Shortly after GW Law’s worldwide webinar on open contracting, GW Law’s Professor Christopher Yukins joined a regional conference in Borneo, held in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. That conference helped launch a report, prepared by Professor Yukins and GW Law students Anisley Sanchez and Ellen Rolda for the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), on legal issues in open contracting in the ASEAN member states.
ASEAN was established in 1967 with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration by Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Since then, Brunei Darussalam, Viet Nam, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Cambodia have joined, to make up what is today the ten member states of ASEAN. (Timor-Leste, the newest Member State, had not formally joined ASEAN at the time the study launched.)
At a September 2025 regional conference in Kuching, Malaysia which helped launch the study, experts from around the world discussed the prospects for open contracting as an anti-corruption tool in the ASEAN nations. The conference outcomes document called for a strengthening of legal and policy frameworks, aligned with core open contracting principles of disclosure, participation, and accountability.
The forthcoming UNODC report is the next step – an in-depth look at what is needed, from a legal and regulatory perspective, to bring open contracting to the ASEAN member states.
Open contracting is a simple concept: it means making public procurement data both accessible (typically by posting it online) and machine-readable (so that the data can be readily scanned and assessed). As the Open Contracting Partnership explains, open contracting “consists of disclosure and citizen engagement throughout the entire procurement process,” which “increases competition, improves public service delivery, creates better feedback loops, and ensures better value for money.”
The report will assess the prospects for open contracting in the ASEAN nations by looking to ten factors highlighted in a landmark report, How can we legislate for open contracting? (2021), published by the Open Contracting Partnership:
- Set out clear principles for all public procurement procedures in a single piece of overarching legislation.
- Establish strong anti-corruption and conflict of interest provisions.
- Promote competition and provide clear safeguards in non-competitive procedures, such as those used in emergency procurement.
- Ensure clear requirements to publish information at all stages of the procurement process, and maintain a complete record in one location.
- Use digital platforms and open data standards to foster and increase transparency and accessibility to information about public procurement procedures.
- Enforce publication requirements, deadlines, and clearly manage exemptions.
- Create procedures for public participation and monitoring across the entire procurement cycle.
- Support an accessible and effective complaints procedure.
- Empower oversight authorities.
- Provide effective guidance and guidelines to make procurement processes accessible and user-friendly to government, private sector, and civic users or observers of the system.
