Cover illustration, designed by: Ananya Broker Parekh

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is often positioned as puzzle pieces that seamlessly slot into existing infrastructure in the Global South. They claim to optimise efficiency and service delivery by enhancing, and not altering, existing systems (World Bank, Asian Development Bank, The South Centre). The lived realities into which these systems land, however, are anything but uniform. They are shaped by uneven capacities in the state, patterns of exclusion, and unique relationships between citizens, markets and public authorities.

If we treat DPI as neutral architecture, we fail to capture its capacity to reorganise these relationships, redistribute power and change who gets to participate in shaping increasingly digital futures. At the same time, the “DPI moment” offers an opening by putting questions of digital infrastructure, access and data use squarely on the public agenda, and in that, creating new institutional spaces where governments, private actors and civil society must negotiate how these infrastructures are designed and governed.

The evolution of India’s DPI, for example, shows that projects like identity systems, payments and data sharing frameworks are not just technical artefacts but also legal and institutional notions that hinge on regulators, consent intermediaries, standards bodies and grievance mechanisms (IIMB). Treated as such, DPI can be a vehicle for surfacing Global South priorities, like inclusion and public accountability, rather than a one-way import of technologies produced by Global North countries. Our starting point, then, is to ask how to frame DPI in a way that keeps these social and political questions front and centre, instead of treating them as afterthoughts to implementation.

A socio-technical approach gives us language and tools to do this. The crux of this idea is simple – no technology operates in a vacuum. It is constantly engaging with people, institutions and practices that both shape and are shaped by it. Early work in this tradition emerged from studies of industrial workplaces, where researchers observed that changes in machinery reorganised work groups, autonomy and job satisfaction as much as they altered productivity (aboutChange). From there, the idea developed that any large system should be seen as an arrangement of social elements (people, roles, norms, rules) and technical elements (tools, infrastructure, code) that work together (Pollution Sustainability Directive). A socio-technical perspective asks how these elements interact, what kinds of behaviours and power relations they enable, and how they might be reconfigured to achieve not only efficiency but also fairness, participation and resilience.

Bringing this socio-technical lens to DPI helps reframe familiar questions. Instead of asking only whether an identity system or data-sharing protocol is secure and interoperable, we can now question how it alters citizen-state relationships, the terms deciding data flows between actors, and the involvement of local governments, community organisations and end-users in setting priorities. For Global South contexts, where digital projects often intersect with histories of welfare targeting, informal labour and contested citizenship, these questions are especially pressing. A socio-technical approach insists that design choices for data sharing DPI regarding authentication, consent, governance structures and participation are, in effect, choices about social ordering.

Aapti’s work has consistently treated digital systems as embedded in broader social and economic arrangements, not as standalone tools. By viewing governance of data sharing models through a socio-technical lens, we can build on that tradition to argue for governance in which technical standards, legal frameworks, institutional practices and community voices are co-designed. The goal is not to reject DPI as inherently alien, nor to accept it uncritically, but to ask what combination of technical architecture and social organisation would allow digital infrastructures to genuinely serve broader social and public interests in the Global South.

Over the past few years, there has been a growing push to treat trusted data sharing itself as a core component of DPI and not merely a technical layer. This shift is apparent in emerging global frameworks that foreground human‑centric governance, accountability and inclusion alongside APIs and standards (UNDP, G20 2024). Recognising the need for global alignment on trusted data sharing, rooted in people, we decided to embed the socio-technical approach in a comprehensive taxonomy, a use-case repository, and a self-assessment tool.

With a comprehensive taxonomy, countries can understand the full range of contexts, gaps, priorities, roadblocks, as well as enablers that will help build a trusted data-sharing ecosystem. The case study repository is intended to complement the taxonomy with particular examples from extant models across use cases, geographies, and contexts. Along with the self-assessment tool, any stakeholder, particularly a government body, will be able to place themselves in the ecosystem and work towards building a trusted data-sharing ecosystem. To prioritise our socio-technical framing, we anchored our taxonomy in motivations and use-cases. The motivations answer the “why” that drives countries’ system choices, whereas the use-cases provide the “how”. Through the taxonomy, we aim to provide clarity on various components of developing data exchanges, assist stakeholders in understanding factors that influence the development of data exchanges, and also provide a firm foundation. We believe that the taxonomy will focus on the impacts of data sharing models and the value they create, over their technical efficiency.

In practice, we envision that our outcomes will highlight the two-way relationship between technologies and the people who are affected by them. By helping governments and other stakeholders place themselves in the ecosystem, we hope to enable well-informed decision-making that focuses on foundational considerations that are context-specific and rooted in trust and country-specific motivations.

Through our outcomes, we also hope to bring out more practical understandings of how different considerations unique to building data-sharing as DPI in the Global South really are. Most literature and models grow out of the larger Global North, and through our tools, we hope more countries bring out unique insights into building better models that work for them.

We want this work to continue to grow, to ensure that data sharing as DPI truly embodies the “socio” in “socio-technical”. Following the deployment of models, we want to ensure governance continues to play a key role in the evolution of the models, and hope that the taxonomy and its outputs continue to evolve to reflect the realities of the people it is built for. We look forward to hearing inputs as we continue to build out this project. If you are interested in learning more about our work please reach out to.