PhD talk asks how to avoid colonialist structures in digital public infrastructure

A recent talk hosted by the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP) showcases the work of Nai Lee Kalema, a PhD candidate at the IIPP who has conducted interdisciplinary multi-year research on the World Bank Group’s Global Digital Transformation initiative. Per a summary of the talk, Kalema’s work “invites people to begin reimagining global digital transformation as a tool for global liberation rather than domination across multiple levels of governance.”

This project, which Kalema calls “decolonizing global digital transformation,” scrutinizes various institutional projects, partnerships, policies and governance frameworks that characterize the World Bank Group’s “holistic, multi-institutional, and globally coordinated approach to global digital transformation.”

Where is the digital transformation project in its current form taking us? Who’s setting the agenda? And how can we ensure the path leads to the best outcomes for everyone – particularly those in the developing world that bear the history of colonization?

Some promises come with colonial caveats

The talk draws on two chapters of Kalema’s doctoral thesis, with a focus on Kenya and Uganda. But it begins with a recognition from Rainer Kattel, co-deputy director and professor of innovation and public governance at UCL IIPP, that academia has a role to play in shaping identity in African nations – and it has not always been a positive one. He cites the university’s history with eugenics research in the 1930s, which “actually influenced the official identity formation in East African countries.”

Kalema’s research, then, aims to right certain historical wrongs, or at least to map out how to avoid them in developing new models for digital identity. The tech world is full of promises, but concrete change can look different in execution than in vision. Kalema aims to consider “the different types of promises that come along with technology and innovation in terms of what it can do in communities – but then what is its ability to actually deliver on that.”

“I wanted to understand what are the complex histories, political dynamics and economic dynamics that are really shaping what we see happening and how we can use this type of frame to look at technology and digital transformation in a new way.”

Kalema was motivated in part by the deployment of biometric tools, including facial recognition, as a way for law enforcement to crack down on protestors following the murder of George Floyd in 2019. “Technologies are being introduced in terms of digital transformation as a tool that can make societies safer and make governments more efficient. I had a lot of questions about, to what extent does it make communities safe, and for whom? And what communities may it not make safe in the process?”

DPI can deliver efficiency and safety, but to whom?

“When I talk about digital transformation, I’m not just talking at the level of technology,” Kalema says. “But I’m also talking about the different types of policies or different types of governance that are emerging, and the different ways that it’s being integrated into public systems and institutions in societies.”

Kalema chose to focus her work on the World Bank because of its scope. Kenya and Uganda were chosen because of their history as British colonies; Kalema points to how taxation schemes there laid the groundwork for larger colonialist structures.

“Identification is never just identification,” she says. “Identification has to do with legibility, how institutions recognize you and what comes with that.” The mechanics and symbolism of identity, even in rudimentary form, can be leveraged to construct narratives that change how the world sees people, and how they see themselves.

“And so in East Africa, you see that later on, we have the cotton plantations, particularly in Kenya, we have the cotton gin also going on in Uganda, we have the colonial train system which is created to extract a lot of things out of the country.” The ways in which the system tied biometrics and identity to extractive infrastructure has had “long lasting implications that even shape what we see happening now.”

An efficient train is good, but not for plundering natural resources

“Digital public infrastructure” straddles the line between national and global needs and ambitions. Kalema points out that “it’s not just a technical project, but a political one, as well.” Who gets to design and manage systems that govern identity – and everything that comes from it – has implications that go beyond national borders. “What are the extractive dynamics that might show up around that? What are the different types of ways in which it changes how populations are viewed?”

DPI, in other words, shouldn’t become another iteration of a colonialist model that prioritizes certain aims and people at others’ expense. Efficiency is not an end in itself, and we risk harnessing digital infrastructure to extractive organs and habits, riding the horse of financialization under the banner of inclusion.

“Projects which are presented as very technocratic or developmentalist – and very much, you know, not political, just technical – even if they’re introduced in that way they still have a lot of political effects and dynamics, and perhaps because we’re not looking at them in that critical manner, a lot of that would get missed.”

Worth interrogating DPI from different perspectives

Key takeaways from Kalema’s talk are that digital public infrastructure projects must try and avoid falling into the ruts worn by persistent neoliberal approaches to global development. A digital world that replicates the repressive structures of the colonial mindset is a failed project.

“Basically the story I want to tell is that global digital transformation is a structural transformation project that’s happening on many different levels, and we should look at it in different ways. I wanted to look at it through a global political economy but also global institutional approach,  because I think that there’s a lot of discussion around how these changes are happening as it relates to competition.”

“We have these discussions of digital sovereignty where it seems like there’s zero sum thinking – for me to win, somebody else has to lose. But maybe we can look at it through decolonial lenses – like, what are the different types of transnational solidarity that has been used to resist certain types of neoliberalizing and colonizing dynamics globally.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  digital public infrastructure  |  World Bank