Trust as a Mechanism of Systemic Coupling in ASEAN's Digital Transformation

Abstract

Digital transformation in Southeast Asia unfolds across a profoundly uneven infrastructural landscape, generating structural asymmetries that undermine regional integration. This article critically examines how ASEAN policy documents (including the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025, the ASEAN Data Management Framework, the ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics, Singapore's National AI Strategy 2.0, and the UN E-Government Survey 2024) deploy the concept of "trust" as a compensatory mechanism for these deficits. Applying Niklas Luhmann's Social Systems Theory, this study positions trust not as a normative ethical value but as a functional necessity engineered to reduce social complexity and enable structural coupling between the political system and the economic and technological systems it seeks to coordinate. Through systematic corpus analysis of 14 coded passages across seven policy documents, this article identifies five dominant trust functions, namely adoption prerequisite, security proxy, governance outcome, empowerment goal, and fragile condition, and maps six operative coupling relations across government, market, citizen, and technology domains. The findings reveal that trust is consistently constructed as a discursive substitute for structural deficits rather than as an organic outcome of robust infrastructure. This analysis contributes a Luhmannian systems critique of ASEAN's digital governance architecture and its implications for regional legitimacy.