Talking Digital Public Infrastructure Podcast: Introductory Note
This is an introductory note for a podcast series focused on Digital Public Infrastructures. All links to the podcast episodes are listed below and will be embedded in each of the blog posts in this series.
What do you imagine when you hear someone say public infrastructure? Railroads, highways, public buildings? Railroads were a turning point in the United State’s economic rise in the 19th century as telecommunications in the 20th century. These different waves of public infrastructure took economic growth across many countries to new heights. Mobile technology and broadband connectivity built on the telecommunication infrastructure foundation now touches many aspects of our daily life, catalyzing a whole new class of digital public infrastructures like identity, civil registration, payments, and data exchange systems that we see in many countries now.
Today, everything from government services, access to capital, and participation in markets is mediated by digital systems. Digital Public Infrastructures build on the telecommunications infrastructure but are a new class of emerging public infrastructure that enables participation in a digital economy as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer.
The Digital Public Alliance refers digital public infrastructures (DPIs) as solutions and systems that enable the effective provision of essential society-wide functions and services in the public and private sectors.
Why are we talking about DPIs now?
There has always been a growing trend of digital strategies, programs, and initiatives in the public sector over the past two decades as per World Bank’s Govtech report (fig.1). This has taken many forms in the past, like e-governance, tech for good, and govtech among others till now, when DPIs are being seen as the next stage of the intersection of technology, state capacity, and development.
This coincides with the growth of private platform monopolies and growing concerns across governments about their digital sovereignty. Antitrust cases have been filed against bigtech platforms in many countries. Governments are increasingly rethinking their approach to digital sovereignty — control of data, software, standards and protocols, processes, hardware, services, and infrastructures.
For a long time, governments have also built digital solutions in silos often leading to duplicate solutions across departments. This lack of a whole-of-government approach is cost and resource intensive. The DPI approach resonates with governments because it addresses this very premise of taking an infrastructure approach and building foundational layers like identity, civil registration, data exchange, and payments.
Vendor lock-ins have been another roadblock for governments in building their capacity to deliver public services digitally. It is a scenario where a customer becomes dependent on a vendor for products and services because they’re not able to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. ID4Africa defines this as a three-pronged problem in the digital ID space — technology, people, and processes. From a technology standpoint, systems built by different vendors are incompatible with each other and flout the principle of interoperability; on the people problem, vendor lock-ins do not allow governments to build internal knowledge and capability as they solely reside with vendors; and from a process lens, they reduce government’s flexibility to migrate or use different services as needed due to tightly bound contractual complications.
Digital public infrastructures played a significant role in helping deliver social security schemes during COVID-19. A World Bank G2Px report states that countries with DPIs like digital identity systems could deliver social assistance to over 50% of the registered target population, as opposed to 16% in countries that didn’t.
DPIs are an integral part of the ongoing G20 discussions. The last UN General Assembly in late 2022 saw many governments, philanthropists, foundations, bilaterals, and multilaterals come together and pledge their support for DPIs. With all this traction around DPI, there are key tensions about DPIs that need to be addressed -
how is it different from the open-source software/govtech/ICT4D approach?
what is the difference between digital public infrastructures and digital public goods?
why is it gaining a lot of traction and investment now?
is this approach financially sustainable in the long run?
what are its governance and regulatory challenges?
what are the roles of public and private stakeholders in the ecosystem?
what are the inclusion and other risks of DPIs in the context of political economy?
To answer these questions, I am putting together this podcast series focused on the digital public infrastructure universe. The series will explore these questions across three chapters
Key stakeholders in the DPI ecosystem and their roles.
We will explore the promises, challenges, and roles of governments, markets, open source software communities, funding agencies, and other stakeholders in the DPI ecosystem.
Governance, financial sustainability, and inclusion considerations for these stakeholders.
These episodes will focus on the emerging thinking and experimental models of governance and financing for DPIs and the principles they are grounded in. We will also try to understand how the political economy of a country influences this.
Models and approaches emerging from across countries and stakeholders in this space.
This chapter will have stakeholders talking about innovative models and approaches of governance, financing, inclusion, and implementation DPIs
There is an exciting list of speakers for this podcast series who have been playing key roles in the DPI ecosystem. Season 1 will focus on the different stakeholders in the DPI ecosystem and explore their roles, challenges, and governance. Season 2 will deep dive into case studies and stories of governments, organizations, and contributors in setting up DPIs.
Each episode has a brief summary of the key points discussed and will have a list of readings suggested by the reader or their writings on DPIs.
Below are a few key documents to get started on DPIs -
- What is digital public infrastructure?
- Government as a Platform: How Policy Makers Should Think about the Foundations of Digital Public Infrastructure
- How to bring digital inclusion to the people who need it most
- What is ‘good’ digital infrastructure?
- Co-developing Digital Public Infrastructure for an Equitable Recovery
- Top Ten Books on Digital Development
- How to build digital public infrastructure: 7 lessons from Estonia
- Creating ‘Good’ Digital Public Infrastructure
- Stacking up the Benefits: Lessons from India’s Digital Journey
