An assessment of the design and effectiveness of the ASEAN Environmental Improvement Program

The ASEAN Environmental Improvement Program (ASEAN-EIP) was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1992 and ran for four years at a cost of US$ 15 million. The program operated in the (then) six member nations of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN): Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines. The program approach was similar to present concepts of cleaner production (CP), addressing the total production process and its upstream and downstream consequences, attempting to mitigate these through more efficient process use of inputs, better management processes and continual improvement. The program design was complex, with inter-linking actions in areas including technology and management demonstration, policy development and regional rationalization, institution building, information networking, technology transfer and trade promotion. ASEAN-EIP probably had a significant impact on furthering the adoption of CP in the ASEAN region, but it probably also fell substantially short of its potential. The program did not operate within any existing national policy frameworks and strategies for the achievement of CP and was unable to establish such. Program resources were stretched too thin, across too many countries and issues, and insufficient resources were available in any one country to make it important to the government to engage in a dialog on sensitive issues such as national policy and strategy for CP. However, the ASEAN-EIP was advanced for its time for programs to promote waste minimization (WM) and CP, considering aspects of change that had not been seriously addressed before and attempting to resolve a wide range of issues in a single integrated program.