Digital Public Goods: Concepts, Politics, and Governance

Digital technologies increasingly provide infrastructures upon which societies depend. Open-source software, digital identity systems, payment infrastructures, data platforms, digital registries, educational resources, health technologies, artificial intelligence models, and other digital systems are increasingly discussed through the language of digital public goods.
Yet the growing use of the term raises fundamental questions for political science and international relations: What, exactly, makes a digital technology a public good? When are digital resources actually recognized as public goods? Is the recognition a matter of national, regional, or international conventions? And who is the "public" in digital public goods?
This panel invites theoretical, conceptual, comparative, and empirical contributions examining the politics and governance of digital public goods. We particularly encourage dialogue between emerging scholarship on digital technologies and established political science and international relations literatures on public goods, global public goods, commons, collective action, development, infrastructure, political economy, and global governance.
Topics can include, but do not have to be limited to:
- conceptual explorations of the term "digital public goods"
- how and when technologies are recognized and constructed as digital public goods, and who has the authority to do so
- what makes a digital public good distinctly digital and how does that fit with conceptualizations of scarcity and resource depletion
- comparative explorations of digital public goods in different domains
- governance of digital public goods and digital commons
- digital public goods and the Global South
- AI as a digital public good
- digital public goods and national security