From Government Solutions to Societal Capabilities
As the DPI debate has evolved over the past couple of years, there continues to be a lack of clarity on what DPI is. There have been several attempts at coming up with a “definition” by various stakeholders, but there is no consensus. The framing of ‘shared means to many ends’ that David Eaves and Jordan Sandman articulated about a year ago seems to capture the essence of what infrastructure generally is – digital or physical.
There is a ‘whole of government’ framing, that has tried to evolve beyond the silo, point, full stack digital solutions approach that has been typical in government for the past few decades. Some have called this evolution ‘digital government’, where the efforts have been to build re-usable capabilities across government. But this framing is still restricted to the thinking of government as a solution provider, albeit taking a more government-wide view of reusable artefacts.
Taking a whole of government view would be like developing roads for all government functions, but not make it available as a societal asset. To give a digital example, it would be like building out the GPS and keeping it only for government use. Digital government takes a “solutions perspective”, and its only purpose is to improve the delivery of government services to citizens.
Contrast this with a ‘whole of society’ view of DPI. When we take a whole of society view, we index more on developing capabilities that societal actors – government and private – can leverage and innovate on top. The whole of society approach takes a view that we don’t know what problems society will need to address in future, but today we can create a series of capabilities that may be combined to find appropriate solutions. This shift in mindset from a solutions perspective to a capabilities perspective is an important one, but also a difficult one.
The capabilities approach often takes the form of digital infrastructure artefacts such as, digital ID, payments, data exchange, verifiable credentials, etc. But the ability of each country/ society to leverage these capabilities and build solutions on top is very mixed – both in the government and in the private sector. The DPI map developed by @David Eaves and colleagues lists many countries as having such capabilities; but most countries have not been able to leverage the collective power of these capabilities to address societal issues innovatively.
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Lessons from some ‘successful’ digital infrastructure artefacts perhaps points to the effectiveness of a mix of these approaches. The Department of Defense in the US built GPS for a specific purpose, but then opened it up to the public. Having a specific use case often provides the justification for the building that capability, but the genius in any such effort is to think of the layer as infrastructure – minimalist and specific in its capabilities, but which others can combine with other capabilities and use for many other purposes. This dual approach – developing targeted capabilities while considering their broader utility as public infrastructure – can unlock immense societal value.
Two things to hope for:
1.??????? The dominant ‘digital government’ view will evolve into thinking about building capabilities for the whole of society. That is, we will see a shift from thinking about digital infrastructure for government to digital public infrastructure for society.
2.??????? Both governments and the private sector will learn how to leverage the full potential of whole of society digital capabilities (DPI) to drive massive innovation, drive down prices and make technology work for everyone.
These shifts will take deliberate and consistent efforts. How might relevant stakeholders navigate this important shift?
Country Director India & Director Growth Operations, Asia, Middle East & Europe (AMEE)
2 周Wonderful piece CV Madhukar !
thanks for sharing your thoughts. Is the problem that we have focused on the digital and the infrastructure and not on the public? How are efforts focused on putting society in the design process? the genius of what Estonia did lies in that they started from the user. the government then asked for help building around this principle; public/private helped build it; but the full focus was on public rights and consent based use of data. this bottoms up focus changed the system design as it was built to ensure trust between government and citizens from the outset. however, in most digital transformations the design is driven by the private sector or the government as you note and/or funded by an external group to achieve a small use case. it might help to focus on how DPI efforts start from re-imagining societal design at the functional level and working with the society to support a min of ICT to re-imagine and prioritize services. I also think we are missing a lot on how to build true trust. as mistrust of governments grows globally, this seems like an important effort to focus on to ensure that DPI investments are not wasted.
Founder, Hawkai Data
4 周The 'public' in DPI should not be seen from the view of ownership but from the view of openness. Are the data and APIs open and available and accessible to the public? Private enterprises rarely have an incentive to make data open, which leads to silos and fragmented data. Take Africa's M-Pesa -- it provides for mobile based payments and transfers. It is used by millions and has cut down the use of cash. But, it comes with high transaction fees, increases the cost of doing business, and really has not significantly moved the unbanked into the formal economy nor had much of an impact on poverty reduction. This payment infrastructure cannot be labeled as 'public' goods. For DPI, governments must ensure that data is open, digital access is inclusive, and data barriers are broken. Even with GPS and open maps, feature data (administrative/regional boundaries, coastal zone boundaries, property, farmland markups, reverse-geocoding APIs etc) are still not available as open data/open APIs. Open data and open maps are foundational to increasing public awareness and promoting citizen engagement. Read more on what constitutes digital public infrastructure at -- https://hawkai.net/digital-public-infrastructure/
Policy Advisor at Government of Bangladesh/UNDP
4 周Madhukar, thank you for sharing your realizations. May I share 3 related thoughts: 1. The DPI Map gives us a very useful look into where countries stand today in terms of ID, payments, and data exchange, and establishes a good foundation for building country-specific DPI strategy and implementation roadmap for relevant policymakers, development partners, donors, and other stakeholders. 2. I completely agree with you that DPI's potential is poorly understood. It’s because governments as service providers and citizens as service recipients think about services - social benefits, healthcare, education, taxation, land records, immigration, etc. - and not the 3 design components (ID, payments, and data) that dominate the DPI conversation today. So, we need to link the DPI conversation to the service delivery transformation conversation. In fact, I’d conjecture that we start the DPI discussion by opening up with sector-specific service transformation discussion when formulating the DPI strategy and implementation roadmap for a country. 3. In addition, it would be greatly beneficial to demonstrate how DPI can drive digital inclusion in very clear terms. That would further excite policymakers and citizens alike.
Digital Technologies Advisor
4 周CV Madhukar, thanks for your article. A short, straight, tangible and accessible DPI definition as that, somehow "connected" to the foundational article "Digital public infrastructure and public value: What is ‘public’ about DPI?" (https://ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2024/mar/digital-public-infrastructure-and-public-value-what-public-about-dpi), was much needed. Both in Cairo's Summit and Bangalore's GTS i have had the chance to debate that perception/concern several times. I guess a good digital government might offer great DPI opportunities but not necessarily is "DPI" (commonly it is not). Recognizing that might be the step 0 for a consistent, sustainable and enriching DPI journey.