Development and Democracy

2024

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…

2023

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,…

2023

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…

2023

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…

2023

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…

2023

Tech titans are fostering new forms of digital colonialism, both within wealthy countries and on the global stage. But it’s not too late to build a digital economy that works for everyone.

The digital economy is not working.

Democracy, freedom, and prosperity were the original promises of the internet. The world wide web was a…

2023

IT for Change submitted its inputs to the public consultation organized by the Rajasthan government on its proposed Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Bill, 2023. The Bill is one of the first to create a fund for guaranteeing social security benefits to platform-based gig workers, and in that regard, aligns with IT…

2023

The entry of generative AI applications in the digital marketplace has intensified recent public debates about AI. Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast’ techno-optimism is now under the scanner. A humane and just AI system requires a radical restructuring of the global political-economic regime of knowledge, innovation, and development. In an era…

2023

Over the past two years, there have been concerning instances of excess and malpractice by Big Tech, leading to serious social, political, and economic consequences. These include data extractivism, increased worker precarity, setbacks in gender justice, the domination of developing countries' infrastructure, manipulation of global governance…

2023

IT for Change participated in the call for inputs by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, in order to collect information for thematic reports on outlining a vision for the future in “reinvigorating the right to development” and understanding the role of business in realizing the right to development in the context of the 2030…