AI-Assisted Surveillance, Illicit Digital Economies, and Hybrid Digital Governance Failure in Cambodia

Sophal Ear — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Cambodia presents a revealing case for public management scholarship by combining rapid AI-assisted surveillance expansion with large-scale illicit digital economies. Over the past decade, the state has enhanced its monitoring capacity through attempted centralized internet routing and facial-recognition systems, aligning with data-intensive “digital-era governance” (Dunleavy et al. 2006). Paradoxically, Cambodia simultaneously emerged as a regional hub for cyber-fraud, trafficking, and crypto-laundering. This paper argues these developments represent a hybrid digital governance order where surveillance and illicit accumulation coexist through political protection, selective enforcement, and institutional fragmentation. These dynamics reflect challenges in accountability and formal control under complex governance arrangements (Kettl 2002; Bovens 2007). The Huione ecosystem demonstrates how digital payment infrastructure facilitates transnational laundering while remaining insulated from domestic oversight, highlighting the role of regulatory intermediaries (Black 2008). Furthermore, the Prince Group case illustrates how elite networks blur the boundaries between licit investment and illicit enabling, capturing governance networks (Rhodes 1997). The analysis concludes that effective responses require institutional reforms to constrain selective enforcement and strengthen cross-border regulatory cooperation. Such reforms must prioritize public value and accountability without further expanding authoritarian surveillance under the guise of maintaining digital stability (Ansell and Gash 2008; Torfing et al. 2012).

Conceptualizing and Measuring Good Administration

Michael Schorn, Julia Kaesmayr, Anna Steidle — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Good administration is essential for a functioning state, yet no comprehensive and accepted conceptualization exists. Scholars and policymakers consequently lack a validated set of criteria for assessing administrative quality and evaluating the effects of reforms and interventions. Drawing on literature from jurisprudence, administrative, economic, and social sciences, we apply Rossiter’s C-OAR-SE approach to ensure content validity. This approach yielded 30 constructs organized along objects, attributes, and raters, using constitutive administrative acts as the assessed object. We empirically validated measurement items for these constructs in an online survey with 519 case workers in German municipal agencies. Principal components analysis identified four components: diligence/mission, efficiency, information, and responsiveness/support. Notably, several criteria prominent in the literature, such as proportionality and fairness, distribute across multiple components, indicating that they cannot be adequately captured by single-construct measures. These findings carry two key implications. First, objects, attributes, and raters must be specified appropriately to obtain constructs that enable content-valid items. Second, the four-component structure provides an empirical basis for designing parsimonious yet comprehensive assessment instruments. Future research should extend this approach to other objects of administrative action and to legal systems beyond the German context examined here.

International Public Management Review

AI-Assisted Surveillance, Illicit Digital Economies, and Hybrid Digital Governance Failure in Cambodia

Conceptualizing and Measuring Good Administration