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4.4 Inclusive Good Governance and Peace
Peace and good, inclusive governance are necessary preconditions for sustainable human development (TWI2050, 2018, chapter 5). However, the digital transformation shapes governance systems around the world and impacts peace. Answers to the question of how political actors can shape digitalization toward a “New Humanism” (WBGU, 2019) and peace are urgently needed. The digital transformation challenges the global and political orders as we know them. It also introduces new forms of warfare, such as cyberwars or drone wars. Still, states and societies need flexible and capable political institutions and systems that address these political and security challenges while at the same
time making best use of digital tools to do so. Table 2 summarizes the necessary governance reforms for the transformation to sustainability. The reforms remain the same as those in TWI2050 (2018), in particular the call for (i) flexible but stable institutions, and (ii) multilateral institutions that are capable of governing transnational dynamics. As we will see below, it will be crucial to govern peaceful and human relationships between states, firms, and people.
Digitalization and new technologies present significant opportunities for governments, communities, and the private sector to come together to achieve the SDGs. Policymakers must, however, remember that managing collective goods is at root a political, rather than a technological, task. This is crucial for getting the best out of digitalization. The risks of bringing digital technologies into contested governance spaces are great. Technology is an amplifier of human intent (Toyama, 2011). It tends to magnify existing inequalities and is not a solution to collective problems that are socio-political and political-economic at heart. However, there are many ways that data and technology can be used for good as long as inclusive governance and democratic participation are at the heart of digital endeavors. Technology has
politics, reflecting our values back to us at the speed of computing. Bringing inclusive and democratic governance to the implementation of digital services to meet the Agenda 2030 goals can bring significant benefits to humanity.
To begin to assess the role that technology can play in meeting the SDGs, it is crucial to bear in mind that technology is not an ontological artefact that influences global politics beyond the scope of human processes. In his seminal article “Do Artefacts Have Politics?”, Langdon Winner (1980) explained how the integration of new technologies into socio-political and political-economic systems is reflexive: the human systems of governance reflect the preferences of the public, and thus the technologies that are selected to support public service provision take on those political features. In some cases, technologies map onto a community’s existing internal sociological structures, while in other cases the integration of a new technology into a social or administrative system is dependent on external intervention. In the 21st century, with digitalization relying so heavily on privately owned systems and software, the nature of the organization of the interface between governance, politics, and technology will be crucial for creating systems that benefit both communities and technology providers.
Mutual benefits and maintenance of collective goods are far from guaranteed when involving private sector actors in critical social processes, and the use of open source systems is not a silver bullet for solving the tensions between private profits and public benefit.
Inclusive, and to some extent democratic, governance is necessary if digital technology is to serve as more than a way for private enterprise to extract value from collective goods. The effective integration of digital technologies into the solutions to massive collective challenges comes with its own complex governance and political challenges.
The distribution of collective goods, whether they are education (Box 3), energy, water, or infrastructure, is an inherently political process. What we hope to achieve with digitalization is increased efficiency in the provision of these goods, and, as an outcome of this efficiency, more equitable access to the best of these collective goods. Digitalization comes with a wrinkle that makes governance of the digital commons even more complex: Technology firms are also competing for contracts and data, which are the lifeblood of their revenue and profit streams. Thus, there is a tension between whether a technology firm is truly committed to supporting access to public goods, or if it is participating in the provision of public goods merely as a way to gain access to the data that underpins a firm’s value.
Before attempting to square the challenges associated with public resource distribution through
technological means, it is therefore important for policymakers to understand the role of data in the valuation of modern technology firms. Data has inherent value (Akred & Samani, 2018), largely for advertising, and firms like Google and Facebook have maximized the ways that Internet-based technology collects user data. User data is so valuable that there are even arguments that there should be ways to make firms pay users for using their data for revenue generation (Zhu Scott, 2018). This has profound implications for allowing private technology firms to intervene in public processes. When a city collects data on its residents, the data collection is paid for with tax dollars, and those tax dollars represent a fiscal contract between the residents and city government that the data will be used for public benefit. When Google collects residents’
data in a proposed smart city, they are responsive to shareholders, and that data must be used to maximize private value – public benefits and efficiencies are not guaranteed. This tension is happening in real time with Google’s Sidewalk Lab’s proposed Quayside smart city in Toronto, as a lack of transparency and data privacy concerns have led to citizen pushback against the proposal (Canon, 2018; Kofman, 2018).
From a software perspective, the push for open source is positive but must be balanced against the costs to human resources and quality control. Free and open source software (FOSS) has advantages over proprietary packages on the acquisition side: it is free, and the code can be replicated publicly, so there is a level of transparency about what a government is using to manage its computing infrastructure. Linux Foundation (2017) outlines a set of challenges that any organization, including governments, needs to be prepared for when making the switch to a FOSS platform. The biggest challenge is human resources:
Do organizations have the necessary software development and quality control competences among their staff to ensure that the software meets the needs of the organization? In many cases this can mean having someone with the technical knowledge to evaluate dozens of interrelated platforms, since a single FOSS implementation could require integrating software from multiple sources.
Technical knowledge feeds into the next challenge governance organizations face with FOSS, which is quality control. Communities of users generally maintain FOSS software; because of this, it is important to make sure that software meets an organization’s quality, security, and usability needs. Some FOSS packages are serious professional endeavors, while others are amateur efforts designed to meet someone’s specific needs. Finally, organizations will need to fundamentally rethink contracting and acquisition of information technology services because there is no centralized customer service center for FOSS. It offers a number of opportunities for governments who want
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Box 3. Private versus Public Goods in the Education Sector
Education (see 6.1.2) is a good example of a sector where the tension between public good and private benefit exists at multiple levels. Education aims to educate active citizens, to develop skills that can be used in the economy, and to enable social mobility; the first two of these represent collective goods, whereas the third is a private good (Labaree, 1997). Increasingly, the social mobility component of education has come to the fore, making education a commodity that individuals seek as the collective goods of active citizenship and skill building have taken a back seat (ibid.).
With this dynamic in the background, policymakers must be careful to understand how digitalization, far from expanding the collective benefits of education, can magnify the commodification of education. Knowing that self-betterment is a key driver of modern education, where do Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) fit into the notion of education as a public good? Firms like Coursera,1 Udacity,2 and Khan Academy3 represent some of the largest MOOC providers, operating in both for-profit and non-profit modes. While these firms provide a wide range of courses, including many backed by world-class universities, there is a risk that they are directly promoting the private good of self-betterment as the primary purpose of education. They do not offer courses on local or national politics, nor do they aim to produce more engaged citizens. For example, the skills courses offered by Udacity are entirely oriented toward the computing and software industries.
Digitalization of education sharpens the utopian vision of access to education resources for everyone, yet this vision runs up against the economy of providing these services for “free”. Universities pay to have their content hosted on Coursera’s platform, and students pay for access to courses on Udacity that prepare them for a specific industry. The social aspects of learning risk being lost, and the firms that provide these platforms do not have a responsibility to students in the way that a tax-funded school system does.
1 https://www.coursera.org/
2 https://eu.udacity.com/
3 https://www.khanacademy.org/
to implement flexible, distributed digital platforms for meeting different components of the 2030 Agenda, but these opportunities need to be balanced with
the political and budgeting changes that come with effective FOSS implementation.