The vision of an integrated, poverty-free, prosperous, and peaceful Asia and the Pacific is what motivates the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to support regional cooperation and integration (RCI) initiatives. Indeed, changing world economic realities underscore the importance of closer economic cooperation for the region’s sustained and stable growth; they also highlight the need for ADB to provide a coherent and strategically focused approach to RCI.
The RCI Strategy
Responding to this clarion call, ADB developed an RCI Strategy, which was endorsed by its Board of Directors on 25 July 2006. The Strategy directs ADB to play an active role as catalyst, coordinator, and knowledge leader of RCI in Asia and the Pacific. In April 2008, the Bank also unveiled its Strategy 2020, which identified regional integration as one of its three development agendas and RCI as a core specialization and operational area.