Digital governance in a complex and uncertain world

GOVERNANCE is about the decisions we take collectively as a society, and achieving the common good is a noble ideal to work towards. As much as we would like the decision-making process to be representative of – and the results fair to – everyone in society, this ideal is very hard to reach.

The challenges of good governance are no less acute in the digital age. There are very few tried and tested formulas of good digital governance; no ready playbooks to adapt. Our task is further complicated by rapid change in the sophistication and use of technologies, as well as the global nature of their reach. Everything we do remains very much a “minimum viable product”.

In 2018, the UK published its Online Harms White Paper, which contained recommendations for regulating online platforms to address harmful material such as child sexual-abuse material and terrorist content. Ironically, there were as many criticisms of inadequacy as there were of over-reach.

Five years on and five ministers later, a bill is still coursing its way through parliament.

The EU has enacted landmark “horizontal” regulations in the past decade, including the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the more recent Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. However, the bloc’s trailblazing approach has attracted concerns about over-regulation and the potential negative impacts on innovation and legitimate use cases.

China has pioneered regulations on publicly available generative artificial intelligence (AI) models to prevent the generation of false and harmful information. However, until the various regulations come together Chinese businesses may experience “confusion” in complying with the different pieces of regulation.

Over in the US, the White House recently secured the voluntary commitments of seven leading companies to mitigate the risks of AI. These commitments signal a promising shift towards Big Tech companies assuming greater responsibility for their products and services. However, some observers say the commitments lack concrete enforcing mechanisms to hold companies accountable for their promises.

Despite these difficulties, a responsible government cannot be frozen into inaction.

Aims and strategies of digital governance

For Singapore, three key objectives drive our approach to digital governance for the common good.

First, we need the digital economy to generate opportunities for our people and businesses, so that Singaporeans can be assured of better lives and a promising future. This is easier said than done, as technology diffusion has tended to be slow and uneven.

Second, we must ensure that digital spaces are trustworthy and safe. Without it, digital participation will recede.

Third, as a country rather than a commercial entity, the aim of governance must ultimately be to foster a sense of solidarity and commitment for society to move forward together. This means challenging ourselves to use technology to strengthen relationships, our shared values, purpose, and love of country.

To mount a suitable response, the Singapore government has adopted five strategies:

• Infrastructure Investments: Digital infrastructure can be expensive to build. Sometimes, the government must take the risk for the common good. One such example is the development of our nationwide fibre broadband network (NBN) in the early 2000s. The need seems obvious today. Then, however, most people were happy with speeds of 30 megabits per second and might wonder: “Why was the government spending up to S$1 billion in public funds to get us to one gigabit per second?”
• Capability Development: Singapore has made special efforts to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) adopt digital solutions. We must also build new capabilities through research and development, for example in quantum computing and future communications. Our institutes of higher learning have expanded intakes into ICT-related courses and infused the curricula of almost all disciplines with digital components. More broadly, for the entire workforce, a whole ecosystem of continuing education and training promotes digital mastery, supported by the national SkillsFuture movement.
• Laws and Regulations: In the last decade, we have moved with greater speed and agility to update our laws and regulations. In fact, since 2018, we have gone through the full parliamentary process for enacting new laws for digital at least once a year. It takes wisdom and care to decide what to do and when to do. Laws for personal data protection, cybersecurity and protection against online falsehoods, as well as the recently enacted laws on online safety and online criminal harms including scams, will likely need more frequent updates as new concerns emerge, demanding fresh interventions for the common good.
• Whole-of-Society Involvement: The private and people sectors can and should be encouraged to do their part to further the aims of digital development. For example, in the area of AI governance, the government works closely with industry partners and the research community, to advance understanding and promote sound principles for responsible AI deployment. This is how we developed AI Verify – a testing framework and software toolkit that help businesses to be more transparent about their AI and build trust with stakeholders. Earlier this year, we decided to open-source AI Verify and set up a foundation with members including Temasek, Microsoft and Google, to steer its development.
• International Cooperation: The global reach of digital technologies means no country can hope to succeed in governing all of them on their own. Instead of decoupling, we should be seeking greater interoperability. This is why Singapore has been active in entering digital economy agreements. At international forums, such as the Counter Ransomware Initiative involving some 40 countries, we also help to lead some work streams.

Building governance capabilities

What else must we pay attention to? To govern digital, we must know how it works. Whether to counter scams or improve service delivery to the public, the government must master the technology and have the ability to design new interventions.

Part of this comes from dedicating resources to establish new centres of excellence within government, such the set-up of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) in 2015, GovTech in 2016, and the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) in 2019.

Effective digital governance also demands great agility. Take the CDC vouchers for example, which help households pay for essential purchases from heartland merchants. Extensive user testing showed that the population was not ready for a full digital roll-out. This is why paper vouchers continue to be made available even as more people opt for digital. This realisation has also led the government to clarify its approach as “digital-first, but not digital-only”.

Increasingly, digital governance must be data-driven. Without good data, we can only rely on our impressions and limited interactions to guess the problems, why they exist and what we can do about them.

Given how much of digital is about the movement of bits and bytes, the lack of good quality and internationally comparable data for policymaking in digital is both ironic and unsatisfactory. For example, there is no standard measure of the digital economy. Countries can therefore make outlandish claims about how big their digital economies are. It all depends on what they include.

As a result, we cannot really analyse the factors that have contributed to the growth of the digital economy. Neither can we easily identify the gaps and take steps to close them for the common good.

For these reasons, the Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA) has started to put together its first-ever report on the digital economy. Our purpose is to shed light on how the digital economy is contributing to Singapore’s economy, and to monitor the direction and pace of change over time. We will also take stock of the progress of efforts to grow our tech workforce and help businesses transform through digitalisation.

While still in its drafting, some trends are worth noting. The information and communications sector was the fastest-growing sector between 2017 and 2022. It was the key driver of our digital expansion and engine of growth for the economy. The value added in other sectors that is directly attributable to investments in digital technology, has also registered rapid growth over the same period, outpacing the rest of the economy.

Expectedly, SMEs still lag behind larger companies in technology adoption. It is however encouraging that 94 per cent of SMEs had adopted at least one digital solution in 2022, compared to 74 per cent in 2018. A 20 percentage point improvement over five years is quite commendable, especially when the base was already quite high.

This report is still a “minimum viable product”, but we are committed to learn more about the different dimensions of the digital economy and to capture their contributions more comprehensively over time.

Societies around the world are being tested on our ability to govern digital for the common good. Our aims are often aligned. But the strategies will differ, and equally our capabilities and results. However daunting our tasks may be, we owe our citizens the determination to try.

The writer is Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information. This is an abridged version of her speech at the Lien International Conference on Good Governance on Aug 25, 2023.