Crisis as Catalyst: Adaptive Institutionalism and the Revival of Multilateralism in the Post-Pandemic Indo-Pacific

• GAJULA SAI NIRANJA

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant limitations in existing mechanisms of regional and global governance and raised important questions about how regional institutions adapt to systemic crises. Although existing scholarship has examined pandemic governance, Indo-Pacific regionalism, and the rise of minilateral arrangements, limited attention has been given to the mechanisms through which systemic shocks reshape regional governance architectures and redistribute institutional functions. This article examines how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed regional governance in the Indo-Pacific through the combined perspectives of adaptive institutionalism and new regionalism. The paper’s core argument is that the pandemic functioned as a critical juncture that accelerated institutional adaptation, not through the consolidation of a single regional institution or through inevitable institutional fragmentation, but through functional differentiation and the emergence of strategic pluralism. To examine this argument, the study undertakes a qualitative comparative analysis of official policy documents, summit declarations, institutional reports, and relevant scholarly literature, focusing on the evolution of the Quad, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, and ASEAN. The findings demonstrate differentiated patterns of adaptation: the Quad expanded beyond its traditional security orientation into health security, critical technologies, maritime cooperation, and supply-chain resilience; IPEF developed modular mechanisms for economic and supply-chain coordination; and ASEAN sought to preserve regional agency and centrality through strategic hedging and engagement with emerging institutional arrangements. These developments indicate that institutional plurality can generate governance capacity when overlapping institutions develop distinct yet complementary functions in response to common challenges. The article therefore advances strategic pluralism as a conceptual framework for explaining how systemic crises can transform institutional overlap into differentiated and potentially complementary forms of regional governance. It contributes to scholarship on Indo-Pacific regionalism by demonstrating that regional resilience may emerge through distributed institutional adaptation and functional specialisation rather than institutional consolidation, while also emphasizing that such pluralism remains contingent on coordination, political commitment, and institutional complementarity.

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