Fostering the Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere approach to translate global goals into local actions: Lessons from national scoping workshops in ASEAN countries

The Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere (Regional-CES) is a guiding concept for environmental policies to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in urban and rural communities with maximum utilisation of local strengths and resources. To promote the Regional-CES concept as a useful guiding principle, a scoping project was designed to engage key stakeholders in selected Southeast Asian countries, namely, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, by organising workshops in these countries.These workshops consisted of sessions to explain the Regional-CES concept, discuss and identify opportunities for applying Regional-CES based on each country’s context, and share practices that may have been conducted under similar frameworks or concepts. Common obstacles include limited scientific understanding, ignorance of local needs and reality in the top-down decision-making process, and limited capacity of local agencies and society. Participants acknowledged the potential of the Regional-CES approach to advance transformative actions towards low-carbon society, resource circulation, and living in harmony with nature at regional, national and local levels, and the importance of aligning the Regional-CES concept to specific local contexts, such as local needs, policy relevance and priorities that could address social, economic and environmentalchallenges.