Locations
Redefining Security
Development Circuit Breakers for a More Secure Future
Global military expenditure has reached a staggering $2.9 trillion, yet some of the gravest threats facing Asia and the Pacific today cannot be addressed through military deterrence alone. From transnational cyber-scam economies and climate and health-driven shocks to endemic economic insecurity and the erosion of trust in public institutions, the region is grappling with a new era of compounding, multidimensional risks.
The Report suggests that security strategies at global, regional and national levels are largely misaligned with the risks facing the region and need to be revised to address current conditions. It argues that the most significant security threats in the region are development challenges and that investment in human development is one of the most urgent security responses of our time. In this new security landscape, countries across the region are no longer managing discrete crises with intervals of recovery between them. They are operating in a state of permanent crisis management, in which shocks interact and amplify one another. A complex system of structural vulnerabilities defines this regional landscape:
FOUR DEVELOPMENT CIRCUIT BREAKERS
1. Governance and institutional legitimacy. By ensuring that institutions deliver quality services, uphold human rights and maintain the rule of law, this circuit breaker helps retain public trust in and legitimacy and acts as a foundation for all other circuit breakers.
2. Digital system integrity. Strengthening digital governance protects people from technology-related security threats and creates an enabling environment for technology to advance inclusive and sustainable development.
3. Economic security. Through resilient social protection systems, pathways to formal employment and efforts to reduce inequality and expand opportunities, this circuit breaker can reinforce capacities of households to absorb shocks and disruptions.
4. Climate and health architecture. Building anticipatory systems can determine whether environmental and health hazards remain manageable events or become full-blown crises.
Key Messages:
Shocks and disruptions are frequent, interlinked, and countries no longer have enough time to recover before the next one arrives. This is putting a systemic strain on the ability to cope and recover. The policy challenge therefore is not just about how we manage these threats, but how do countries build and preserve development gains and capabilities to recover and stabilize while continuing to develop.
Illustrative Examples
Fiji’s Adaptive Social Protection System: Fiji’s response to COVID-19 illustrates the importance of institutional resilience. COVID-19 drove an estimated 15.2% economic contraction in 2020, followed by another 4.1% decline in 2021, while public debt rose from 51.6% of GDP in 2019 to 87% in 2021, reflecting one of the region’s most severe pandemic shocks. Recovery efforts combined emergency assistance with investments in adaptive social protection that can be expanded rapidly during future crises. By 2023, Fiji’s GDP had exceeded pre-pandemic levels, illustrating how capabilities and institutions built to protect households can accelerate recovery and protect development gains.
Anticipatory Action in the Philippines: The Philippines has made significant progress in institutionalizing anticipatory action within its disaster risk management system, linking impact-based forecasting, early warning systems, pre-agreed interventions and pre-arranged financing. For example, anticipatory action mechanisms have been developed to enable multipurpose cash transfers to reach up to 125,000 vulnerable people three days before a Category 4 or 5 typhoon makes landfall, protecting households before crops, assets and savings are lost. This approach demonstrates how forecast-based early action, combined with social protection systems and advance financing, can help protect vulnerable households, reduce disaster-related losses and potentially lower subsequent humanitarian response and recovery costs.
Long term security outcomes are shaped not only by police, military, and intelligence institutions, but also by those making decisions on public finance, regulation and development planning. At the same time, concerns about climate and disaster risks, cyber threats, critical infrastructure, economic resilience and geopolitical uncertainty are increasingly influencing investment priorities and resource allocation. Finance ministers, city and local governments, policy banks and financing institutions will therefore play an increasingly important role in shaping resilience and stability. Investments in social protection, digital integrity, climate and disaster preparedness and good governance can reduce the vulnerabilities that allow shocks to escalate into crisis. Prevention, therefore, must become a criterion for allocating public resources, guiding how governments allocate resources not only for current needs, but also the risks that could undermine future stability and development.
Illustrative Examples
Sri Lanka’s Economic Crisis and Social Protection Response: Sri Lanka's 2022 economic crisis demonstrated how fiscal vulnerabilities can quickly become broader stability challenges. As debt distress, inflation and shortages of essential goods intensified, poverty rose from 11% in 2019 to more than 25% in 2023, contributing to widespread social and political unrest. The government's response, including reforms to social assistance through the Aswesuma programme, highlighted the critical role of social protection in protecting vulnerable households’ ability to weather further economic shocks, illustrating how social protection can serve as a critical stabilizer during periods of economic crisis. The experience underscores that fiscal policy and social protection are no longer simply economic instruments; they are increasingly central to national resilience and stability.
Pakistan’s Governance Reform Agenda: Pakistan demonstrates that choices around fiscal resilience and institutional reform have direct security consequences. Following inflation that approached 38%, the IMF’s 2025 Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment estimated that sustained governance reforms could raise GDP by 5–6.5% over the following five years. The assessment underscores the growing link between governance, fiscal management, and resilience, illustrating the economic dividend of stronger institutions while helping to reduce the conditions that contribute to instability.
Police are dealing with online scams, military forces are responding to climate crisis, border security personnels are handling migration and managing displacement, intelligence agencies are dealing with digital misinformation and disinformation. At the same time, development institutions are being asked to address challenges shaped by geopolitics, insecurity, digital threats and transnational shocks. As the boundaries between security and development become less distinct, neither sector can succeed alone. The challenge isn’t to continuously expand the mandates of individual institutions, but to create a shared understanding and clear responsibilities for managing risks across finance, development, regulatory and security actors.
Illustrative Examples
Responding to Scam Economies in Southeast Asia: Cyber-enabled scam operations have become one of the fastest-growing transnational threats in Asia. Estimates suggest the region may lose as much as US$114 billion annually through online fraud and scam networks while at least 300,000 people are estimated to be working in scam compounds across Southeast Asia. These operations combine cybercrime, human trafficking, illicit finance and organized criminal activity, making them impossible to address through law enforcement measures alone. UNDP has supported multi-sector responses involving regulators, financial institutions, technology companies and development actors, demonstrating the need for integrated approaches. In Cambodia, UNDP convened over 40 experts from 20 organizations, with INTERPOL committed to training Cambodian officers on its cross-border payment intervention mechanism.
Myanmar’s Interconnected Crisis: In Myanmar, conflict, economic collapse, weak governance, and criminal economies have converged. GDP contracted by 17.9% in 2021, poverty increased from 24.8% to 49.7% between 2017 and 2023, and Myanmar has become an epicenter of the regional cyber-scam economy while also returning to being the world's largest opium producer. The UNDP report explicitly concludes that these criminal economies cannot be addressed by development or security actors in isolation and effective responses require coordinated action across humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors rather than siloed interventions.
As countries become more interconnected, as risks become more transboundary, trust between people, between nations, between institutions are going to be more critical. Development efforts build trust by expanding opportunities, enabling cooperation to address shared risks, and lay foundation for sustainable peace. Hence, preserving the trust necessary for international cooperation, for collective security and effective multilateralism is going to be more important than ever before. Building, sustaining and measuring trust should therefore be an explicit development objective and cornerstone of effective multilateralism.
Illustrative Examples
Justice and Security Sector Reform in Pakistan: Pakistanshows how development investment can actively rebuild trust in security institutions. UNDP-supported justice and security reforms established 72 virtual courts and 75 community access points and trained more than 2,700 law-enforcement personnel, enabling over 50,000 court hearings in 2024 alone and expanding access to justice in underserved areas. A subsequent survey found 73% satisfaction with police interactions and 82% appreciation of community peace committees, alongside improved perceptions of courts, police and local government. The experience illustrates how making institutions more accessible, responsive and people-centred can help build public confidence while improving security and governance outcomes.
Village Courts in Bangladesh: Accessible local justice can strengthen trust before everyday grievances escalate. In rural Bangladesh, UNDP-supported village courts provide affordable community-level dispute resolution, empowering communities to settle disputes while reducing pressure on the formal justice system. In the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, local mediators and civil-society organizations also work with community leaders, authorities and humanitarian actors to address disputes over housing, land, property and labour rights. These mechanisms turn fair and accessible service delivery into a practical investment in institutional legitimacy and social cohesion, strengthening public confidence in institutions and reducing the likelihood that local grievances will escalate into broader tensions.
Development investments can help stop risks from escalating into instability and crisis. The circuit breakers described in the report can interrupt the pathways through which shocks spread and compound. Yet investments still flow into response rather than prevention. Political leaders and policy makers often have the pressure to demonstrate quick results within political and budget cycles while the benefits of prevention are measured in crises that never occur. As a result, prevention struggles to attract sustained political attention and financing despite its long-term value. The challenge is therefore to make prevention visible, credible and investable without claiming certainty about crises avoided. Strengthening development capabilities should be understood not only as a social investment, but as an essential investment in long-term security.
Illustrative Example
Peacebuilding and Reintegration in Bangsamoro: In the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, peacebuilding has been reinforced through investments in governance, livelihoods and local institutions. UNDP-supported initiatives connected approximately 650 vulnerable households to economic opportunities while strengthening collaboration across 17 regional government agencies. The experience demonstrates how inclusive development can interrupt pathways that otherwise contribute to instability and conflict recurrence.
Early warning, financing, and public services only become effective when they are trusted, accessible and connected to local actors who can act quickly. Putting people at the center of security means ensuring communities have the voice, resources and institutional links needed to anticipate and prevent interconnected risks from becoming crisis while governments provide authority, resources and scale needed for lasting resilience.
Illustrative Examples
Community Peacebuilding in Bangsamoro: In the Philippines’ Bangsamoro region, community-driven planning has connected vulnerable communities directly with government and peacebuilding institutions, helping local authorities identify and mediate disputes before they escalate into violence. Across three conflict-affected areas, 650 vulnerable households participated in locally led livelihood and resilience initiatives, while a platform involving 17 BARMM government agencies linked community priorities with early warning, mediation, human rights and transitional-justice mechanisms. While not part of formal negotiations, these interventions helped sustain the Bangsamoro agreement by addressing conflict drivers, building trust in autonomous institutions, and linking early warning to mediation and rights-based responses. They complemented normalization (including the decommissioning of over 26,000 MILF combatants and support to former combatants and their families) while reducing risks to peace gains. UNDP Philippines, Peacebuilding and Stabilization, 2025. The experience demonstrates how security is strengthened when communities are active partners in shaping solutions rather than passive recipients.
Community Peacebuilding in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG): In PNG, UNDP through the UN Highlands Joint Programme promotes area-based programming to address root causes of conflict in the Highlands. This initiative supports trusted local mediators to facilitate dialogue and support local peace agreements among parties in conflict. This includes working with community leaders, churches and faith-based organizations to support peace processes and strengthen broader ownership of the peace agreements. For example, in 2024, after mediation efforts supported by UNDP and the local church, a peace agreement was signed between clans in the Highlands, marking the end of an armed tribal conflict that had been ongoing since 1997, and which had displaced 5,000 people. This type of investment in local-level peacebuilding efforts builds on existing local networks to rebuild security and increase the likelihood of sustaining peace.
Risks are increasingly interconnected and cascade across climate, economic, social, digital and governance systems while current development financing architecture remains fragmented across sectors and siloed funding windows that treat risks separately. There’s a need for deeper shift in how development finance is organized, one that follows how risks interact in practice, enabling integrated actions and investment in capabilities to reduce multiple risks simultaneously.
Illustrative Examples
Integrated National Financing Frameworks: UNDP’s Integrated National Financing Frameworks (INFFs) provide a practical example of how governments can organize financing around interconnected risks. Today, 90 countries are using the INFF approach, with more than 65 countries implementing financing reforms informed by the framework. INFF-supported reforms are estimated to have helped mobilize US$56 billion in new financing and align an additional US$49 billion toward sustainable development priorities. The approach demonstrates how financing systems can be structured to address climate, economic, governance and social challenges together rather than in isolation.
Mongolia’s Green Energy Transition: Mongolia's green energy transition shows why financing architectures must be designed around interconnected risks. Investments in renewable energy contribute simultaneously to climate mitigation, energy security, improved air quality, public health and economic resilience. Through integrated financing approaches that align public policy, development finance and private investment, Mongolia has sought to unlock larger-scale resources for its energy transition. With a target of increasing renewable energy to 30% of installed capacity by 2030, the country's experience demonstrates how integrated financing system can be designed to around interconnected risks through a single strategic investment pathway rather than sectoral silos.
Cross-border early warning for climate action and disaster, safer digital systems and disease surveillance offer tangible entry points to cooperate even in hyper charged environment. Such tactical cooperation can strengthen trust, relationships and mechanisms for shared solutions that support broader global and regional resilience.
Illustrative Examples
Tsunami Warning and Mitigation: The Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System illustrates how cooperation around shared risks can create durable regional partnerships. The system emerged following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed approximately 228,000 lives across 14 countries. Today, it links countries through shared monitoring, early warning and preparedness mechanisms, demonstrating how collective action on common risks can save lives while building practical habits of cooperation. Building on this regional architecture, UNDP and the Government of Japan have since 2017 helped strengthen tsunami preparedness across 24 countries in Asia and the Pacific, reaching more than 220,000 students and teachers and supporting nearly 800 schools through evacuation drills, disaster education, and preparedness planning. By embedding a culture of preparedness in schools and communities, the initiative helped ensure that when disaster strikes, vulnerable populations have the knowledge, systems, and confidence to act quickly, save lives, and recover faster while reinforcing cooperation around a shared regional risk.
Cooperation in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: The Himalayan water system serves nearly two billion people across Asia, supporting water, food, livelihoods and energy source from Himalayan range to flat river belts. Recent floods from Nepal-China borders showcase why glacier monitoring, water management, disaster preparedness requires cooperation across borders. Practical cooperation on data sharing, joint planning, adaptive water governance and cross-border early warning illustrates how countries can work together on shared vulnerabilities while advancing both development and confidence-building objectives.
