Multistakeholderism and meaningful participation in DPI Governance: What should it actually look like?

Date: Sunday, Oct 12

Time: 13:00 - 14:00 (60 mins)

Session Types: Workshop

The question this workshop largely asks and seeks to collaboratively answer, simply, is what multistakeholderism and meaningful community participation in digital public infrastructure (DPI) governance actually looks like. Policy consensus around DPI governance has been difficult to achieve—competing perspectives from global regulators and diverse societal realities of participating states stand in the way of effective realisation of SDGs through DPI. Even though baseline DPI safeguards have now been proposed at international fora, their implementation heavily depends on domestic experiences and partnerships between the state, private entities, and people.

Often having taken the form of digital identity projects in many parts of the world, DPIs have long impacted communities and their access to public services and welfare entitlements. Experiences from digital ID systems rolled out in India, Kenya, and South Africa, even though many decades apart, present a common set of concerns with digitalisation at societal scale. The most pervasive of these is the risk of exclusion—the likelihood of at-risk populations to become excluded from availing an essential public service runs high across LMICs and is backed by evidence, especially in India and Kenya. The data-heavy nature of DPI brings surveillance, censorship, and data privacy risks to the fore, especially in jurisdictions with little to no legal safeguards for data protection and privacy. Improper implementation of DPI can undermine citizen dignity and autonomy, thus impeding the very development and inclusion it set out to further. Their lived experience and participation of people and communities, therefore, should become the cornerstone of DPI governance and participation. DPI must be legislated with—and not only for—the people.

Moderators/Speakers: Disha Verma