Norms in practice: People-centric governance in ASEAN and ECOWAS

Abstract

The communities of practice in ASEAN and ECOWAS adopted and institutionalized the norm of people-centric governance at similar times for similar reasons. As we have shown, however, recognizing the existence of a norm within organizational settings offers little insight into outcomes. The meaning of a norm and its effects are shaped in and through practice. How the norm is understood and enacted-and with what effect-varies across each diplomatic community. As we have shown, this variability is explained in part by the composition of the respective communities of practice. ECOWAS' institutional development in the mid-2000s was more profound than the formalization of ASEAN's arrangements during the same period. As a result, while the ASEAN community upheld notions of the appropriateness and efficacy of the 'ASEAN way', ECOWAS underwent a more substantial transformation, creating an autonomous institutional space wherein regional actors were empowered and freer to pursue a reorientation of the organization's priorities. The effects of the norm in ECOWAS, then, have been more transformative. This recognition highlights a further distinction between the two communities. Membership of the ASEAN community of practice extends beyond bureaucrats and technocrats at the ASEC and includes state officials acting within the CPR and more widely. This has reified ASEAN's insular understanding and practice of people-centric governance. The ECOWAS community of practice now consists of civil servants, autonomous from state elites, who have changed or sought to change the normative thinking towards adopting the norm of peoplecentric governance. The ECOWAS community of practice seeks to empower CSOs, civilians and regional stakeholders beyond state authority, and has been given the institutional space and capacity to do so. This account is broadly consistent with the dynamics detailed in norm localization and subsidiarity frameworks. However, our analysis deviates from each in important ways and, in doing so, highlights the utility of adopting a practiceoriented approach to understanding community thinking and behaviour. As we have shown, there is little 'active construction' of the norm in either case examined here.108 Rather, it is in and through practice that the norm is understood and enacted by each community. Similarly, in a complication to the subsidiarity approach, we see little evidence of explicit 'normative opposition' within either community to the external norm of people-centric governance.109 Instead, as we have shown, each community was driven to adopt and institutionalize the norm for similar reasons. However, in each case, the community recognizes the appropriateness and effectiveness of a norm in practice in distinct ways. This core finding aligns with recent practice-based accounts of norms which note that communities of actors can 'hold different understandings of what particular norms mean without contesting them'.110 Our analysis complements and extends existing work on norm localization, subsidiarity and contestation by explicating the relationship between norms and practice and providing empirical description to exemplify these rarely glimpsed dynamics. In ASEAN the norm of people-centric governance has been largely reactionary and defensive, serving as a means to uphold an elite-led and insular organization. In ECOWAS, the norm is understood in more transformative ways and has had a wider impact, empowering civil society actors who are increasingly included in governance practices.