Reframing AI Governance: Perspectives from Asia

This collection of essays compiled by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and Digital Futures Lab brings together the work of eleven scholars from across Asia to help unpack perspectives on AI governance from South and South-East Asia.

Machine learning and AI tools increasingly permeate vast areas of political, economic, and social life. The use of AI systems can enable efficiency and productivity gains but is also beset by a range of complex problems and challenges. Developing strategies to align AI development and deployment trajectories with social justice is thus an urgent policy priority.

But, much of the scholarship on AI governance is based primarily on the experiences of a few western industrialised economies. Regulation trajectories and governance frameworks are shaped by political and cultural contexts, and hence values, assumptions and goals underlining the pursuit of AI governance are bound to have local flavours.

This collection brings together eleven scholars from Asia to help unpack perspectives on AI governance from South and South-East Asia. The volume focuses on:

1. Unpacking the politics, values, institutions, and policies shaping AI governance across Asian countries
2. Examining how well global conversations around AI governance translate to Asian contexts, with differing state priorities, institutional capacities, and cultural contexts
3. Alternative frames or discourses around AI governance emerging from the Asian region

The contents of the volume include:

1. Socio-Material Steering of AI Innovation and Governance by Urvashi Aneja
2. The Beginnings of AI and Data Governance: The Landscape in Sri Lanka by Ramathi Bandaranayake
3. To what extent does Malaysia’s national fourth industrial revolution policy address AI security risks by Jun-E Tan
4. An ill-advised turn: AI under India’s E-Courts proposal by Vidushi Marda
5. Chinese AI governance in transition: Past, present and future of Chinese AI regulation by Julia Chen
6. The myth of data driven authoritarianism in Asia by Cindy Lin and Yuchen Chen
7. Kampong Ethics by Mark Findlay and Willow Wong
8. Between threat and tool: the poetics and politics of AI metaphors and narratives in China by Maya Indira Ganesh and Jennifer Bourne

You can watch a TechLaw.Fest fireside chat between Julia Chen (a contributor to the book) and Nicolas Moës (Director of European AI Governance at The Future Society), moderated by Urvashi Aneja, on a comparative look at the AI governance regimes in Europe and China here.

You can download ‘Reframing AI Governance: Perspectives from Asia’ from here.