Overview
The intention of this paper is to, for the first time, bring together the different critiques and concerns of the DPI agenda to support a complete picture of its opportunities and harms. The advocates for DPI present it as a common-sense solution to digital transformation. This paper aims to be a counterweight to the strong positive push for DPI, seen, for example, at the Global DPI Summit, and unbundle the components of what DPI is and distinguish the narrative from the actual impact. Failing to engage with real and potential harms limits the strength and possibilities of DPI as an approach to government-led/enabled digital transformation.
Behind the multiple issues and concerns around DPI, there are difficult questions about the digitalisation of government that governments, especially the Global Majority, face.
Complex global supply chains mean that it is very difficult - and impossible for most - countries to avoid new dependencies as they digitalise governments.
There are also very real concerns about inequality and dominance in digital innovation, supply chains and infrastructure, with the dominance of American and Chinese tech firms. Uncertainty surrounding Trump’s upcoming presidency and its implications for global trade, supply chains and production heighten these concerns.
What sovereignty, democratic accountability and sustainable development entail in an increasingly digitalised, and potentially increasingly polarised world, are not easy questions, and ones that are being chased by countries everywhere.
The DPI approach offers some hope of a way to navigate these questions. However, as we have discussed in this paper, this hope is limited by the ways that DPI is being discussed, funded, implemented and promoted. The current push for DPI introduces - and obscures - associated risks, dependencies and harms to states, citizens and economic activity, and falsely buckets all DPIs in all its implementations in one broad stroke. And these risks may be worsened by the intersection of the DPI agenda with other agendas – including technological (for example, the recent AI push), political (e.g. India’s pursuit of soft power), and economic (including competition-based agendas).
In this last section we do two things. First, we outline / summarise our answers to the three questions posed at the onset, drawing from the wide-ranging examples and content in this paper. Second, we consider alternatives to the current global agenda for DPI: could DPI be done differently? What would this entail? Where are there examples of alternative approaches that are better positioned to recognise and mitigate real and potential harms?
Question 1: Is the ‘DPI approach’ a ‘good’ product?
While DPI has undeniably brought some benefits to the contexts in which it has been deployed - as it has evolved - brings real harms, not only in how it is being implemented but also the way that global narratives obscure harms and close down space for meaningful critique.
Drawing together the diverse perspectives brought to this paper, the limitations on DPI’s potential as a ‘good product’ emerge through three developments.
First, DPI narratives erase/ignore decades of learning on poverty, inequality and sustainable development. This ultimately risks reinforcing and accentuating inequality and distributional issues, as seen with digital ID projects already, along geographical and demographic dimensions. This neglect extends to specific issues/learnings around components of DPI, e.g. issues around a lack of checks and balances with digital ID systems, or concentration of market share/power in some areas of digital payments seem out of scope of DPI narratives.
Second, the DPI approach has assumed a particular role for the private sector but does not fully grapple with which firms are benefitting disproportionately from private sector implementation of DPI. This is taking place at the level of services and protocols ‘below’ (e.g. fingerprinting devices), and ‘above’ (e.g. payment providers), as well as around key principles of DPI, such as the business models around open source technologies. Data is also a key consideration here, with insufficient engagement with how data is created, accessed and generates value, e.g. who has access to which data? How is this concentrated? What sorts of value creations are enabled and for whom? Across the proposals, the public is expected to foot the bill for private sector innovation – yet these firms are rarely, if ever, held accountable to public goals.
Third, the DPI approach excludes serious consideration of the enabling environment and logic that is required for DPI to ‘work for’ different countries, e.g. it begins from an assumption that underlying infrastructure, tech literacy and sustained funding will be solved for. As well, it assumes that cost-benefit calculations will work across countries with very different sized populations. With this, it casts aside questions of long-term viability and sustainability, and is permissive of models that may erode state capacity over time.
As a result of these omissions the DPI agenda is misaligned to even engaging in conversations about what accountable, inclusive and equitable digital transformation in government would entail. Beyond this, the lack of independent - and published - evidence on both implementation and impacts of DPI add to the impossibility of assessing DPI as a good product.
Question 2: To what extent are global processes of evangelising/promoting DPI demand driven?
To consider the weight of country-demand on the global push for DPI, our paper interrogates who is benefitting from the current global agenda for DPI.10