Development institutions and economies in Southeast Asia: introduction

[Extract] A wide range of institutions are engaged with development in Southeast Asia. Each pursues a particular vision of development and is involved in the circulation of associated economies. For multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the pursuit of neoliberal forms of development provides a primary rationale for existence. For the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), development provides an important legitimizing role for political and economic decision-making, such as the recent establishment of the ASEAN Community. At the village scale the pursuit of development may come in the form of community enterprises, collectives and businesses that reflect local engagements with broader development flows – often in the form of changing access to technology, policy or infrastructure. In this section, some of the key institutions involved in development in Southeast Asia are reviewed. We have purposely cast our net wide to include not only core development institutions like the World Bank, IMF and ASEAN, but also lesser known but increasingly important development actors like the International Labour Organization (ILO), Chinese aid and community-scale organizations. While many of these are involved in what could be considered the formal architecture of the development industry – the business of grants and loans in pursuit of development – we also survey shifts in the tourism industry, urban manufacturing and community economies – that provide alternative means of pursuing and understanding development