DATAGOV Blog

Digital government is often discussed through the language of efficiency, innovation and service delivery. After two days of discussions at the Statecraft, Sovereignty and Digital Government symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London (16-17 April 2026) however, I started to think about digital transformation not only as a policy agenda, but also as the combination of the infrastructures, dependencies, and power relations that make digital government possible in the first place.

This shift felt particularly relevant to my own PhD research on how Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) travels globally as a governance model. Broadly referring to a set of foundational and interoperable digital systems such as digital identity systems, digital payment infrastructures, and data exchange frameworks, DPI has emerged as a framework for organising digital systems that support public service delivery at scale in the past few years. Much of my work examines the policy imaginaries underpinning DPI, particularly around visions of interoperability, modularity and openness. The symposium encouraged me to continue thinking more critically about the political and economic arrangements through which these visions are realised, and how they reconfigure what we understand as statecraft.

Organised through the DIGI-FRONT project, the two-day symposium brought together scholars working across Science and Technology Studies (STS), media studies, platform studies, international relations and political geography. One of the recurring themes across the symposium was that digital government can no longer be understood simply as administrative modernisation or technological efficiency. Steadily and inevitably, it is entangled with geopolitical competition, platform dependency, and questions of sovereignty.

What struck me most was how sovereignty itself appeared as a remarkably fluid concept. Throughout the symposium, discussions ranged from territorial sovereignty and infrastructural sovereignty to data sovereignty, platform sovereignty and even AI sovereignty. Sovereignty emerged as a function of infrastructures, standards, cloud systems, procurement arrangements and governance models, rather than a fixed political condition.

The conversations that resonated strongly with me were those focused on DPI and governance. Bidisha Chaudhuri’s work challenged many of the dominant narratives surrounding DPI as inherently public, open and inclusive. Her discussion of India’s digital payment ecosystem – Unified Payments Interface (UPI) highlighted how difficult it is to maintain clean distinctions between public and private infrastructures, when the everyday functioning of supposedly public systems is mediated through private platforms such as Google Pay and PhonePe. It is worth noting here that Walmart currently owns 71.8% of PhonePe.

Shifting the attention to dynamic market-state configurations reveals the complexity of DPI. Rather than understanding these infrastructures through a simple public vs private binary, Chaudhuri’s work points towards the multiple tensions operating within these ecosystems themselves, be it between banks, technology companies, payment providers, and the state. How does the language surrounding DPI–centred around openness, interoperability, innovation and participation–obscure the political and economic arrangements through which these infrastructures actually operate?

Chaudhuri also invited us to rethink what we understand as multipolarity, particularly in light of the growing emphasis on South-South cooperation within DPI discourse. DPI is presented as evidence of an emerging multipolar digital order, where countries in the Global South are no longer merely adopting governance models developed elsewhere but are actively shaping, adapting, and exporting them. Yet this raises a broader question of whether the circulation of DPI models through South-South cooperation necessarily challenge existing power asymmetries, or can it also reproduce new forms of dependency, influence, and standardisation? For me, this opened up a productive line of inquiry into how governance models travel globally and whose interests they ultimately serve.

I was also inspired by Siddharth de Souza's research on defining DPI governance. Rather than attempting to resolve the ambiguity surrounding the term, de Souza and colleagues studied how governance itself is imagined differently across institutions and actors: governance as aspiration, governance as commons, governance as multi-stakeholder by design etc. The recognition that governance itself can be a site of contestation offered a promising line of inquiry.

Particularly insightful was their mapping of three broad approaches to DPI governance: governance through sovereign power in India, governance through dispersion in South Africa, and governance through regulation in the European Union. This immediately raised questions that resonate with DATAGOV's work on governance by data infrastructures across these regions. Similar data infrastructures often become embedded within very different political, institutional, and historical contexts, making it difficult to understand governance through fixed national models alone. What appears as a common infrastructural form can produce distinct configurations of power, accountability, and state capacity.

I started to think about how to avoid reducing countries into neat governance models, when national approaches are constantly evolving and adapting over time. DPI itself is a moving target. While many of its components, such as digital identity systems, have existed for decades, the consolidation of DPI as a distinct global governance model is a much more recent phenomenon. India's G20 presidency in 2023 is often cited as a key moment in its global diffusion. Yet as the language, standards, and governance frameworks surrounding DPI continue to travel and stabilise, states and institutions are simultaneously reinterpreting and reshaping them. This raises a broader challenge with conceptualising governance when the object we are trying to define is itself constantly changing.

Several discussions also pushed me to think more critically about the relationship between digital government and platformisation. Paolo Gerbaudo's work on the "contactless state" offered a useful lens for understanding developments around government apps, automated welfare systems, and AI-enabled public service delivery. He argued that as states are becoming more digital, platform logics are getting increasingly embedded within state infrastructures and public services.

What makes this particularly significant is that it complicates how we think about public infrastructure itself. The same systems that promise seamless access to services can also expand the state's capacity to classify, monitor, and intervene. Service provision and surveillance are not necessarily separate developments but can emerge through the same infrastructures. For scholars working on DPI, this raises an important question: where do we draw the line between public service provision and infrastructural forms of control when both are increasingly embedded within the same digital systems?

Another theme that connected strongly with my own research was how often the language surrounding digital transformation appears politically neutral while carrying significant political assumptions underneath. Terms such as innovation, efficiency, participatory design, digital inclusion, and co-development often frame infrastructures as technical solutions rather than contested political projects. In my own research on DPI models and digital development initiatives, I study how these narratives present infrastructures as neutral architectures, particularly when governance models travel across highly unequal geopolitical contexts. Several discussions at the symposium reinforced the importance of interrogating these narratives rather than taking them at face value.

The symposium was ultimately a productive space to think through what digital government means at a time shaped simultaneously by AI hype, geopolitical tension, platform dependency, and renewed debates around sovereignty. How do governance models travel while simultaneously changing meaning across contexts? How can we rethink sovereignty when digital infrastructures are built through complex public-private arrangements? How do infrastructures themselves shape what becomes possible in the name of public interest, development or innovation?

It reinforced that debates around digital government can no longer only be about digitising public services. They must also investigate what kinds of states are being built through digital infrastructures, who those infrastructures serve, and how power itself is being reorganised through platforms, standards and data systems.