Amid intersecting crises and threats that cross borders and sectors, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says a redefinition of security is required.
A newly released United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report argues that development should assume a larger role in addressing insecurity—not in the traditional sense, but in the way it actually affects people across Asia and the Pacific. The document calls for a re‑orientation of development policies to reflect the lived realities of insecurity throughout the region.
Kanni Wignaraja, the United Nations Development Programme’s regional director for Asia and the Pacific, told Catherine Putz, managing editor of The Diplomat, that the issue is not a binary choice between defence and development.
What is essential, however, is achieving the proper balance, investing in development and prevention, and using development to strengthen security.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has outlined in its latest report a framework of “development circuit breakers” designed to address economic insecurity, weak institutions, digital disruption and climate‑health pressures, which it says interact and reinforce one another. The report adds: “Trust is the one switch that allows all four circuit breakers to work.”
"Each transition relies on trust—both between individuals and institutions, and among the various institutions that manage different components of the system," Wignaraja said.
In an interview, Kanni Wignaraja, UNDP regional director for Asia and the Pacific, expanded on the structural vulnerabilities that shape today’s security landscape, placed recent defence‑spending trends in context and urged regional governments to shift their mindset from managing isolated crises to managing shared risks.
When asked what structural vulnerabilities define the modern security landscape across Asia and the Pacific, Wignaraja highlighted the underlying factors that underpin contemporary threats in the region.
How is the current reality different from previous periods, what’s changed?
A lot has changed in the way we see and feel vulnerability and insecurity today across the region and the world.
Previously, maybe there were more episodic periods of intense pain, wars, for example, but more contained.
Now I feel it’s almost like having chronic pain.
It’s all of the time and in so many more places.
And that is a very different scenario of insecurity and feeling unsafe.
Countries face overlapping shocks, often before they have recovered from the last.
The old crisis-recovery-rebuilding cycle is breaking down, putting hard-won development gains repeatedly at risk.
The nature of the threats has changed too: many are not contained within borders.
Climate shocks, pandemics, cybercrime, disinformation, supply-chain disruptions and water insecurity move across countries and systems.
Online criminal economies are estimated to generate $1.03 trillion annually, and cybercrime victims are projected to incur $114.1 billion in losses in 2025.
An additional exponential factor is evident, as these risks now travel more rapidly, interconnect more swiftly and spread like wildfires.
Economic insecurity can undermine public trust; climate‑related shocks damage livelihoods and pressure government budgets; weak institutions provide opportunities for illicit economies.
Sri Lanka exemplifies the link between its prolonged economic crisis and a sharp rise in poverty, which increased from 11 percent in 2019 to over 25 percent in 2023. The surge in poverty has unfolded alongside broader social and political unrest across the country.
Myanmar shows what can happen when several pressures converge and collide.
Conflict, economic decline, poverty, weak governance and criminal economies increasingly reinforce one another.
These cannot be neatly separated into security problems on the one hand and development problems on the other.
Our response systems were built for episodic emergencies.
They now have to manage chronic, connected insecurity.
Worldwide defense expenditures are on the rise, with notable increases in Asia as governments allocate more funds to military capabilities. Meanwhile, development budgets have been reduced, with some experiencing dramatic cuts.
Do these trends reflect – or do they ignore – the actual threats communities across Asia and the Pacific face?
Today recorded military budgets are close to US$3 trillion.
At the same time official development assistance (ODA) has fallen to $175 billion.
This is just 6 cents to the dollar if we compare the ratio between the two.
Officials stressed that the discussion is not about choosing between defense and development, but about achieving the right balance of investment.
And to optimize security spending that aligns with development outcomes.
The questions is how to use both military and development budgets to invest in common outcomes.
And how do you leverage one to get more of the other?
Their budgets can also serve as a frontline tool to ensure both national safety and the well‑being of the population.
Investments in technologies that enhance wellbeing—including protection measures, early‑warning and preparedness systems, vaccine production and access, AI integrity, and robust rule‑of‑law and justice institutions—are being prioritised. Such investments are intended to prevent risks from developing into full‑scale crises.
Regardless of the source of funding, investment must be directed more deliberately toward prevention and with a longer‑term perspective.
Investing one US dollar in preventive measures can avert as much as US$103 in costs associated with conflict and crises.
In the Philippines, anticipatory systems can reach 125,000 vulnerable people three days before a Category 4 or Category 5 typhoon, helping to safeguard assets and savings.
Some of the new risks also require us to work differently.
Cyber scams exemplify the convergence of cybercrime, human trafficking, illicit finance and organized crime, and they frequently promote cross‑border conflict.
No single institution can make a dent in this.
Ultimately, it is about getting a better security return from the investments we make.
And where together, one-plus-one can be way beyond two.
The opportunity is to find these investments that strengthen both.
Experts have asked what is meant by “the securitization of development” and why it is important to avoid securitizing development as they encourage governments to rethink the connections between development and security.
The risk is that development could come to be seen primarily through a security lens.
Development, when viewed through the perspective of human wellbeing, must continue to be treated as an objective in its own right.
These objectives encompass reducing poverty, eliminating major diseases, ensuring universal access to full education and decent jobs, providing affordable energy, water and food for all, protecting rights and enabling people to live with dignity.
The report contends that maintaining security—a condition that ensures a safer present and future for everyone, not merely a select few—cannot be achieved without development defined as the improvement of human wellbeing for all.
Investing in people, institutions and resilience is not separate from security; it is among the most effective ways to achieve it.
That is different from turning development into a security instrument.
Development ought to enable people to live free from fear and want, with dignity; it should expand individuals’ capabilities, strengthen their rights, improve access to services and create new opportunities.
This is why the report places such emphasis on people-centered security.
Individuals and communities should be at the heart of both development policy and security decisions.
Security, viewed in this way, concerns whether individuals can feel safe in their homes, safeguard their livelihoods, obtain justice and essential services, and live without fear.
The approach reflects the human‑security tradition that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has championed since the early 1990s.
The central message is that if governments are serious about security in the fullest sense, investment in development is non-negotiable.
Effective governance, economic opportunity, social protection, digital resilience, climate adaptation and access to justice are not replacements for security; they constitute some of its most essential foundations.
A portion of the report observes that “Current responses generate the crises they were meant to prevent,” referring to the phenomenon described as the “response and reactive trap.” It asks why regional governments find it so difficult to invest in prevention.
How can governments break out of this particular trap?
The fundamental problem with prevention is that when it works, it is often invisible.
Political and fiscal cycles tend to reward outcomes that are immediately visible, whereas the benefits of preventive measures are often measured by crises that never materialize.
Consequently, financing response and reconstruction becomes simpler than funding preventative investments that could have reduced the losses in the first place.
We have to make prevention politically meaningful, economically visible and financially viable.
That means translating risks into investments with clearer costs, returns and avoided losses.
We need to move from paying for disasters to investing in resilience before they happen.
The shift is from managing each emergency to managing compounding risks over time.
Countries need the capacity to anticipate and absorb shocks, protect development gains and recover more quickly. They must avoid rebuilding over the same vulnerabilities after each crisis.
Finance ministries, local governments and financing institutions are increasingly shaping resilience through their decisions on public finance, regulation and development planning.
Prevention must be adopted as a criterion for allocating public resources, a shift that is already beginning to appear across the region.
A better integrated financing architecture is central to breaking the reactive cycle.
The United Nations Development Programme’s Integrated National Financing Frameworks, now being implemented in more than 90 countries, illustrate how nations can coordinate public and private financing around interlinked risks, making prevention economically visible and attractive for investment.
Mongolia’s green‑energy transition, with the United Nations Development Programme supporting the implementation of the Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF), illustrates that a single, integrated financing pathway can simultaneously strengthen climate resilience, energy security and economic stability.
We need to change the economics and politics of prevention.
Increasing the transparency of risks, avoided losses and returns makes it easier to justify prevention measures politically and renders them more attractive to financial investors.
Security encompasses not only the ability to respond when incidents occur, but also the capacity to prevent disruptions from escalating into an explosive crisis.
Bangladesh and Nepal are recent examples of doing so.
The report’s principal message frames governance and institutional legitimacy, digital‑system integrity, economic security and climate‑health resilience as interlinked “circuit breakers,” stressing that these elements function together and cannot be treated as separate domains.
The speaker argued that, for too long, responses—including analytical ones—have treated the major issues and contemporary disruptors as isolated systems.
If an electrical fire ignites in a single location, it must be contained to prevent it from spreading and engulfing the entire house.
That is the purpose of the circuit breakers.
The report identifies four distinct circuit breakers, yet the risks each one targets are interrelated rather than operating in isolation.
The Big Four are tackling economic insecurity, weak institutions, digital disruption and climate‑health pressures, which are increasingly interlinked and mutually reinforcing.
The most volatile risks that can set the place on fire often lie in the connections between them.
A shock in one area can quickly travel through the whole system.
Climate shocks can undermine economic security, and economic insecurity can erode public trust. Weak governance can enable criminal networks and the spread of disinformation, while digital harms can deepen social divisions.
That is how one vulnerability can become a much wider crisis.
Trust is the one switch that allows all four circuit breakers to work.
Each transition relies on trust—both between individuals and institutions, and among the various institutions that oversee distinct components of the system.
Trusted institutions can avoid or reduce the tensions through which risks escalate.
In Pakistan, the introduction of virtual courts and community access points has enhanced public perceptions of the police and the justice system. In Bangladesh, village courts are being used to settle routine disputes before they expand.
These examples show how strengthening trust at the community level reinforces all four circuit breakers.
The same on the digital and this AI spurt.
“How do we make sure that something like AI does not undermine trust that has been built over time, but it is used as an extender or accelerator on the positive side?”
It is about managing these four circuit breakers, but in one system.
The report’s central message is that new approaches to “anticipating, preventing and managing both internal and transboundary challenges” are needed.
Can you summarize some of those new approaches?
We need to move from managing individual crises to managing shared risks.
Neither do climate risks, human trafficking, illicit financial flows or many of the other pressures we face today.
No country or institution can address these challenges alone.
It requires a level of multi-country, regional and global cooperation that we have not seen before.
And that, I think, is where institutions like the United Nations are so key.
That means cooperation itself becomes a form of prevention.
But cooperation works when countries see it in their own interest.
Such cooperation depends on trust, especially when nations are called upon to exchange data, coordinate actions or make decisions whose benefits extend across borders.
Subregional cooperation mechanisms—including ASEAN and the Mekong River Commission—illustrate how nations can move beyond purely national responses and explore collective approaches to shared risks.
Institutions of development and security need to work differently together, starting with where outcomes align.
The objective is not to broaden each party’s mandate, but to develop a shared understanding of risk and to define clearer responsibilities for managing it in the collective interest.
Ultimately, we need to move to strengthen these connected systems.
Success will be judged not only by how effectively we respond to the next crisis, but also by how well we prevent a shock from developing into a full‑blown emergency.
Why it matters
Integrating development into security strategies helps Bangladesh prevent crises, protect livelihoods and strengthen institutional trust.