in member states’ National Public Health Emergency plans, National Focal Points, and by ASEAN’s public health emergency system in general. ASEAN has also been reluctant to mobilize existing emergency response mechanisms from the field of disaster management. The AHA Centre provided support to national pandemic responses using regional relief items stockpiles on an ad hoc basis but did not have a substantial role in the response strategy. Overall, coordination between the health sector and other areas of ASEAN cooperation remained limited.

5.2. Applying ideal types to the ASEAN Covid-19 vaccine procurement and distribution

Having provided an overview of the ASEAN Covid-19 response, we now turn to applying our analytical framework to explore the role of sovereignty in ASEAN member states’ governance concerning the procurement and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. The ideal type sovereignty scripts are: 1) State-reactive script: state as embodiment of the nation; 2) People-reactive script: state as protector of the people; 3) State-relational script: state as interdependent actor; and 4) People-relational script: state as part of a community of providers. We go through each script in turn then conclude the analysis by discussing complementarities and tensions among the different scripts.

5.2.1. The state-reactive script: the state as embodiment of the nation

The tasks of Covid-19 vaccine procurement and distribution have largely been carried out by member states, which mainly relied on bilateral procurement approaches. Differential access to vaccines led to unequal progress between member states. As one respondent stated, ‘ASEAN went country by country. The better off countries like Singapore and Indonesia got a hold of vaccines early, and other member states didn’t.’ (ES5). The reluctance to pool resources within ASEAN and preference for independently securing vaccines can be seen as reflexes of governments aiming to protect the state’s autonomy in times of crisis, in which state institutions are pressed to assert and maintain control over the situation (Jabko & Luhmann, 2019). It also reflects the different approaches to managing the Covid-19 pandemic overall among ASEAN countries, with some like the Philippines, Lao PDR and Myanmar initially downplaying its severity and applying relatively lax measures in terms of testing, contract tracing and isolation (Heydarian, 2020; Siahaan, 2021). This lack of oversight, in combination with differential purchasing power, found some ASEAN countries at the back of the vaccine queue while more proactive countries such as Singapore had reportedly already ordered vaccines still in trial (Khalik, 2021).

In combination with temporary border closures, refraining from regional pooling also appears as a strategy for supporting the recovery of national economies and thereby bolstering a crucial source of state legitimacy. These are patterns of behaviour consistent with the state-reactive script, which projects an image of the state as the embodiment of the nation (Box 1). Indeed, the discrepancy between what is stated in the documents produced by ASEAN on the regional response and coordination, and what is adamantly proposed by our respondents about the ASEAN regional response, suggests the kind of implementation gaps that ASEAN scholars often observe and attribute to traditional ideas of ASEAN sovereignty and the imperative to protect state apparatuses (Jetschke, 2009). In that sense, parts of ASEAN’s Covid-19 response certainly confirm traditional understandings of ASEAN sovereignty and the ASEAN Way as constraining cooperation. However, this conception only gives us a part of the picture. It ignores important nuances of the response and does not consider other constraining conditions that may have made independent procurement necessary. It also leaves the question open why ASEAN states should be willing to enter into bilateral vaccine deals, which after all can create autonomy-infringing dependencies of their own. We address these issues through the lens of the other three sovereignty scripts below.

5.2.2. The people-reactive script: the state as protector of the people

While conventional arguments about sovereignty as constraining regional governance often suggest that states prefer bilateral over regional avenues to maximize their agency, striking deals with external partners can also create dependencies that infringe on state autonomy (Woertz & Yellinek, 2021). Vaccine deals with major powers are therefore not entirely consistent with the state-reactive script. Alternatively, we can understand them as enacting the people-reactive script (Box 2). The urgency of the matter as well as economic and political circumstances in individual members states has meant that the priority for ASEAN member states has been to quickly provide vaccines for their people. This has sometimes meant accepting trade-offs, as Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia, publicly acknowledged: ‘The question is asked whether Cambodia is too dependent on China. If I don’t rely on China, whom should I rely on? Without the donations and sales of vaccines from China, we would not have vaccinated the Cambodian people’ (as cited in Turton, 2021). One respondent noted that using ASEAN regional mechanisms would have slowed down the process of securing vaccines: ‘They didn’t have time to go through ASEAN, they didn’t have time to go through another layer of meaningless work’ (ES3). Instead, governments largely opted for bilateral procurement. We can interpret this decision to prioritize bilateral over regional approaches as enacting the people-reactive script, in which the state appears as protector of the people (Box 2). Like in the state-reactive script, this script motivates state action against an external threat, but orients it towards popular well-being rather than the integrity of the state apparatus itself. Accordingly, protecting citizens against pandemics such as Covid-19 can be considered a fundamental part of the repertoire of legitimate state behaviour, in that the state must fulfill its positive obligations to the right to health (Evans, 2002).

Interpreting the lack of drive behind regional initiatives as resulting from governments enacting the people-reactive sovereignty script highlights that governments may refrain from regional cooperation even if the protection of the state apparatus is not their primary objective, namely if they deem regional approaches ineffective. For instance, it could be questioned whether Singapore would have been as successful in providing vaccination services for its people had they taken the pathway of pooled procurement. Of course, whether regional approaches actually are less efficient is a matter of contention. In prioritizing bilateral approaches, ASEAN member states have sped up national rollouts but limited the exploration of an integrated procurement scheme with potential scale effects. One respondent was adamant that ‘[i]f ASEAN as a block had come together, like the EU, to negotiate the procurement of vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, whoever, we would probably have had a greater voice and a greater collective market’ (ES7).

5.2.3. The state-relational script: the state as interdependent actor

As mentioned, while there has been some bilateral cooperation among ASEAN member states, vaccines have mostly been procured from external powers active in the region, including China, the US, and Japan (The ASEAN, 2021b). Choosing a provider has often been a highly political question. Chinese ‘vaccine diplomacy’ in the region has been particularly influential, with ASEAN member states such as Cambodia and Indonesia strengthening political and financial ties with China by accepting donations of Sinovac doses (Turton, 2021). However, other member states, especially Vietnam and Singapore, have been reluctant to use Sinovac and instead relied more on Western producers. To some extent, these decisions reflected the popular-relational script, as they were driven by concerns around access and effectiveness. In particular, the Chinese overtures were seriously hampered by evidence showing Sinovac to be less reliable than mRNA-based alternatives such as Pfizer and Moderna (Maude & Fraser, 2022). But ASEAN member states’ strategies were also influenced by domestic politics and geopolitical concerns. While Hun Sen’s pre-existing relationship with Bejing has influenced Cambodia’s decision to prioritize Sinovac, in Vietnam, the government’s approach was driven by broader sinoskepticism among the public (Zaini & Ha, 2021). There were also fears among elites that the vaccine deals would provide China with leverage over recipient countries in other questions such as the tensions in the South China Sea. Over time, most Southeast Asian states therefore tried to diversify their vaccine procurement from bilateral partners to avoid overdependence on any single provider (Zaini, 2021). We can see these considerations as enactments of the state-relational sovereignty script (Box 3). In this script, strategic interaction with international actors is justified because of the symbolic and material benefits that the state apparatus can obtain from it. Deftly managing international interdependence and being seen as doing so—rather than isolating the state from external influences—thus becomes a central dimension of sovereignty.

While the diverging political opportunity structures between member states have reinforced incentives for bilateral approaches, ASEAN’s regional programme for vaccine procurement and distribution via the Covid-19 ASEAN Response Fund can also be understood as enacting the state-relational script. Regardless of its limited output, the very act of establishing a regional programme creates positive effects for ASEAN members state governments, whose legitimacies are bolstered through visible engagement with one another and appearing as a coherent regional block in the eyes of the international community. One respondent characterized ASEAN meetings on the pandemic response as ‘theatre performances’ (ES3), which perfectly captures the idea that sovereignty is enacted through collective displays of solidarity and constructive interdependence. This perspective reinforces the point that the relation between sovereignty and governance can be mutually reinforcing.

5.2.4. The people-relational script: the state as part of a community of providers

In our ideal type framework, the people-relational (Box 4) is diametrically opposed to the state-reactive script (Box 1). Accordingly, enactments of this script most clearly stand in contrast to traditional understandings of sovereignty in ASEAN as preventing cooperation. Despite the overarching preference for bilateral procurement, it is possible to discern a genuine aspiration for joint action within ASEAN. In September 2021, there was a reported agreement that ASEAN would evenly distribute about 100,000—250,000 doses of vaccine to each member state (Vietnam News Agency, 2021). In conjunction with the ASEAN Summits in October 2021, ASEAN officially confirmed plans to use 10.5 million USD of the USD 25.8 million COVID-19 Response Fund to procure vaccines ‘for the peoples of ASEAN and the ASEAN Secretariat staff’ (ASEAN Secretariat, 2021b). Even though these plans appear limited in light of the region’s population size of nearly 662 million people, they attest to a commitment to collective action that is not fully explained by references to sovereignty in the conventional, state-reactive understanding. Instead, we can detect elements in ASEAN’s response that speak to a people-relational script, in which the state is part of a global community united by the common purpose of protecting the world against the virus. While addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2020, the remarks by Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha remarks reflected the openness of the people-relational script. He highlighted the use of the Response Fund ‘to address the public health emergency and to support research and development of medicines and vaccines to strengthen ASEAN’s resilience in the long term’ and argued that ‘a strong ASEAN will provide a good partner for the United Nations and the international community’ (Prayut, 2020). In focusing on the benefits of cooperation on the pandemic response for ASEAN and the international community, these remarks play to the people-relational script, as state action is seen as providing positive externalities beyond its own boundaries. In utilizing the Response Fund, ASEAN foreign ministers decided to procure 10 million doses under the Covax scheme and tasked UNICEF with purchasing, citing the mantra ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’ (ASEAN; Thai PBS World, 2021). This further illustrates the governments’ recognition that sovereignty is to some extent predicated on their ability to establish open cooperation for the provision of public goods. The recent support for the mutual recognition of Covid-19 vaccination certificates among ASEAN countries to enable smoother travel can also be seen as participation in transboundary public good provisions (ASEAN Secretariat, 2022).

Appeals to the people-relational script, like that of the Thai Prime Minister, seem to be particularly present in contexts with extra-regional partners like the UN. This pattern is compatible with research on ASEAN’s implementation gap, in which rhetorical commitments mask a continued preference for governmental autonomy. Our framework highlights, however, that such dynamics should not be seen as a matter of sovereignty trumping regional governance. What we see instead is ASEAN governments navigating a rich repertoire of practices through which political actors can claim sovereignty, which can lead to idiosyncratic outcomes in terms of governance, as we demonstrate in the following section.

5.2.5. Complementarity and tension among the scripts

While managing a pandemic, states have to deal with competing demands—they need to provide vaccines for their people, protect their borders, and manage relations with intra- and extra-regional partners (such as the UN, China, the US etc.). All the while, they have an inherent interest in bolstering their own regimes. In applying our analytical framework to ASEAN’s Covid-19 response, we are able to demonstrate how these different demands relate to competing understandings of sovereignty.

In a conventional understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and regional governance, ASEAN member states’ actions in the Covid-19 response can appear contradictory or even irrational. If sovereignty means that state-centrism reigns supreme, why set up regional mechanisms or international partnerships at all? A possible way of rationalizing the contradictions would be to argue that the state-reactive script dominates the other scripts, hence all nods to cooperation are merely rhetorical and ultimately geared at protecting the capacity of the state apparatus. For instance, in the drawn-out process of establishing and deploying the COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund and the Regional Reserve of Medical Supplies (RRMS), one could see ASEAN leaders playing to the rhetoric of partnership and public goods provision to attract funding, but then ultimately defaulting to non-cooperation when it comes to adequately resourcing the initiatives themselves.

While this line of argument provides one plausible theoretical interpretation, our reading of the different modes of governance during the Covid-19 pandemic is open to alternatives. The different scripts can be at play simultaneously without one logic or motivation being superior a priori. For instance, the Response Fund and the RRMS are set up in a way that simultaneously

• allows governments to commit to the idea of a worldwide community tackling the pandemic, as the Fund is open to contributions by external partners and the stockpiles provide a (small) contribution to a transboundary public good (people-relational script, Box 4);

• enables governments to claim the role as provider for their citizens, as the regional vaccine initiatives demonstrably protect some against the virus and make the member states more self-reliant (people-reactive script, Box 2);

• enables performances of solidarity between ASEAN governments that bolster their state apparatuses (state-relational script, Box 3);

• protects the states’ authority, through the largely voluntary nature of the mechanisms (state-reactive script, Box 1).

In this sense, the modes of governance enabled by the different sovereignty scripts are mutually compatible and even reinforcing. Pursuing a way of governing that fundamentally neglects any of the scripts may over time incur legitimacy costs for state actors (cf. Verwej et al., 2011, p. 17–18).

At the same time, the scripts also give rise to tensions and explain dysfunctionalities. Here, our approach follows that of cultural theorists who argue that competing principles of social organization account for ‘the paradoxical and sometimes contradictory ways in which people’—and, we would add, the way in which state actors—’approach contemporary public policy issues’ (Verwej et al., 2011, p. 5). While the people-reactive and people-relational scripts encourage ASEAN member states to establish mechanisms for the provision of effective pandemic management, the small number of vaccines actually distributed demonstrates that governments can contend themselves with satisfying the minimal demands of the state-relational script, making do with symbolic gestures of managing interdependence and limiting benefits to the immediate necessities of the state apparatus. Tensions between bilateral and regional approaches can also emerge, as the urgency of the pandemic have pushed governments to enact the protector role of the people-reactive script through deals with major powers, rather than a regional approach. Rapidly vaccinating people using available channels instead of getting bogged down in a regional scheme like the EU initially did also has secondary effects in creating positive externalities beyond the region, making it possible to play to the people-relational script. But even so, due to political considerations of managing the state’s position in the broader international environment as required under the state-relational script, strategic motives may have been prioritized over effectiveness. As suggested by previous scholarship, the US-China rivalry amplified the geopolitical aspects of dealing with the pandemic and was highly palpable among the ASEAN countries. For instance, Indonesia as a prominent member of ASEAN has had to carefully navigate overtures for vaccine assistance by both superpowers (Sulaiman, Delanova, & Jati, 2021).

Another example of sovereignty scripts at play simultaneously is when ASEAN Leaders in 2019 (i.e. pre-pandemic) called upon member states to collectively attain regional autonomy through the Declaration on ASEAN Vaccine Security and Self-Reliance (AVSSR) ‘to avoid incidental vaccine shortage and improve the supply of affordable, quality vaccines for normal and emergency situations both at the national and ASEAN-wide levels for the benefits of the people of the ASEAN’ (ASEAN, 2019). Leaders call on ‘development partners, intergovernmental agencies, regional organisation and others to support and promote regional collaboration in the development of AVSSR’. This declaration appeals to a people-relational script (Box 4) of open cooperation while also, as a joint declaration by ASEAN leaders, fulfilling the function of bolstering the state apparatus in the state-relational script (Box 2) and de facto seeking to keep interventions by extra-regional actors out by being ‘self-reliant’, hence playing to the state-reactive script (Box 1). Made more relevant in pandemic times, the Declaration was echoed at the 38th and 39^th ASEAN Summits in October 2021, where member states said they ‘look forward to exploring the regional vaccine supply chain and self-reliance of affordable, quality vaccines for normal and emergency situations both at the national and ASEAN-wide levels for the benefits of our people’. However, how the imperatives of transboundary goods provision and self-reliance, of global partnership, regional cooperation and national autonomy can be reconciled in practice, remains unaddressed. While our evidence suggests that ASEAN actors were able to mitigate tensions by emphasizing different scripts in different phases of the response and in different settings depending on the situational context and audience expectations, a systematic study of those dynamics over time was beyond the scope of the article. This is one of several lines for future research we outline in the concluding section.

6. Conclusion

With this paper, we set out to improve our understanding of the role of sovereignty for regional governance by interpreting ASEAN’s Covid-19 response as an enactment of different sovereignty scripts. Looking at this exceptional crisis allowed us to observe how ASEAN member states have enacted ideas about what legitimate state practice entails beyond entrenched routines. In our empirical analysis focusing on vaccine procurement and distribution during the pandemic, it becomes apparent that ASEAN’s institutional initiatives have not followed a single sovereignty script, but rather appealed to different understandings, uses and nuances of sovereignty that engender different roles for the state. Rather than explaining which sovereignty script has been decisive in shaping specific outcomes, the main purpose of the study is to show how our framework captures the multiformity of sovereignty in relation to regional governance. As the conventional literature on sovereignty in ASEAN would expect, we can see sovereignty at play in member states’ efforts to secure their own vaccines, which we interpret as enactments of ‘reactive’ scripts that aim at shielding the state apparatus and its people against external threats. On the other hand, member states launched initiatives to pool resources regionally, which were accompanied by appeals to international partnership but also calls for ASEAN to become more self-reliant. We read these elements of the response as enactments of ‘relational’ scripts, in which the sovereign state is seen as interdependently embedded in a transnational context.

By showing that different sovereignty scripts were at play simultaneously in ASEAN Covid-19 response, our approach goes beyond existing ASEAN research that adopts a monolithic conception of sovereignty without asking how it is practiced. It ties in with work in IR that emphasizes the inherent ambiguity of foundational normative categories and organizing principles of international politics (Linsenmaier, Schmidt, & Spandler, 2021). Extending the traditional perspective of ASEAN sovereignty in this way provides a new perspective of how it hangs together with regional governance. Most importantly, we suggest that typical cooperation problems—institutional proliferation, incoherence between mechanisms and across sectors, rhetoric-implementation gaps etc.—may best be understood as emerging from diverging imperatives for practicing sovereignty and statehood. For example, ASEAN member states play up their role as members in a community of providers in the presence of international partners and donor states, and that may increase their chances of obtaining external funding. However, inasmuch as governments see the establishment of the mechanisms as such sufficient in portraying the state as a capable manager of interdependence, they might not feel the need to follow through with such initiatives, or even see doing so as a threat to the autonomy and authority of the state apparatus, which helps understand the implementation lag in many of its mechanisms.

Our framework for understanding these dynamics may also speak to practitioners. Representatives of governmental or non-governmental organizations engaging with ASEAN sometimes express puzzlement at the seemingly contradictory way in which officials of the organization and its member states shift between cooperative and uncooperative registers in their interactions with external partners. If one interprets individual statements or actions by ASEAN actors as expressions of a principled and immutable stance, it is easy to either over- or underestimate the potential for cooperation. Additionally, inconsistent behaviour can easily be mistaken as evidence for disingenuity or irrationality. The notion of sovereignty scripts allows ASEAN’s partners instead to interpret what ASEAN actors do in any given moment as part of a broader strategic performance that they necessarily have to engage in to deal with competing expectations that are imposed on them by a complex and ambiguous environment.

While we have generated empirical support for our framework by looking at ASEAN, its general theoretical parameters are not derived from regionally specific observations. Neither are they exclusive to health as a policy field. While we can expect that there is a degree of localization in how the scripts are interpreted, and that concrete enactments are shaped by specific domestic and regional contexts (political cultures, institutional frameworks, economic capabilities, issue areas etc.), the framework of the four sovereignty scripts lends itself to comparative analysis with a high potential for theory-building. Three avenues for future research seem particularly promising to us in this respect. First, studies on other policy fields can provide insights into how the nature of different issue areas mediates the relation between sovereignty and regional governance. For example, governing infectious diseases could be considered less threatening to the state apparatus and more transboundary in nature than traditional security issues, which could make it less crucial for state actors to enact the state-reactive script.

Second, pairing such a perspective with cross-regional comparison can deliver nuanced perspectives of different sovereignty understandings that go beyond highly generalized notions of the post-Westphalian West vs. sovereignty-centric regions in the Global South. Analysts have noted, for instance, that some regional organizations in Africa have fared much better than others in orchestrating a regional pandemic response (Yingi & Hlungwani, 2022). A plausible hypothesis is that such differences could be tied to an increasing emphasis on relational conceptions of sovereignty among member states in these regions.

Finally, as indicated, longitudinal perspectives can reveal broad-scale historical changes in the role of sovereignty and their underlying political dynamics, but also more fine-grained analyses of policy-making processes and their practical significance for policy-makers and stakeholders. For example, if we find that typical processes like responding to a transboundary emergency follow a certain sequence of enacting different sovereignty scripts (e.g. from reactive to relational scripts), this could have implications for when partner organizations at different levels can expect to influence these processes, and which narratives may prove successful for that purpose. Advocating for cooperation based on appeals to progressive international norms like human rights and human security would likely be more effective in phases and settings where the people-relational script is dominant, while in other situations, arguing that cooperation is in member states’ ‘national interest’ may be more expedient. Further study of sovereignty scripts, including through comparative perspectives, thus promises to catalyze a more nuanced debate on the conditions for transboundary problem-solving in ASEAN and beyond.

List of interviews

Table

ID	Descriptor	Date interviewed
ES1	Independent consultant who has supported efforts to strengthen capacity within ASEAN disaster management mechanisms.	22 October 2021
ES2	UNOCHA representative and senior liaison with ASEAN	5 November 2021
ES3	Representative from an international humanitarian organisation working with partners in ASEAN members states and ASEAN humanitarian mechanisms	16 November 2021
ES4	Independent consultant who has supported ASEAN and AHA Centre on civil-military engagement	18 November 2021
ES5	Lead Advisor on disaster management and regional coordination with ASEAN for a global consulting firm	10 November 2021
ES6	Official at an international health technical agency operating in the ASEAN region	19 November 2021
ES7	Consultant to ASEAN Member State government during the Covid-19 pandemic and former senior representative of an international humanitarian organisation	25 November 2021
ES8	Former senior staff member of the AHA Centre	31 November 2021
ES9	Representative from an international humanitarian organisation working with partners in ASEAN member states and ASEAN humanitarian mechanisms	15 November 2021
ES10	Disaster management expert deployed (from a western donor country) to assist the AHA Centre during the Covid-19 response	04 December 2021
ES11	Researcher specialised in politics, security and defence studies in Asia, currently working for a think tank based in an ASEAN member state	25 February 2022

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all our respondents who took the time to engage with us. We also appreciate the valuable feedback we received during a series of workshops and research seminars at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Special thanks go to Proshant Chakraborty, Sophie Hellberg, Hortense Jongen, Florian Kühn and Pernilla Nordqvist. We also thank Joel Ng for his comments on an earlier draft. Finally, we are grateful for the valuable research assistance provided by Miroslava Grausovà.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2018-03909, ‘TRANSFORM – Regional Cooperation and the Transformation of National Sovereignty’.

Notes

1 Another strand of research takes a historical approach by tracing transitions from pre-colonial to modern conceptions of sovereignty in Southeast Asia (Haacke, 2003, pp. 17–19; Sebastian & Lanti, 2010; Tadjbakhsh, 2010).

2 There are certain tensions between these two approaches on the level of ontology: whereas world polity approaches tend to naturalize actors, notions of performativity ultimately aim to denaturalize them (cf. Weber, 1998). Inasmuch as political ‘actors’ appear as having given identities in our account of ASEAN’s Covid-19 response, this should be seen as a pragmatic analytical choice.

3 We use the notion of ideal type in a Weberian sense as theoretical abstractions for the purpose of ordering and interpreting empirical realities that do in some sense – but not perfectly – correspond to the theoretical concepts.

4 On the difference between historical institutionalist and world polity approaches to institutional cooperation, see Voeten (2019).

5 Informed consent was obtained from all participants. The research followed the ethical guidelines of the Swedish Research Council and ethics approval has been obtained at the research institution at which the research was carried out.

6 More detailed information on these mechanisms can be found in The ASEAN (2021a, p. 9), and 2019 Tan, H. (<ul Tan, >.