Why Digital Public Infrastructures?
In geographies as diverse as India, Brazil, and the European Union, states are promoting, building, and operating digital public infrastructures. IndiaStack in India, Brazil’s Digital Public Infrastructures for identification and payments, and proposals for EuroStack in the European Union are at the forefront of this new approach to digitalization. These systems make bold claims about the futures they will bring about. In a geopolitical conjuncture of the breakdown of the liberal consensus and emerging multipolarity, they are increasingly articulated as interventions to secure digital sovereignty. Yet seeing them only through the lens of digital sovereignty misses the broader range of concerns that shape them. They also make a range of contextual and concrete promises that need to be unpacked as sites of discussion and deliberation.
This paper comparatively studies the range of promises that are made by these systems’ promoters, builders, and operators. It catalogues seven promises across the three terriotries: strategic autonomy, securing values and rights, competitiveness and innovation, cost savings, digital and financial inclusion, improving public service delivery, and environmental sustainability. The paper takes a constructionist approach to these promises, seeing them as discursive moves that legitimize the pursuit of new infrastructures by certain actors. It asks: What concerns do these framings let us address, and what do they disregard?
While promises are important for orienting and mobilizing stakeholders, they are also materialized in the institutional and technical architectures of these systems. Thus, the paper also discusses the planned and existing architectures of these systems, examining the tensions and the power dynamics they encode. These architectural considerations include: the scope of the stack, how to drive adoption, the potentials and limitations of interoperability and federation, infrastructure as derisking, the emergence of new geopolitical alliances, and the. missing role of the public across all three contexts. A critical missing piece across al interventions, the paper argues, is the role of the public. By bringing attention to these elements, te paper aims to expand the possible terrain of architectures beyond a handful of “default settings” that have dominated the turn to digital public infrastructures.
The paper contributes to Open Future’s work on Public Digital Infrastructure, which aims to foster an ecosystem where Digital Commons and digital public spaces can emerge and thrive.
