Country-specific approaches key to digital government innovation in APAC

It can be difficult to open a news site or newspaper these days without reading that we live in the era of polycrisis - wherein the world is facing continuous, complex and compounding threats. It has also become clear that these crises, the moments where governments are most challenged, have often served as points of intense digital change.

Responding to such crises has defined Thomas Abell’s – then- Director of Digital Technology at the Asian Development Bank (ADB)  - time at the bank’s digital helm.

“The pandemic really moved the needle: everyone went to digital services, digital education, digital working from home,” he tells GovInsider during an interview.

The role of the Covid-19 pandemic in propelling digital government is well understood now, but the catalysing effect of crises continues to be front and centre of inspiring digital change in governments across the world (one only needs to look at Ukraine’s Diia, for example).

In an APAC context, the most dynamic geopolitical and economic region in the world, the changes from the pandemic seem to have stuck. According to Deloitte, 73 per cent of APAC citizens have noticed a more digital government services since the pandemic. “You can tell the digital economy is front and centre now, instead of just an idea”, Abell reflects as we discuss this statistic.

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Country specific approaches: the key to transforming to a more digital government?

There have been dramatic steps forward in digital government in Asia in recent years. For example, Singapore and Indonesia continue to set the global pace with integrated approaches to digital government like Life SG and INA Digital, while smaller countries like Bhutan have found their niche in developing self-sovereign IDs.

The real success in modernising government and tackling institutional risk aversion or a lack of digital skills, remarks Abell, has been in countries pursuing bespoke approaches at their own pace – “targeted, incremental progress” focusing on their strengths rather than trying to “do it all at once”.

This is especially necessary across APAC, where many governments do not have the adequate resourcing or capacity to drive wholesale systemic change in a costly and agile manner.

Abell talks about how the Vietnamese government e-cabinet programme has been a demonstration of this. The service is designed to digitise internal public sector communications in Vietnam and replace the administrative burden of the most common  tasks, rather than needing to resort to paper-based communication methods.

This includes creating the National E-document Exchange Platform to replace paper documents with e-Documents to promote efficiency and transparency. The intended outcomes of the e-cabinet programme include reducing meeting times by 30 per cent and using e-documents at all meetings.

Building confidence step-by-step

Rather than attempting to jump to sophisticated AI-driven services, or comprehensive data exchange systems, ADB supported the Vietnamese government by focusing on the bottom step of a hierarchy of digital skills’ needs: eliminating paper-based processes.

While less flashy than an AI-driven knowledge repository in the mold of Morgan Stanley’s collaboration with OpenAI, such initiatives are crucial for building confidence in digital government, paving the way for future initiatives. Smaller initiatives like this also allow ADB to establish successful partnerships that can lead to larger engagements.

The value of country-specific approaches is especially pertinent right now, Abell continues, when “there’s always the lure of the great big hype cycle”.

As well intending as some governments may be, governments don’t always leapfrog effectively when pushing the limits of public sector innovation. Recalling the idea of the hierarchy of needs, Abell argues that systematic steps must “layer” onto each other to build capacity over time, a concept he calls a “data science pyramid”.

To build effective digital government capabilities, this pyramid can help prioritise engagements to cover all the important components, starting with digital infrastructure, then data collection and organisation, and finally data analysis and prediction, including machine learning (ML) algorithms.

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Facilitating country-specific innovation

Our discussion moves to talking about how the ADB is set up to facilitate exactly this country-specific innovation, working to absorb some of the risk that governments might otherwise take in digital transformation by providing technical expertise, capacity building finance and convening power.

ADB’s digital capacity building efforts are channelled through programmes like DigitalxADB, which convene thought leaders in digital public sector innovation for knowledge sharing conferences, showcases of ADB’s digital initiatives, and experiential sessions around the technology-based and data-driven solutions developed by ADB members.

If DigitalxADB provides governments with the inspiration for digital services, ADB’s loan structures can incentivise structured, well measured and accountable digital transformation.

Typically, ADB loan disbursements are tied to measurable digital transformation milestones - part of a broader commitment to Results Based Lending (RBL). By creating accountability structures in their loans, the bank works to ensure government efforts are focused on high-value activities, driving lasting change rather than “flash in the pan” transformation.

Finally, there is the ecosystem-building, fostering bottom-up innovation through proliferating start-up ecosystems. Abell draws attention to ADB Ventures - which invests in tech start-ups across the region, promoting credibility of tech products and a bottom-up tech transformation in the belief that “startups are more nimble in digital transformation”.

ADB Ventures has backed over 50 companies with venture capital financing across 18 APAC countries including SkyCatch and Satsure, which have introduced remote sensing tech in Nauru and democratized IoT technology in Indian agriculture respectively.

If these offerings are enormously broad in scope, it’s partly because of the sheer diversity of the countries that the Bank is supporting. It’s important to remember “there’s no formula”, says Abell.

Digital government success “depends on the tangible needs at any moment. Every government will be in a different situation.”

Given the diverse composition of APAC nations, from large to small economies, different demographics and varying levels of institutional maturity, the reminder that there is no one size fits all strategy is a necessary one. Nonetheless, as Abell reflects on his time at ADB at the end of his tenure, his confidence in APAC’s digital future – in its own countries and in its growing role in the global economy – will be long enduring.

James is focused on enabling civil society and governments to achieve longer-term governance practices in pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He is interested in how futures and foresight methodologies can facilitate better ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ governance practices that can identify systemic governance dysfunctions, and overcome these dysfunctions for the long term. Specific tools he focuses on include government technology (GovTech) and entrepreneurial governance practices, often termed ‘agile governance’.

Luke Cavanaugh holds a Master’s in Global Affairs from the Schwarzman Scholars programme at Tsinghua University, Beijing and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge. He has recently worked for StateUp, as part of the ITU Team working on GovStack, and sits on the Global Visionaries Board of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union.