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Paper short abstract

This paper conceptualises Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as portable statecraft. Through a comparative document analysis of India and the EU, it examines how design principles such as interoperability and scalability function as governance rationalities that depoliticise infrastructural power.

Paper long abstract

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as a globally circulating governance model, comprising interoperable systems of digital identity, payments, and data exchange. Popularised during G20 discussions under India’s 2023 presidency and increasingly promoted by multilateral actors, DPI is framed as a technically neutral foundation for efficient and inclusive governance.

This paper conceptualises DPI as portable statecraft: a standardised infrastructural template that travels transnationally through shared design principles such as scalability, interoperability, openness, and trust. Rather than analysing DPI as a singular technology, the study examines how these principles operate as governance rationalities that organise political authority through technical architecture.

This paper asks how DPI models circulate transnationally as portable forms of statecraft, and how core design principles such as scalability, interoperability, openness, and trust are implemented and institutionalised within distinct political contexts. Drawing on comparative interpretive policy analysis, the study examines foundational strategy documents, institutional frameworks, and implementation-oriented texts from India and the European Union.

The findings suggest that while both contexts mobilise a shared infrastructural vocabulary, they stabilise distinct assemblages of governance, with one oriented towards scale and inclusion, while the other towards sovereignty and regulatory harmonisation. By centring design principles as sites of power, the paper contributes to STS debates on infrastructural governance, policy circulation, and the data-driven state, showing how authority increasingly materialises through infrastructural deployment rather than legislative deliberation.

Keywords: Digital Public Infrastructure, infrastructural governance, policy circulation, statecraft, comparative policy analysis