This book is one of the products of the ‘Integration Through Law: The ASEAN Way in a Comparative Context’ Project or the ASEAN Integration Through Law (ITL) Project sponsored by the Centre for International Law (CIL) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The ASEAN ITL Project is directed by Professor J. H. H. Weiler, President of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and Professor of Law at NUS, with the assistance of Dr Tan Hsien-Li, Senior CIL Research Fellow, as the Executive Director.

I was invited by Professor Weiler on 30 June 2011 to be the principal investigator for the Governance and Management Research Group's project on the role of the public bureaucracy in policy implementation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. The ASEAN was formed on 8 August 1967 by the five member states of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The number of member states has gradually increased to ten from 1984 to 1999 with the addition of Brunei Darussalam in January 1984, Vietnam in July 1995, Lao People's Democratic Republic and Myanmar in July 1997 and Cambodia in April 1999. As resource and time constraints did not permit the group to conduct research on all the ten member countries, the decision was made after consulting the project leaders to focus on the role of the public bureaucracy in policy implementation in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.

I would like to thank all the contributors for accepting my invitation to write the chapters in this book and for attending the two research workshops in Singapore on 14 October 2011 and 17–18 July 2012. Two important decisions were made at the first research workshop in October 2011. First, all the authors agreed to use the six variables identified by Van Meter and Van Horn to analyse the public bureaucracy's role in policy implementation in the five ASEAN countries.

The second important decision made at the October 2011 workshop was to illustrate the public bureaucracy's role in implementing ASEAN policies in the five countries by focusing on two case studies.