Small jurisdictions have emerged as the true testing grounds for digital identity carrying all the risks of reshaping how legal identities are governed, despite their often overlooked contributions. Many small places pioneering digital identity initiatives find themselves subsumed under the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) project, one of the largest of its kind. Coincidentally, ID4D receives substantial funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while Microsoft shapes standards for emergent digital identity technologies reaping the benefits of economies of scale.
Meanwhile, the indivisibility of cost puts every fifth participating jurisdiction in ID4D at risk of creating an impractical digital identity system due to their small size. While digital identity projects may be a recent occurrence, debt-financed infrastructure projects have been weaponized in the past. To bridge the gap between established neoliberal development policies and emerging digitalisation efforts, it is warranted to investigate the criteria that define technologies as digital infrastructure within small jurisdictions. Therefore, this research aims to systematically analyse small jurisdictions’ procurement processes for obtaining digital identity solutions. Best practices from celebrated examples like Estonia and Singapore may be intriguing, but they can distract from the fact that the developmental trajectories of small jurisdictions can significantly differ.
Procurement, Digital Infrastructure, Competitiveness, Digital Identity, Distributed Ledger Technology.