On 21-22 August 2025, the ASEAN Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Sustainability was held in Thailand, convened by the ASEAN Secretariat with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). It gathered governments, civil society, business, academe, and regional bodies to explore how Southeast Asia can advance the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development amid overlapping crises. The aim was to foster dialogue, identify cooperation, and highlight innovative approaches to inclusive and sustainable growth. Across two days, the discussions ranged from sustainable finance and digital innovation and the urgent need for cities and industries that serve both people and the planet.
The second day zeroed in on two themes shaping ASEAN’s future: digital transformation and caring cities. With hopeful session titles— “Digital Shifts, Human Impacts” and “Caring Cities: Strengthening Community-Based Care Systems”—the stage was set for a narrative of progress. Yet beneath the polished language, one question persisted: Whose future is being built, and whose voices remain silenced beneath the polished language of sustainability?
The Digital Divide Dressed as Progress
The morning panel on digital transformation acknowledged the double edge of innovation: its promise of economic growth, and its danger of deepening inequality. In the Philippines, the contradiction is everyday reality. Government champions digitalization—through e-governance platforms, tech companies, and AI promotion—but the lived experience is precarity, or a state of persistent insecurity.
In the Philippines, food delivery riders weave through Metro Manila traffic for twelve-hour shifts with no health insurance nor sick leave, and barely enough income to survive. Freelance online workers, who make the country one of the largest sources of digital labor, depend on volatile contracts and platforms that can cut them off without explanation. Even BPO (business processing outsourcing) employees, the so-called “backbone” of the Philippine economy, face graveyard shifts, weak labor protections, and looming automation.
Source: EILER Labor Bulletin, September 2022
Here, algorithms act as invisible employers—setting hours, wages, and discipline—while social protection systems remain stuck in the past, built on shrinking “formal” workforce. Innovation, without safeguards, becomes exploitation.
The ASEAN forum rightly spoke of the need for inclusive digital infrastructure and cross-sector partnership. But we must be honest: partnerships too often mean deals with corporations whose business models depend on keeping labor cheap and disposable. Inclusion cannot rest on corporate goodwill. It requires binding protections: recognizing gig workers as workers, extending social protection, and pitting people before platforms.
Civil society must push the conversation beyond shiny “innovation ecosystems.” Digital futures must be shaped by the very workers and communities who live them—not by technocrats or corporate boards.
Caring Cities Beyond Concrete and Steel
Later in the day, the session on “Caring Cities” was a refreshing change from the usual ASEAN fixation on highways and megaprojects. Care was framed as essential social infrastructure: childcare, eldercare, disability support, community health systems—services that make dignified life in cities possible.
This resonates sharply in the Philippines, where cities symbolize inequality. Manila glitters with malls, tollways, and luxury condos. Yet nearby, informal settlers live by flood-prone esteros, and public hospitals overflow with patients who cannot afford private care. City planning remains dominated by developers and dynasties, while care workers—mostly women—stay invisible.
To talk of “caring cities” in this context is to confront the absence of care in ours. Care work is essential but devalued; indispensable but underpaid; feminized but excluded from economic planning. Urban policies still prioritize cars over pedestrians, profit over people, enclaves over inclusive neighborhoods.
Yet alternatives exist. Joy Hernandez of ITUC-Asia Pacific highlighted the Batibot Early Learning Center in Marikina City, a childcare initiative organized by a workers’ union and supported by the local government. Batibot is more than daycare—it is a community care system rooted in solidarity. Despite harassment and red-tagging of unions and civil society, it persists, enabling women workers to balance livelihood and family life.
Such grassroots efforts show that caring cities are not abstract ideals. They are being built quietly and collectively—but often in spite of government neglect and repression.
A truly caring city in the Philippines would mean well-funded public hospitals, universal childcare and eldercare, ensuring housing as a right, and recognition of women’s unpaid care work. It would re-orient “development” away from speculative construction and toward sustaining life itself.
ASEAN’s conversation on care is an opening, but unless governments move beyond buzzwords, “caring cities” will remain empty slogans while our real cities grow more hostile to the vulnerable.
The Philippine Mirror
Listening to ASEAN leaders speak of inclusive digital futures and caring cities, one could not help but see the Philippine mirror. Our government’s obsession with infrastructure—packaged as “Build, Build, Build”—has delivered roads, bridges, and airports that primarily serve elites and investors. But where is the investment in social infrastructure? In care systems? In protections for digital workers?
What we get instead are privatized utilities, risky public-private partnerships, and token inclusion policies that never shift power. The result: widening inequality, women overburdened with unpaid care, and communities displaced by so-called development.
The ASEAN forum deserves credit for naming these gaps. But talk is not enough. Without political will to confront corporate capture, neoliberal models, and authoritarian governance that sidelines grassroots voices, these promises of “inclusive innovation” and “caring cities” will remain hollow.
Whose Future?
At the heart of all these is power. Who gets to shape the future of work, of cities, of sustainability? Are governments more accountable to investors than to its citizens? Corporations that answer to shareholders, not workers or communities? Or the people—the workers, women, and grassroots communities—whose daily lives are defined by inequality and exclusion?
If ASEAN is serious about sustainability, it must choose the latter. It must place people’s rights and needs above profit, value care work as much as construction, and ensure digital innovation serves humanity. Until then, civil society will continue asking hard questions, exposing contradictions, and fighting for a future where sustainability is more than a slogan.
A city that does not care is not sustainable; and an innovation that leaves people behind is not progress.#