AI Adoption in ASEAN Higher Education as a Digital Governance Challenge: A Scoping Review

Across the ten ASEAN member states, governments and regional bodies have produced more artificial intelligence (AI) policies for higher education (HE) in three years than the indexed empirical literature has generated to evaluate them. This scoping review treats that policy–evidence mismatch not as an educational-technology problem but as a digital-governance problem: a question of how policy ambition, institutional governance capacity, and educational-informatics infrastructure interact as one socio-technical system. Following Arksey and O’Malley (2005), refined by Levac et al. (2010) and reported under PRISMA-ScR, the Scopus records were screened alongside grey literature from ASEAN, UNESCO, and the World Bank. There are three contributions: we document the mismatch as a structural, not transitional, governance pattern; the Policy–Governance–Informatics (PGI) framework is also proposed, and its falsifiable weakest-layer-binds proposition; it is specified that the theoretical, methodological, and stakeholder gaps in a governance-focused research agenda must be addressed.