InsightWorks
The Asia Foundation’s applied research center, turning practical experience into actionable analysis on development and reform in Asia and the Pacific.
Our knowledge products synthesize fresh research with more than seven decades of learning from direct engagement with the political, institutional, and social realities that determine whether solutions succeed, stall, or fail. The result is timely, policy-relevant analysis that governments, funders, regional institutions, and leaders across societies can use to navigate complex development and reform challenges.
Our work is centered around three fundamental questions:
- How do reform coalitions come together and sustain momentum?
- What makes evidence-grounded research carry weight with the people making critical decisions?
- Why do some changes last while others unravel?
Reframe – Coming soon!
Reframe is TAF’s short monthly readout on what’s moving in Asia and the Pacific. Each issue picks one live question—something people in the region are living and discussing right now—and puts it to experts who know the topic in depth.
InsightWorks is focused on five interconnected challenge areas central to the future of Asia and the Pacific.
Adaptive, Effective States
Across Asia and the Pacific, countries are under mounting pressure from fiscal strain, environmental shocks, energy and trade disruptions, and intensifying strategic competition. Meeting these challenges requires effective institutions and better data. It also requires the ability to adapt as conditions change and to act when warning signs emerge. That capacity rarely sits with the state alone. It depends on how governments, businesses, civil society, local agencies, and informal networks agree on how to share responsibility and work together. Adaptability requires access to warning signals, systems and processes for recognizing them, and actors capable of navigating through power and incentives structures toward solutions.
To understand what this means in practice, and to develop actionable solutions, Insightworks asks:
- How do governments weigh competing priorities under pressure?
- Who are the key decision-makers in various crisis scenarios?
- What makes some reform coalitions hold together under pressure and others fall apart?
- Why are some institutions – formal and informal – more resilient than others?
Ongoing Research About Adaptive, Effective States
Levels of violent conflict in Asia and the Pacific remained low even as global trends turned upward after 2012, but this exception is fading: conflict indicators across the region have been rising since around 2020. This report asks what is driving that shift, and what capacity states and societies in the region have to manage it. It examines conflict trends from subnational tensions and national fragility through to inter-state friction, situates these within the increasingly contested international order, and asks how governments and communities across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific are responding.
Cyber scam operations have grown into a trillion-dollar criminal ecosystem, generating harm that runs from trafficked and coerced labor inside scam compounds to the millions defrauded worldwide. As crackdowns in Cambodia and the Philippines push operations to relocate, the phenomenon is spreading into new and less prepared settings, from Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste to Palau, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea.
This multi-country, comparative study examines how governments and civil society in these emerging risk locations can draw on the experiences of Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, where responses are more developed but still evolving, to understand what is driving the spread of scam centers, how institutions are responding, and where legal frameworks, mandates, and cross-border coordination are falling short. This study foregrounds the governance dimension: which agencies hold responsibility, what tools they have, and why some responses hold while others simply displace the problem elsewhere. Scam operations expose with particular clarity what happens when a state’s capacity to sense a fast-moving threat exceeds its institutions’ ability to coordinate and act on it, and what determines whether that gap closes or widens.
Future of Development Cooperation
Development cooperation in Asia and the Pacific is being remade. Traditional foreign assistance budgets are shrinking and being reprioritized, and both donors and recipients are working through a wider mix of financing mechanisms, technical exchange, blended finance, and cooperation structures. Some middle-income states are now recipients, providers, and creditors at the same time, while lower-income states navigate a more complex field of partners and funding mechanisms. This creates new choices, but also new risks around accountability, influence, and whose priorities shape cooperation. What is at stake in this reshaping is both how the region adjusts to less aid, as well as how, and by whom, the terms of cooperation are set.
To understand what this means in practice, and to develop actionable solutions, Insightworks asks:
- How can middle-income countries turn their position on both sides of cooperation into influence over the reshaping underway?
- For lower-income states, does a complex field of new providers and approaches mean real choice and bargaining power, or dependence in a more fragmented, less accountable form?
- What future of development cooperation do the region’s own actors want in place of the current system, and how are they building it in practice?
- What does a loosely coordinated field of cooperation partners mean for accountability, and for those who depend on it?
Ongoing Research About Future of Development Cooperation
As the global development architecture is disrupted and reshaped, Southeast Asia’s middle-income states are navigating this shift not only as recipients of development assistance but also as providers and donors, a role they have long held. This project examines how Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are responding to these disruptions and seeking to shape the future of development finance, aid effectiveness, global health, and humanitarian standards. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with government officials, academics, and think tank practitioners across the three countries, the research asks what the countries’ practices as providers reveal about what makes cooperation work at a regional level, and what would give them a genuine stake in a shared architecture worth investing in.
A collaboration with The Crawford School, Australian National University, funded by the Australian Government.
Cities and Urbanization
Cities across Asia and the Pacific are drivers of growth and opportunity, hothouses for innovation, and homes to a growing majority of the region’s population. They are also under strain from environmental pressures, rising costs of living, and aging infrastructure. Effective urban policies need to respond to fast-changing conditions, make difficult trade-offs among competing needs, and strengthen the formal and informal systems that keep urban life moving, especially in rapidly growing capitals and secondary cities. It works better when the people who depend on those systems—ministries and utilities as well as informal workers, neighborhood groups, and residents—have scope to drive solutions.
To understand what this means in practice, and to develop actionable solutions, InsightWorks asks:
- How do decision-makers come to know what is happening within cities—through resident voice, local data, civic technology, and administrative records—early enough to act and in ways that respond to residents’ needs?
- How do urban leaders sequence and prioritize across competing needs like housing, transportation, energy, air quality, and public health, and why do some build durable coalitions for difficult trade-offs while others stall?
- How do informal systems of settlement, work, mobility, care, and neighborhood governance keep cities running, and what ensures reforms strengthen those systems rather than displace them?
- What coalitions, financing, and intergovernmental relationships enable city-level reforms to travel—from neighborhood to municipality, from secondary city to national policy, and across the region?
Ongoing Research About Future of Development Cooperation
Each haze season, smoke over Chiang Mai, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh closes schools and draws headlines. But haze is only part of a year-round air crisis driven by traffic, power generation, industry, and waste burning. This research examines urban air pollution in the Mekong as a political economy problem, not just a technical one. It asks who benefits from pollution sources that go poorly regulated, who carries the health costs, and who decides what gets measured and made public. By looking beyond seasonal emergencies, the project traces how citizen sensors, city platforms, and local accountability can reframe air quality as a governance issue—and whether those with the power to act have reason to do so.
A collaboration with The Crawford School, Australian National University, funded by the Australian Government.
Artificial Intelligence: Enabler and Disruptor
Artificial intelligence is moving quickly into economies, governance, and daily life across Asia and the Pacific. It offers real promise: better services, higher productivity, and new tools for solving development challenges. But the benefits are uneven. Leading AI systems often perform best in dominant languages, draw on limited data, and depend on computing power and capital concentrated among a small number of firms and states. For smaller and lower-income countries, the risk is dependence on systems they neither own nor control. How the region gains from AI will depend on the institutions, incentives, and policy choices that shape how these technologies are developed, governed, and used.
To understand what this means in practice, and to develop actionable solutions, InsightWorks asks:
- How is AI reshaping governance across Asia and the Pacific, and what new forms of state capability and accountability are required?
- What can be learned from the region’s emerging efforts to govern AI, from regulation and data governance to building the public trust on which adoption depends?
- Who gains from AI and who risks being left behind, and what determines whether it drives inclusion or exclusion between and across countries, sectors, firms and workers?
- How can the region’s smaller and lower-income states gain real agency over their AI futures when the compute, capital, data, and language behind these systems lie largely beyond their control?
Shared Prosperity and Social Mobility
Many countries in Asia and the Pacific are engines of global growth, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. But the gains are uneven, and barriers to opportunity are feeding mass migration, political strife, and other forms of instability. Ensuring that economic expansion enables broadly shared prosperity requires attention to skills development, education quality, labor market participation, and social protection systems. Inefficiencies in the institutions charged with those issues and the presence of large informal sectors in many economies are leaving segments of many populations out of the equation.
To understand what this means in practice, and to develop actionable solutions, InsightWorks asks:
- Who is benefitting from economic growth in Asia and the Pacific, in what ways, and who is left out? How does this manifest in different sectors and varying economic systems?
- How do the region’s different growth models support or undermine shared prosperity and social mobility, and how are changes in technology, the environment, demography, and political polarization reshaping who gains?
- What factors determine who gains from growth?
- How can incentive structures be shaped to deliver both growth and inclusion?
