PPPs have an important role to play in ASEAN's efforts for greater connectivity across its 10 member states, and as one approach to advancing the region's infrastructure development. In 2016, ASEAN leaders adopted the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, which focuses on five strategic areas: infrastructure that can help sustain economic growth, digital innovation, seamless logistics, regulatory excellence, and people mobility. The sustainable infrastructure strategy has three objectives: increasing public and private infrastructure investment in each ASEAN member state, significantly enhancing the evaluation and sharing of best practices on infrastructure productivity in ASEAN, and increasing the deployment of smart urbanization models across ASEAN.
To achieve the first objective, the master plan proposes that a priority list of potential ASEAN infrastructure projects and sources for their financing be drawn up. Having such a list would improve market confidence and the capability gaps associated with developing a strong infrastructure pipeline. Since the master plan's adoption, no progress has been made on this initiative. But this is understandable, given the complexities of PPPs and the loose relationships between ASEAN member states. For the project list, the master plan contains the incomplete projects of the plan it succeeds. The Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2010 had 52 projects in four strategic areas: the ASEAN Highway Network, the Singapore-Kunming Rail Link, an integrated multimodal transport system, and the ASEAN Single Aviation Market.