Collaborative Governance Among Public, Private, Civil Society and People Sectors for Prevention and Suppression of Technology-Related Crimes

Abstract

  This research aimed to: 1) examine the context, starting conditions, and problems of technology-related crime prevention and suppression in Thailand; 2) analyze the patterns, processes, and strategic factors affecting the effectiveness of collaboration among the public, private, civil society, and people sectors; and 3) propose an appropriate collaborative governance model. This qualitative study employed in-depth interviews with 24 key informants from the four sectors, participant observation, and documentary analysis of court judgments on hybrid online scam cases, using interpretive content analysis alongside triangulation.
The findings revealed that: 1) technology-related crime in Thailand is a highly complex public problem driven by industrialized transnational crime networks, marked by a power–resource imbalance and five structural problems: justice-process bottlenecks, legal-interpretation loopholes, regulatory limitations, case overload, and cross-border constraints; 2) collaboration operates as a “Reactive–Proactive Dual Mechanism in Multi-Level Governance,” driven by trust, joint commitments, and three strategic factors; and 3) the appropriate model is an integrated collaborative governance model combining four pillars with five mechanism layers, resulting in reductions in both the number of cases and financial damages. Policy recommendations include improving laws and the justice process to cope with the complexity of cyber cases, expanding the Pakkret grassroots model, and setting national KPIs.