Model of risk governance in digital public sector projects: The case of Kazakhstan’s electronic human resource management platform

Leila Salykova, Rakhila Rakhmetova, Regina Andekina, Ainura Maxyutova, Marzhan Sembinova, Mussabekov Zhandos

2026

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.22495/rgcv16i3p6
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

Risk governance has become a central concern in public administration as governments implement complex digital transformation projects aimed at improving service delivery, efficiency, and transparency. Although International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 31000 provides a structured framework for identifying, assessing, treating, monitoring, and communicating risks, its procedural orientation may be insufficient in public sector environments shaped by cognitive biases, institutional inertia, information asymmetry, and misaligned incentives (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017; ISO, 2018). This study develops an ecological model of risk governance that integrates ISO 31000, Behavioural public administration (BPA), and agency theory into a multi-layered framework for analysing digital public sector projects. Using Kazakhstan’s electronic human resource management (e-HRM) platform as a qualitative single-case study, the research draws on document analysis, 20 semi-structured interviews, observation of inter-agency discussions, and descriptive project-level evidence. The findings show that formal risk registers and technical safeguards were necessary but insufficient: optimism bias, status quo bias, inter-agency coordination problems, and vendor-government incentive misalignment generated emergent risks during implementation. The study contributes to public administration theory by conceptualising risk governance as an adaptive system and offers practical recommendations for improving accountability, risk disclosure, user adoption, and institutional coordination in digital transformation projects.