The Colombo Plan gradually shook off the taint of British Treasury designs to become an experiment of shared interest by a growing number of newly-independent regional governments. An expanded membership brought tentative explorations of regional ideation and practice. It was also necessary for members to build a distinctive identity in a region being shaped by the Cold War, and amidst other organisations such as the UN’s Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East. They did so through elaborate hospitality in annual meetings and the showcasing of iconic development projects.

While perhaps not obvious initially, the formative period for the Colombo Plan was also the dawn of a new arena for the conduct of foreign relations. The Colombo conference at the start of 1950, while focused on development needs, also provided a stage for experiments in representation, hospitality and diplomacy.

The information experts helped enable a broad-based appreciation of the Colombo Plan’s unusual qualities. Through their efforts, the Colombo Plan gestured towards ideals of regional co-operation within a broader internationalism in ways that continued to attract its regional members even as they were clear-eyed about its practical limitations. State-making was such a high priority for regional members that region-making often came second, even as it retained its appeal. One of the reasons for the Colombo Plan’s embrace during the long 1950s and its persistence in popular remembering in more recent decades was, and still is, this shape-shifting quality. Greater than the sum of its component parts when needed for publicity and promotional reasons, it could also dissemble easily into discrete bilateral relationships or forms of aid such as iconic projects or the flows of sponsored students. As critiques of foreign aid programs accumulated from the mid-1960s onwards, its benign character and fading significance spared it from becoming the subject of the sharpest attacks.

Those interested in questions of new diplomacy, foreign aid and regionalism in decolonizing Asia gain much from analysis of the Colombo Plan’s laboratory of development internationalism. In addition to the three components of development internationalism outlined, namely, state-making harnessed to growth, internationalism and experimental regionalism, each of the chapters in this book features common threads underpinning the ‘laboratory’ nature of the Colombo Plan.

For the historian, two features stand out over the course of the years 1950–1951, as the Colombo Plan took shape. The first is a sense of overloaded expectations by the British not being met, especially after the Americans declined to tie their own policy to British plans for sterling debt reduction. Logically, those seeking a British-shaped or US-determined narrative dependent on the conjoining of finance, foreign policy and defence strategy in plans for South and Southeast Asia need to look elsewhere, not at the Colombo Plan. The second is the emergence of a broader range of diplomats, politicians and planners whose work appears marginally in British and US archival records, but from 1950–51 increasingly in the archives of other Colombo Plan members such as Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand. This bigger cast of diplomatic players decouples the Colombo Plan from its British anchoring and enables the agency of others to emerge more fully.

More generally, the Colombo Plan functioned as a foreign relations laboratory in which knowledge about other peoples and places could accumulate, new professional networks could be built and ideas could be tested.

Without overstating the case for direct lineage between current-day international organizations and the Colombo Plan, its Consultative Committee practices of generous time for discussion, decision-making by consensus and diverting the most controversial content to other forums, find echoes in the ways of ASEAN. In its recurring discussions about region, acknowledgment of Cold War dynamics, and the potential for regional action through north-south cooperation, the Colombo Plan might also be regarded as a staging post towards the more recent embrace of the ‘Indo-Pacific’. In the history of development, the Colombo Plan, while constrained in its operation by legacies of colonialism and Cold War alignments, also enjoyed a certain license during the long 1950s before standardized aid measurement and the professionalization of foreign aid bureaucracies caught up with it. It enabled member countries to tell stories about themselves for regional readers and viewers.

By the late 1950s, the Colombo Plan had gathered steam and supporters. As this chapter shows, the small Bureau in Colombo attracted talented experts who worked as advocates as much as the administrators. Drawn on a rotating basis from donor nations, the directors of the Bureau could be counted to expand the realms of their work and reporting. For several of the newly joined, membership was a step towards higher diplomatic cachet, towards full sovereignty, membership of the UN, or simply higher standing among neighbours. Representatives enjoyed the indulgences granted by long meetings. In addition to lavish hospitality, the annual meetings provided ample space for reflections on the state of ‘East–West’ relations and on the best paths towards peace and prosperity. Still buoyed by the momentum from Bandung, leaders such as Sukarno relished the chance to again proclaim how the world had changed and how Indonesia would not be moulded into a Western approximation of how a state should appear. One grievance that Asian representatives found they had in common with colleagues from Australia and especially New Zealand, was the effects of price fluctuations on their main exports.