Digital Public Goods: A Precondition for Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals

With a decade until the 2030 deadline to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, experts continue to view progress as largely inadequate. Many experts highlight collaboration as being crucial for driving progress on the 17 goals and 169 targets, which were formally launched in 2015.
Progress towards every single one of the goals and targets also hinges on the effective deployment of digital technologies, write ANITA GURUMURTHY and NANDINI CHAMI in a new report published by Bonn-based Development and Peace Foundation (sef:).
As the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (HLPDC) has flagged in its 2019 report, the authors state, this cannot be restricted to the idea of promoting access to connectivity technologies. “In the age of digital interdependence, a transformative vision in relation to Agenda 2030 requires building digital ecosystems, including elements such as public data pools and public platforms,” they write in the report, titled ‘Digital Public Goods: A Precondition for Realizing the SDGs’.
Only by overcoming crucial weaknesses in the current data economy will such ecosystems be able to catalyze and sustain progressive socio-economic change. A binding international treaty on data – enabling states to develop national policy frameworks for the governance of their data resources – is necessary for the realization of the SDGs.
Successful public provisioning of digital and data infrastructure is predicated on overcoming the data economy challenges. Infrastructural investment in digital public goods and national data and AI strategies or digital economy road maps need to be guided by an effective policy framework.
The following actions need to be undertaken on priority by governments:
- Building public data pools
- Adopting a mixed data economy ownership regime
- Putting in place a strategic framework to govern cross-border transfers of data
- Introducing public interest exemptions in AI patent licensing
- Recovering the public utility character of essential platform infrastructure
Undoubtedly, nation states cannot effectively undertake these policy measures without a supporting international framework for the regulation of transnational digital corporations, fair use exemptions for intellectual property rights in AI technologies and the governance of cross-border data flows.
In the first two areas, there are already existing processes in the multilateral system that need to be leveraged: the negotiations on the binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights must be closed out at the earliest with a dedicated section on platform companies; and the prevailing intellectual property rights regime must be revisited so that foundational digital infrastructure is made available as a global public good.
With regard to data, it is imperative that the governance of data flows is removed from the space of trade policy negotiations. “The need of the hour is a new binding international treaty on data that recognizes the sovereign right of states to evolve national policy frameworks for the governance of their data resources, working within the larger rubric of a data constitutionalism that respects, protects, and promotes the civic-political and economic rights of individuals and communities in data resources,” the authors state.
As Jovan Kurbalijia, the Executive Director of the argues, a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue forum at the international level to build policy traction on data and AI governance issues may be a useful step in the direction of international cooperation in the digital domain, GURUMURTHY and CHAMI write. The UN HLPDC’s recommendation to reboot the Internet Governance Forum into a Digital Cooperation Forum with due corrections to its historical weakness of lack of concrete action outcomes and dedicated discussion lines for governments/other stakeholders is a concrete direction in this regard.
Finally, in the highly skewed and exceptionally unequal global digital economy, strengthening ODA contributions to digitalization for development strategies in the global South must be undertaken, according to the authors. As the UNCTAD has flagged, the share of aid for ICT in aid for trade is only a mere 1.2%, and only 1% of project funding of multilateral development banks in developing countries has gone to ICT projects. This needs to shift immediately, through a dedicated mechanism to co-ordinate development funding for digital public goods that are integral to the realization of Agenda 2030.