ASEAN Guidance for Climate-Smart Land Use Practices

The review examines six key ASEAN guidelines, including those on Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), crop insurance, responsible investment, public-private partnerships, and gender mainstreaming. It finds that while these guidelines often lack documented evidence of national-level implementation due to ASEAN's non-binding governance and lack of funding, they serve as critical tools for regional consensus and multilateral policy-making, such as submissions to the UNFCCC. The report recommends moving toward more strategic, intersectoral policy-making, improving the accessibility and readability of documents, and pairing guidelines with concrete implementation plans and monitoring frameworks.

• ASEAN guidelines are non-binding policy tools used to distill best practices into accessible compendiums, reflecting a shared strategic direction among Member States rather than formal legal agreements.
• The ASEAN Regional Guidelines for Promoting Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Practices served as a vital tool for regional coordination in international climate negotiations, specifically enabling the first ASEAN submission on agriculture to the UNFCCC's 44th Subsidiary Body of Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 44).
• There is a significant gap between the regional endorsement of guidelines and their national-level implementation, with few documented examples of field programmes being executed based on these tools.
• Successful operationalisation of guidelines is strongly linked to direct support from development partners through dedicated projects and funding.
• The review identifies a lack of systematic monitoring, evaluation, and learning (M&E) frameworks to track how guidelines are used after they are endorsed.
• The style and format of guidelines impact their usability; for example, the 'step-by-step' approach of the crop insurance guide was found more practical for governments than text-heavy technical documents.
• The process of developing guidelines, even without explicit implementation, provides value by fostering regional dialogue, identifying gaps, and legitimising shared priorities.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2020). ASEAN Guidance for Climate-Smart Land Use Practices. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021-asean-guidance-for-cslu-practices-a-review.pdf

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. ASEAN Guidance for Climate-Smart Land Use Practices. 2020. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021-asean-guidance-for-cslu-practices-a-review.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=ASEAN Guidance for Climate-Smart Land Use Practices |date=December 2020 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021-asean-guidance-for-cslu-practices-a-review.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2020asean, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{ASEAN Guidance for Climate-Smart Land Use Practices}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2020}, month = dec, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021-asean-guidance-for-cslu-practices-a-review.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }