Our Executive Director, Anita Gurumurthy, is a member of the UN CSTD Working Group on Data Governance. In line with its mandate under Para 48 of the UN Global Digital Compact, the Working Group is exploring follow-up recommendations towards equitable and interoperable data governance arrangements, through deliberations on four key tracks:
- Fundamental principles of data governance at all levels as relevant for development;
- Proposals to support interoperability between national, regional; and international data systems;
- Considerations of sharing the benefits of data; and
- Options to facilitate safe, secure, and trusted data flows, including cross-border data flows as relevant for development (all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)).
The discussions in the Working Group have generated rich insights across the four tracks.
In January 2026, the IT for Change team conducted a narrative analysis of the submissions across the four tracks to identify interlinkages in the debates and pathways for forging a holistic data governance approach grounded in a developmental vision.
Our mapping demonstrates that questions on the principles of data governance, interoperability, equitable benefit-sharing, and governance of cross-border data flows are deeply interlinked and mutually constitutive. While they may be significant issues for policy in and of themselves, addressing them in isolation risks fragmenting governance responses and diluting their developmental implications.
Across tracks, certain political-economic tensions surface repeatedly. These are between:
- Economistic data frameworks and social-relational ethics of data (individualistic and societal frameworks of data governance),
- Technical interoperability and socio-cultural and economic premises of data ethics (technical standards for data interoperability and pluralistic visions of data governance), and
- The liberalisation of cross-border data flows and the differential abilities of countries to generate value in an interdependent global economy (free data flows and data sovereignty).
Read the full submission here.