The ASEAN Creative Economy Agreement for Cultural Product Protection and Legal Certainty in Economic Growth

Abstract

The creative economy has emerged as a strategic pillar within national development architecture; however, the local cultural products that constitute its foundation remain persistently vulnerable to crossborder commercial exploitation in the absence of robust legal protection. The lack of a regional legal instrument specifically addressing cultural product protection within the ASEAN creative economy framework creates a normative lacuna that disproportionately disadvantages creative economy actors, particularly in developing nations such as Indonesia. This study aims to examine the synchronisation of the ASEAN Creative Economy Agreement as a regional legal instrument in safeguarding local cultural products against transnational commercial exploitation, while simultaneously assessing the effectiveness of its legal certainty guarantees in accelerating extensive convenience for creative economy stakeholders to support national economic growth. Employing a normative juridical methodology through statute, conceptual, and comparative approaches, this research critically analyses the structural adequacy of existing normative frameworks at both the regional and national levels. The findings reveal that normative harmonisation within the ASEAN Creative Economy Agreement requires substantive reinforcement through a sui generis mechanism capable of accommodating the distinctive characteristics of local cultural products, and that wellstructured legal certainty functions as a significant catalyst for accelerating the regional creative economy ecosystem. The novelty of this research lies in the integration of a regional economic legal regime with the concept of extensive convenience as a novel legal instrument construction designed to sustainably accelerate the creative economy. These findings carry meaningful implications for the urgent reform of national and regional legal policy frameworks that are genuinely responsive to the dynamic, culturally rooted nature of the creative economy.