Infrastructuring identity, securing citizenship: open-source platforms and the global governance of digital identity

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My proposed DPhil project examines how ideas of citizenship and governance are embedded in digital identification platforms, and how these enable or constrain access to political participation. Following the publication of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals - which include the imperative to provide a "legal identity for all" (Goal 16.9) - a range of powerful global policy actors have begun investing in and promoting foundational digital identification technologies (World Bank 2016; UNDP 2022). These are digital platforms which provide legal proof that somebody is who they say they are, typically with respect to a state-managed administrative system (Whitley, Gal and Kjaegaard, 2014; World Bank, 2019). One prominent solution proposed as a means of addressing Goal 16.9 is the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP): a purportedly context-free, scalable digital identification system that can be adopted by any state government. MOSIP's compelling vision, alongside its institutional backing by influential actors including the World Bank, Gates Foundation, and Omidyar Network, has seen the platform's uptake in the Philippines, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Togo, Guinea, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone (Burt 2022). MOSIP's growing adoption indicates its vast potential for reshaping how governments operate at a global scale. In response, this project proposes a timely and critical investigation into the understandings of citizenship embedded in the platform, who these include and exclude, and how they affect access to political decision-making and government resources. As the first indepth study of MOSIP, this research offers significant conceptual impact, elucidating how open source digital identification platforms shape political participation. This not only has implications for MOSIP and its seven countries of implementation, but also for similar initiatives such the Digital Impact Alliance's 'GovStack'. Through a mixed-methods study combining policy analysis, technical document analysis, participant observation, and interviews, I will explore the values and practices of the policy and technical actors involved in MOSIP, and how these shape the platform's design. In doing so, I will examine what open source digital identification technology means for the role of digital platforms in scaling new forms of governance. Thus, my project will respond to the following research questions: RQ1: What notions of citizenship does MOSIP embed and enact (and what criteria is used)? RQ2: How might this shape political participation? RQ3: What norms of governance does the platform reflect (and how are these scaled across national boundaries)?