Development and Democracy

IT for Change's work in the area of development and democracy critically examines the digital paradigms of development and the opportunities and challenges it presents for deepening democracy, global justice and citizen rights. We believe that an equitable information society can flourish only through inclusive and informed debate, involving all stakeholders, especially from the global South. Given the prevalence of Northern perspectives and market-centric thinking in current ICTs for development approaches, we have consciously attempted to articulate alternatives through our research and policy engagement. Techno-architectures must be designed and governed for democratising power, so that countries, communities and individuals at the peripheries can renegotiate their place in the world. From concerns spanning e-governance, public information systems and data in governance to emerging policies in global trade, data governance and the very architectures of Internet policy, ideas of justice must be coded into the legal-institutional architectures of digital technology. 

RECENT

Towards Democratic Governance of Digital Society is the January 2024 edition of the WACC's Media Development Journal. This issue seeks to address growing concerns around the potential for governments, security services, and Big Tech to misuse digital technologies to suppress and exploit users. More importantly, it delineates pathways to ensure…

Digital labour platforms function in markets through “matching…the supply of and demand for paid work through an online platform”. One of the major ways in which matching platforms function is through algorithms, which collect vast amounts of data both from the workers and their customers in order to ostensibly optimise their services…

Data cooperatives offer an alternative to the enclosure of data in digitalized agricultural supply chains by large agri-tech platforms. Despite their potential, experiments in data cooperativism face challenges in a rapidly privatizing technopolitical ecosystem. In India, platforms addressing this issue often focus on producer organizations,…

The Roots of Resilience Conference, a collaborative effort by the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (KDISC), IT for Change (ITfC), and the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) unfolded in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, from 30 November to 2 December 2023. One key outcome that emerged from the engaging discussions over…

This baseline report, conducted as part of IT for Change’s broader partnership with LabourNet under the ‘Re-wiring India's Digitalising Economy for Women's Rights and Well-being’ project, aims to provide data-backed, specific recommendations for the development of the SAHI Serve app, recognizing the ecosystem in which it is situated and the…

The public release of ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot by OpenAI, in November 2022, percolated the public consciousness with the disruptive potential, both incredible and iniquitous, of emerging general purpose AI technologies. In the following months, AI has dominated the public discourse and imagination, with tech organizations trying to…