Khazanah Nasional has published the concept paper for its 2026 Megatrends Forum under the theme “Who’s Got the Power? Watching the Watchmen in an Imbalanced World.” The document, and the accompanying forum held on 5 October, position power, its concentration, its exercise and its counterbalances, as the central analytical frame for understanding today’s major structural forces.

The paper traces how power has moved from individuals to institutions, yet still remains unevenly distributed across geopolitics, technology, climate, demographics and inequality. It argues that many of the defining challenges of the current decade are not purely economic or technological. They are contests over who sets the rules, who captures the returns, and who bears the risks.

At the forum, Khazanah Managing Director Datuk Amirul Feisal Wan Zahir applied the framework directly to Malaysia. He described the country as needing to recover the spirit of the “Sang Kancil”, the clever, adaptive mouse-deer of local folklore. As a mid-sized economy, Malaysia cannot rely on the domestic market depth or capital buffers available to larger powers. Resilience, he argued, must come from breadth: more sources of capital, more export destinations, and more diversified supply-chain relationships.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who opened the forum, stated that he would present the concept paper to Cabinet this Friday. The political elevation of the document underscores its intended role as a strategic input rather than a purely intellectual exercise.

For institutional investors and asset owners operating in or allocating to ASEAN, the framing is useful. It shifts the conversation from headline growth rates to the underlying distribution of power that shapes investment outcomes. Concentration of capital in a handful of technology platforms, the weaponisation of industrial policy, the competition for energy and critical minerals, and the demographic pressures on fiscal systems all appear differently when viewed as power contests rather than neutral market phenomena.

Khazanah’s own portfolio and policy influence give the analysis additional weight. As Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, it sits at the intersection of commercial investment and national development priorities. The emphasis on mid-tier companies, the senior economy, and the need to capture a greater share of value from the AI and data-centre build-out all flow logically from the power lens.

The paper does not prescribe detailed portfolio allocations. Its contribution is diagnostic. It asks investors and policymakers to examine who holds leverage in each of the major global systems, and what that implies for a country or institution that does not sit at the centre of those systems. For a mid-sized Asian economy, the answer is diversification of relationships and sources of capital. For an allocator, it is a reminder that concentration risk is not only financial. It is also political and structural.

Whether the framework influences actual capital deployment will depend on follow-through. The fact that the Prime Minister has undertaken to table the paper at Cabinet, however, gives it a clearer policy pathway than most conceptual exercises.