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Maintaining centrality: ASEAN's evolving institutional strategy on the climate change agenda |
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| รหัสดีโอไอ | |
| Title | Maintaining centrality: ASEAN's evolving institutional strategy on the climate change agenda |
| Creator | Claire Ed Canete Bacong |
| Contributor | Srida Sonsri, Advisor |
| Publisher | Thammasat University |
| Publication Year | 2569 |
| Keyword | ASEAN centrality, Legitimation, Punctuated equilibrium |
| Abstract | How does a regional organization claim authority in a domain where it holds no hard power? This study addresses that question by examining how ASEAN has discursively constructed and maintained its centrality in the climate change agenda across fifteen ASEAN Joint Statements on Climate Change (AJSCC) issued between 2007 and 2025. Applying discourse tracing methodology supplemented by van Leeuwen's (2007) legitimation framework, the study treats the Paris Agreement of 2015 as a critical juncture and asks whether it produced a meaningful shift in how ASEAN constructs its authority in this domain. The analysis reveals that ASEAN frames climate change as a global problem whose disproportionate regional impact justifies its collective engagement, anchored throughout the corpus in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC). This framing is sustained through a multimodal legitimation strategy combining authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis—though not without evolution. Most notably, the disappearance of explicit 'historical responsibilities' language after 2014 reflects a deliberate discursive accommodation to the normative grammar of the post-Paris governance architecture, in which the historical accountability framing had been systematically diluted through the Agreement's negotiating process. The study also finds that ASEAN centrality is never explicitly named in the corpus. It is instead constructed indirectly through the prior legitimation of ASEAN's climate agenda itself, producing a nested structure in which institutional credibility must be established before centrality can be claimed. Contrary to what punctuated equilibrium theory would predict, the Paris Agreement does not produce a discursive rupture. The more significant inflection points in the corpus are ASEAN's own internal institutionalization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the escalation of physical climate events—each of which reshapes the discourse more visibly than the 2015 governance milestone. These findings affirm the resilience of ASEAN's path-dependent deliberative norms. More broadly, they contribute to scholarly understanding of how regional organizations construct institutional authority in domains where hard power is structurally unavailable—not through assertion, but through the patient, incremental accumulation of discursive legitimacy. |
