Inclusive Digital Public Infrastructure Expands Public Power and Value

On Tuesday, Solly Malatsi, the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies for South Africa, which currently holds the Presidency of the G20, welcomed delegates to the Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Summit in Cape Town. He described a vision for DPI in which digital systems could ‘realize human dignity’ and ‘cross-border interoperability’ could help strengthen regional associations and relations. As leaders from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the World Bank opened the conference, a diverse group of governments, technical experts, civil society representatives and funders met to explore how to realize the ambition of the conference: “Implementing Tomorrow's Digital Society Today.”

Along with the emphasis on design and implementation of DPI among the practitioners at the summit, a third stream of discussion on governance is acquiring prominence. Governance can quite easily become a catch-all phrase, depoliticized and reduced to a check box exercise. But how can governance frameworks engage with multi-polarity and multi-culturality to redistribute power that comes with digital infrastructures? Further, in what ways can governance serve the interests of diverse publics, and how can they negotiate the links between the functions of DPI and sovereign interests?

The development and use of DPI systems are projected as pathways to build digital sovereignty by those that advocate for them. These systems are defined by characteristics of interoperability, open standards, scalability with allied goals of public trust, accountability, and economic benefit. Concretely, DPI developers have adopted a productized approach focusing on elements of identity, payments, and data exchange as means to project themselves as alternative infrastructure to Big Tech.

However, underlying the emergence of DPI are definitional ambiguities about what constitutes the public, who defines it, and what its goals are. At one level, the aspect of the public relates to those functions that have public value, while on another level, the public relates to that which is democratic, social, and context dependent.

An emergent tension with DPIs is that a technocratic approach subsumes other considerations including those around governance standards and geopolitical considerations. “Public Digital” identifies two levers of digital sovereignty that are useful for unpacking elements of how to ground a more democratic DPI. The first is the aspect of agency, and the second is that of capacity. Agency is the ability to determine a direction for action while capacity is the institutional knowledge to account for different consequences of technical and system choices.

DPI and digital sovereignty

One of the arguments for the value of DPI has been its role in strengthening state sovereignty—freeing the state from dependence on a single infrastructure provider by creating state owned foundational rails on which digital transformation can be pursued in advance of the public interest.

The word sovereignty is used to mean many different things and to gloss over tensions or even out paradoxes in their use—from Russia and China’s approach to internet governance to, more recently, concerns around dependence on ‘Big Tech’—from vendor lock-in to market regulation and politicization—such as the US sanctions leading to the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor losing access to Microsoft services.

Digital infrastructure can create public value and serve public interest by creating infrastructure that can be used across government verticals so that systems for identification, payments and the exchange of data are shared across social welfare, health, education and also enable private innovation. This approach to DPI is built on the recognition that the value of digital infrastructure comes from enabling data and services to be used across services, siloes and boundaries.

DPI in pursuit of national sovereignty can risk limiting the value of digital infrastructure to a national level, excluding the value that comes from a global, borderless digital infrastructure. It also fails to recognize that the pursuit of pure sovereignty is a chimera, and in the case of digital sovereignty, would constrain the value of an open internet. Even Russia, which, after China, is perhaps the most advanced in pursuit of a sovereign internet, retains a high level of dependence on foreign infrastructure components. Further, DPI in pursuit of national sovereignty also brings with it threats of surveillance and population control.

With attempts to package DPI in a box, whether on account of technical or funding necessities, building democratic ethos in the design is increasingly urgent.

Instead of pursuing absolute sovereignty, there is growing use of terms such as ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘relational sovereignty’ to describe efforts to establish national capacity to exercise ‘agency’ over key functions, such as maintaining domestic industry or financial management, while still benefiting from the value of open digital infrastructures. This concept of relational sovereignty aligns with work on indigenous data sovereignty, bringing in questions of reciprocity and shared ownership. Digital sovereignty is therefore not something that is fixed, but, as researcher Mauro Santaniello argues, is a ‘site of political struggle’ with diverse and competing interests influencing its characteristics.

Researchers Renata Avila, Ramya Chandrasekhar, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, and Andrew Rens propose a “commons approach” to DPI which explore how to build participation through engaging in design, development, operations and evaluation of DPIs. Recognizing the value of the commons can ensure the importance of national autonomy is accounted for, as well as the very real importance of cross-border relations. We know from existing work that cross-border data flows are huge generators of public and economic value, yet are hugely reliant on effective and appropriate governance, including regulatory and technical dimensions and capacities.

What role for governance?

Governance is key to building DPI that serves as a pathway to sovereignty. Establishing the foundational elements in legal mandates, regulatory and policy frameworks is the fundamental building block on which digital infrastructure, and the data that flows through it, can both serve national public interest as well as interact with those on the other side of national borders. And key to implementing this cross border governance are digital standards—for identification, payments and data exchange—that formalize into code the legal governance foundation on which digital infrastructure is built. But code, like governance, is not neutral. There are diverse standards bodies, and governance frameworks reflect the interests of those who establish them.

Ensuring that governance and standards are developed with the input and participation of diverse stakeholders is key to ensuring that sovereignty is stable, inclusive and capable of protecting national public interest as well as the global public good.

Governance of these systems are ways of arranging power and authority over how such infrastructures are built, and polycentric approaches to governance can decenter power away from established hierarchies.

A poly-centric, bottom-up approach to governance can help ensure there is a degree of equilibrium around the involvement of all parties. Such an approach stands in contrast to singular, top-down approaches, ensuring that governance is seen through a lens of collective action which reveals the interests and conflicts of involved parties and provides a framework for resolving differences. A bottom-up approach that includes the perspectives and interests of diverse stakeholders can help ensure that DPIs create value for all parties. This is particularly significant if public values are to reflect the interests of marginalized and excluded groups, and to ensure the stability of support for digital systems. A polycentric approach thus requires a mapping of all actors, particularly marginalized or excluded groups, and the identification and representation of their interests and needs.

These are not just abstract ideas discussed at conferences. There are concrete instances of this approach in practice. For example, in Brazil, the central bank developed a publicly-owned payments system, PIX, and established a multi-stakeholder forum to inform the management and further development of the system. Banks, payment providers and consumer protection organizations come together every quarter to provide feedback to the central bank. And this is not an isolated case—a recent paper shows how emerging frameworks for governing digital public infrastructure, such as the UNDP’s Digital Public Infrastructure Safeguards and the emerging Common Good Framework, are articulating principles centered on purpose, participation, learning, equity, and accountability.

These are principles and approaches that can inform all efforts to strengthen sovereignty that serves the public interest and creates public value, from Africa to Europe. And as Europe also turns to building its own digital sovereignty, ensuring that it serves the public interest can help build an inclusive, relational sovereignty that binds nations and people together rather than isolating and excluding them.