Towards a Multilateral Framework for Digital Public Infrastructure

IMAGO / SNA

As the current G20 chair, India confronts the challenge of affirming the forum’s value for consensus-building and collective action in times of heightened geopolitical tensions. A key opportunity for this is a structured and prudent agenda on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The broad availability of performant and secure DPI is a critical enabler to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, India’s experience of rolling-out digital services at scale puts this year’s presidency in a strong position to design a forward-looking agenda on the issue.

This policy brief identifies DPI as a component of sustainable development, discusses the G20’s potential as a focal point for international cooperation, and develops possible steps for advancing the group’s DPI agenda. This includes setting up a designated task force on human-centred DPI principles, a multistakeholder process to support the mapping of local requirements, and early cooperation prototyping in ‘implementation triangles’ consisting of two G20 members and a third partner country. More broadly, intensified engagement on DPI also provides an opportunity to anchor sustainable development and the global public good at the centre of the G20’s rapidly-evolving digital technology agenda.

This article by Christoph Meinel, Sharinee L. Jagtiani & David Hagebölling was first published by Think20 (T20) in January 2023. You can find the full text here.

Bibliographic data

Hagebölling, David, Christoph Meinel, and Sharinee Jagtiani. “Towards a Multilateral Framework for Digital Public Infrastructure.” German Council on Foreign Relations. January 2023.

This article by Christoph Meinel, Sharinee L. Jagtiani & David Hagebölling was first published by Think20 (T20) in January 2023. You can find the full text here.

Program

Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and Technology