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This paper explores whether Chilean public authorities using automated decision‑making can truly meet their duty to give reasons, given the structural tension between human legal reasoning and opaque, statistically driven algorithms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines whether Chilean public authorities that deploy automated decision‑making systems can genuinely satisfy the legal duty to give reasons for administrative acts in a constitutional democracy committed to transparency and accountability. It argues that the growing complexity and opacity of contemporary artificial intelligence architectures create a structural tension between human, causally oriented legal reasoning and statistically driven algorithmic decision‑making that often resists meaningful explanation.

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The paper identifies a fundamental epistemic dissonance between the requirement of rational motivation in administrative law—grounded in the articulation of causal narratives, normative justifications, and publicly accessible reasons—and algorithmic systems that operate through correlations, probabilistic inferences, and high‑dimensional models that are difficult to translate into the language of legal argument. This dissonance becomes more acute as technological sophistication increases: while simple, rule‑based or linear models may allow for relatively clear and auditable explanations, complex machine‑learning systems tend to function as “black boxes,” undermining both citizens’ ability to understand decisions that affect their rights and courts’ capacity to exercise effective judicial review.

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Situated in the Chilean context, the paper engages with recent regulatory developments that recognize a right to an explanation for automated decisions but leave public bodies largely outside the scope of these guarantees. Against this backdrop, the paper contends that the key challenge is not whether the State may use automated systems, but under what conditions such use can be reconciled with the constitutional and administrative law duty to provide reasons that are intelligible, reviewable, and normatively grounded.

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This paper examines how ASEAN’s emerging digital governance frameworks shape power, agency, and digital rights. It analyses regulatory divergence, online safety, and grassroots rights advocacy to envision more inclusive and just digital development futures in Southeast Asia.

Paper long abstract

As Southeast Asia accelerates its digital transformation, ASEAN member states are developing regulatory frameworks for data governance, online safety, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. These initiatives unfold across varied political systems and uneven institutional capacities, producing divergent approaches to digital rights and reshaping relationships between states, corporations, and citizens. This paper analyses how ASEAN’s evolving digital governance landscape is directly influencing development futures in the region.

Drawing on policy analysis and practitioner insights from regional online safety consultations, cross-border data frameworks, and digital payments governance, the paper highlights how digital infrastructures redistribute power while creating new inequalities. Although digitalisation is often narrated as a catalyst for economic growth and inclusion, it also heightens risks of surveillance, algorithmic injustice, digital exclusion, and shrinking civic space—particularly for vulnerable groups such as migrants, refugees, and informal workers.

The paper contributes to reimagining development by advancing a rights-based, people-centred approach to digital governance in ASEAN. It outlines pathways to strengthen constitutional protection of digital rights, embed algorithmic accountability, and enhance community participation in regional policy design. By foregrounding Southeast Asian experiences, the paper challenges Eurocentric governance models and demonstrates how digital futures in the Global South are actively negotiated through everyday struggles over power, access, and agency.

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Western-trained AI models risk "contextual failure" in the Global South. This paper argues current safety benchmarks ignore SADC's epidemiological reality. We propose a "Minimum Viable Audit" framework to protect digital health sovereignty and prevent algorithmic harm in resource-scarce settings.

Paper long abstract

While the Global North focuses on the existential risks of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the Global South faces the immediate risk of "Algorithmic Dumping", the deployment of unverified, Western-centric AI tools into fragile health systems. This paper challenges the assumption that "aligned" models are universally safe.

We introduce the concept of "Contextual Failure," arguing that Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on NHS or US clinical data will hallucinate or provide dangerous advice when faced with the "resource friction" of Southern African healthcare (e.g., suggesting treatments requiring ICUs that do not exist).

Using the SADC region as a case study, we analyze three critical gaps:

1. Epidemiological Mismatch: The bias of training data toward Western disease presentations.

2. Linguistic Drift: The failure of models to parse local clinical shorthand.

3. Infrastructural Friction: The safety risks introduced by low-connectivity deployment.

We conclude by proposing a "Minimum Viable Audit" (MVA) framework. This policy tool would empower African Ministries of Health to demand specific "Safety Certificates" from AI vendors, shifting the burden of proof from the resource-constrained buyer to the technology provider. This moves the debate from abstract "Digital Rights" to concrete "Digital Safety.

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A CDA of Kenya’s digital-skills policies and media narratives showing how state, donor, and corporate actors shape power, agency, and inequality, exposing gaps between empowerment claims and outcomes, and outlining how context-sensitive, just digital futures can be re-imagined.

Paper long abstract

Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” agenda, aligned with regional and national digital plans, presents digital skills as a route to growth and inclusion. Yet upbeat promises sit beside rural–urban and gender gaps, English-first training, and insecure platform work, raising questions about who sets up the digital skilling agenda, who benefits, and why. This paper examines how policy and mainstream media frame communities, organise power, and match claims to results. Using a single-case design, the paper analyses 39 documents from the government, donors, private sector firms, civil society, and media using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, guided by a three-layer framework that links structures, actors, and outcomes, and a focused power analysis. The findings show that: (1) communities are mostly portrayed as passive “beneficiaries” or a “talent pipeline,” not co-designers, thus obscuring grassroots agency; (2) agenda-setting power concentrates in government–donor–corporate coalitions while civil society occupies peripheral spaces; and (3) a persistent rhetoric–outcome disjuncture privileges numeric outputs over quality, equity, and decent work, particularly for women, rural youth, and persons with disabilities. The study advocates for participatory, multilingual, and context-sensitive models that centre local knowledge, open spaces for co-creation, and privilege decent work/labor protections, offering actionable implications for Kenyan ministries, donors, and industry partners.

Building on wider debates about decolonial development futures, the paper demonstrates that dominant narratives continue to reproduce structural inequalities while masking epistemic hierarchies embedded in donor- and corporate-led digital transformation, thus contributing to reimagining digital development in the Global South by foregrounding agency, justice, and context-sensitive governance of digital futures.

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This paper will examine how digital platforms, algorithms have shaped working conditions for gig workers. I employed a convergent mixed-methods approach to demonstrate the interconnection between digital platforms' algorithmic control, media framing of digital platforms, and worker narratives.

Paper long abstract

Digital Platform-mediated work has significantly impacted the urban labour market in terms of changing traditional flexible work arrangements and making them more precarious. This paper will examine how digital platforms algorithms and media practices have shaped working conditions for gig workers in Delhi/Delhi NCR (Delhi/National Capital Region). I used a convergent mixed-methods approach that included structured surveys, semi-structured interviews, ethnographic research and grounded theory coding to show how digital platforms algorithmic control, media framing of digital platforms and worker narratives are interconnected. Some of my most important findings were that gig workers experience extreme income volatility due to the lack of transparency surrounding digital platforms algorithms; that gig workers developed highly effective resistance strategies using WhatsApp groups and coded language; and that there are specific, acute, gendered and disability-specific concerns about safety and access to employment. This study adds to the literature by providing a geographic, media studies, and labor studies lens by centering on worker lived experiences and media practices within a South Asian context, providing key policy implications for social protection in India.

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We test whether an IVR narrative game builds “critical capabilities”—fraud-resistant judgment under urgency and ambiguity—among mobile money users in Uganda. A randomized trial with Viamo links survey outcomes to administrative complaints. We also discuss scale-up challenges with the regulator.

Paper long abstract

Digital markets demand judgment and autonomy in environments engineered to steer attention. The same tools that personalize finance and communication lower the cost of persuasion and, in adversarial hands, deception. This tension is acute in developing countries, where mobile money has driven financial inclusion while shifting risk onto consumers making high-urgency decisions on basic phones with limited recourse.

We argue that consumer protection in adversarial digital markets must build critical capabilities—the capacities that make consumers and citizens autonomous. Not generic “awareness,” these include trainable skills of discernment and action under pressure: distinguishing legitimate from deceptive contact, executing verification routines, and choosing protective responses (pause, verify, refuse, report). We test a scalable method to build these capabilities experimentally.

In partnership with Viamo, we evaluate a 20-minute interactive voice response (IVR) narrative game for mobile money users in Uganda. The intervention simulates scam scripts, prompts choices in real time, and provides immediate feedback to practice routines. IVR supports inclusion by reaching low-literacy users without smartphones through the same communication layer where scams arrive.

In a large randomized evaluation linking survey outcomes to administrative data, we find durable impacts nine months after exposure. Treated users report fewer fraud losses and stronger protective practices, and administrative records show increased complaints, consistent with greater consumer voice rather than higher fraud incidence. We also observe calibrated trust and sustained engagement with digital financial services. Ongoing work with Uganda’s communications regulator (UCC) explores scale-up, costs, and how to build consumer-protection infrastructure.

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The present study focuses the inclusiveness of government Digital Health Platforms (DHP) in permitting equitable health access for transgender individuals in India. The main objective of this research is to evaluate how DHP facilitate the access to healthcare services for transgender persons.

Paper long abstract

India’s enduring digital health transition, headed by initiatives such as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), to advance Universal Health Coverage (UHC) through technology-driven systems. However, the capacity of these digital health inventions remnants uneven, principally for transgender and gender-diverse populations who remain to encounter exclusion from mainstream healthcare services. The present study focuses the inclusiveness of government Digital Health Platforms (DHP) and digital identity (ID) systems in permitting equitable health access for transgender individuals in India. The main objective of this research is to evaluate how DHP especially those linked to identity authentication systems like Aadhaar facilitate the access to healthcare services for transgender persons. A transgender identity card (TGID) was introduced in 2020 to improve inclusion, but uptake remains very low – less than 5% of the estimated trans population have obtained one – due to bureaucratic delays, technical glitches, and privacy concerns. These challenges are compounded by systemic social exclusion (over 80% of trans individuals do not live in their natal family households, making family-based health schemes like insurance hard to access) and instances of stigma or discrimination in healthcare settings. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to conduct a mixed-methods study focused on metropolitan cities, working closely with transgender communities to identify gaps and co-create solutions. Thematic analysis will be applied to examine the intersection of digital access, gender identity, and healthcare delivery.

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This paper examines how Gen Z in Kenya leverages social media platforms to mobilise, document state actions, and assert political agency. It explores how digital rights struggles reshape youth agency, governance, and development futures in East Africa.

Paper long abstract

Digital spaces are becoming central arenas for negotiating power, citizenship, and development futures in the Global South. In East Africa, the rise of Gen Z–led mobilisations in Kenya demonstrates how young people are using social media platforms, especially X/Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, to organise, document state actions, and articulate new forms of political agency. These decentralised and networked practices challenge traditional governance structures and offer alternative visions of accountability, transparency, and civic participation.

This paper examines the mechanisms through which digital platforms have enabled the rapid growth of Kenya’s youth-driven movements, focusing on how online narratives, digital solidarity, and crowdsourced information shift the balance of power between citizens and the state. In contrast, the paper analyses Tanzania’s recurring internet shutdowns as a form of digital repression that restricts civic space and undermines constitutional protections of digital rights. These shutdowns highlight the uneven governance architectures shaping who can participate in digital public spheres and whose voices are silenced.

By comparing Kenya’s bottom-up digital activism with Tanzania’s top-down control, the paper explores core questions for the panel: How do digital tools redistribute agency? How do state surveillance and shutdowns shape civic space? And what do these tensions reveal about the possibilities and limits of decolonising digital governance?

The paper argues that the region's political futures are increasingly shaped by contestations over digital rights. Gen Z movements point toward more participatory and justice-oriented digital futures, even as states strengthen mechanisms of digital control.

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This paper analyses how Big Tech corporations are extracting income from digital markets in Africa and shifting the profits to tax havens in Cayman Islands, Ireland, and Luxembourg among the other secrecy jurisdictions. .

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses how Big Tech corporations are extracting income from digital markets in Africa and shifting the profits to tax havens in Cayman Islands, Ireland, and Luxembourg among the other secrecy jurisdictions. The paper particularly focuses on the unethical tax practices of the Silicon Valley-based tech giants including Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple and Microsoft as well as Chinese tech firms such as Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent that have become pervasive in Africa. While the tech giants have been celebrated on the continent for their imagined contribution towards digital transformation, there are claims that these firms practice aggressive tax avoidance, transfer-pricing, intellectual property migration, and IP-licensing to minimize their tax liabilities in Africa. These practices raise questions of distributive justice, fiscal sovereignty, and revenue integrity. Viewed from an Afro-decolonial approach, it is argued that the tech titans are clandestinely involved in intensifying their rent extraction and capitalist accumulation at the expense of Africa’s financial health. This is not dissimilar to the traditional multinational corporations that have decapitalized Africa since the days of slavery, colonial encounters, and Cold War years. The paper concludes by canvasing for the decolonization of African agency in order to stop the bleeding and the decapitalization of the continent in this digital age. Using data from press reports, policy briefs, and academic literature as well as key informants, the paper seeks to contribute towards a deeper understanding of the contradictions of the digital economy/platform economy in Africa.

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Drawing on practitioner experience at Change.org, this paper explores how grassroots women-led digital campaigns in the Global South negotiate digital rights, governance and feminist development futures through a bottom-up approach

Paper long abstract

Digital transformation is increasingly reshaping governance and development trajectories in the global south. While digital platforms offer quick access to opportunities promising new forms of inclusivity and equal participation, they also generate new forms of exclusion and discrimination especially for women and marginalised communities. This paper is drawn from the researcher's practitioner experience while working as a Campaign Strategist in Change.org India, supporting women-led digital campaigns across the country, to examine how digital rights are contested and negotiated through the medium of platform advocacy.

This paper explores how women use such digital platforms to fight for social issues translating their lived experiences - such as menstrual health, violence against women, gender-neutral washrooms etc, towards action-oriented policies/ collective political action.

By centring Global South feminist practice, the paper contributes to debates on digital rights, governance, and sustainable development by demonstrating how women-led digital campaigns function as bottom-up governance interventions. It argues that reimagining development futures requires moving beyond Eurocentric and technocratic models of digital transformation towards rights-based, gender-responsive digital governance frameworks. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications for policy design, institutional reform, and the co-creation of more equitable and just digital futures grounded in grassroots agency.

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Based on fieldwork in Chhattisgarh, India, this paper shows how digitisation of welfare turns Anganwadi workers from caregivers into data labourers, intensifying surveillance, workload and precarity while redefining care as auditable, digital and data efficiency rather than social reproduction.

Paper long abstract

Aanganwadi workers (AWWs), the backbone of India’s child nutrition program - Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), are one of the largest groups of state-dependent, low-paid care workers in the country. This paper examines how digital governance and digitisation of their routine work has restructured the everyday rhythms of labour and livelihood for AWWs. The transformation of AWWs from caregivers to “digital footsoldiers” whose labour as data collector and uploader has been proving a basis for digital governance in India. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, and participant observation conducted in Bemetara and Bilaspur districts of Chhattisgarh, India between 2023–2024, the study demonstrates how digital tools such as the Poshan Tracker App, Matru Vandan App has converted care into surveilled, auditable data. Drawing on feminist scholarship on care, social reproduction and feminist STS literature, the study aims to bring how digitisation extends the managerial control of the state at the expense of redefining care as efficiency and data. Findings from the field shows that AWWs face significant challenges while doing their digital duties, like- lack of digital literacy, infrastructural challenges, and complex app interfaces. The paper argues that digitisation of welfare programs has further devalued the women’s care labour and has put the burden of delivery of welfare onto them. Digitisation has also intensified surveillance and control, with workers monitored through GPS, real-time dashboards, which increases anxiety among the workers. While the data is made visible in digital welfare systems, the labour that produces it, remains undervalued and precarious.

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This paper examines Ghana’s digitalisation policies and their effect on women. This study finds that geographical location, educational background and socio-economic status results in only partial digitalisation which reflects access, knowledge and competency regarding using digital technology.

Paper long abstract

Digitalisation is described as able to empower women by enhancing their economic independence through flexible jobs, adaptable working hours, online entrepreneurship and financial inclusion while also expanding access to education, health, and information among others. Various governments in Ghana have therefore embarked on several digitalisation policy initiatives to make Ghana a digital economy so women can take advantage of the opportunities digitalisation offers to enhance equitable development. In this paper, I examine the extent to which these policy initiatives have been beneficial to women and other vulnerable groups in Ghanaian society. This paper relies on indepth interviews conducted in the Northern, Ashanti and Western regions of Ghana and pertinent literature and policies to assess the effects of digitalisation policies on Ghanaian women. Using the concept of domestic digital divide and intersectionality, I argue that there is a governmental disconnect and technological gap which inhibits rural, poor, uneducated and vulnerable women from accessing the full set of opportunities which digitalisation offers inspite of digitalisation policies. This study shows that one’s geographical location, educational background and socio-economic status determines level of access, knowledge of digitalisation policies and competency regarding using digital technology tools. I conclude that despite the existence of digitalisation policies and institutions tasked with implementation, the result is only partial digitalisation. There is a need for broader citizen centered consultation for effective policy implementation.