S8 E2: Digital Technology and Environmental Sustainability: Is it a match?

 The Principles for Digital Development were created over a decade ago as international development and humanitarian practitioners began integrating accessible digital technology in programming. And while the Digital Principles didn't quite revolutionize the field, their establishment created a common language and vision around how to institutionalize lessons learned. That was in 2016. Fast forward and a lot has changed: digital technology is accessible, commonly adopted into programming, and we are witnessing new kinds of technology emerging that have incredible potential to both help and harm economies, societies, and the way we work and live. In this mini-season, we will look ahead to explore the new challenges that come with new technology and see how global actors and the Digital Principles themselves can evolve to ensure that technology benefits all.

Widespread adoption of digital technology has improved the way we access information, services, and economic opportunities, but at what cost to the environment? Claudine Lim hosts Carlosfelipe Pardo and Angelina Fisher to weigh the tradeoffs on how technology both exacerbates and mitigates the impacts of climate change and the natural environment. 

Emerging technologies are introducing a new digital era, driving innovative business and service models. This comes with new pressures for regulators and global actors to balance public interests and fair markets, all while allowing innovative businesses to thrive. Miriam Stankovic (Senior Digital Policy Specialist, DAI) sits with host, Claudine Lim, to explore critical questions and approaches to ensuring equitable and sustainable governance frameworks, protocols, and policy systems.

The Digital Principle "Reuse and Improve" is often applied to data: by leveraging existing information, we can drastically reduce operating costs and quickly improve services and systems. On a national level, opening data flows can impact economies by increasing trade volume and productivity while reducing prices for industries that increasingly rely on data. Thus, for any nation participating in the global economy, effective and clear policy on cross-border data flows is necessary. But as we know, there are legitimate concerns around risks to human rights and citizen safety. In this episode, Angelina Fisher (NYU School of Law), Tom Orrell (DataReady), and Chris Calabrese (Microsoft) compare their industry's innovative approaches to governing the surge in data and designing robust policies that retain a fine balance between the benefits and risks of data flows and governance.

The use of digital technologies in international development and humanitarian programs to deliver information, services, and assistance has become commonplace, but cybersecurity in these areas have been largely untapped. Without it, ICT becomes a potential new point of failure that could threaten to undo development progress. In this episode, Claudine Lim sits with Melissa Hathaway and Francesca Spidalieri to discuss key takeaways for development and humanitarian practitioners to consider from their recent report "Integrating Cyber Capacity into the Digital Development Agenda." Mark Manantan (Resident Vasey Fellow, Pacific Forum) joins the conversation to share cyber strategies, challenges, and breakthroughs in the Indo-Pacific.

The Digital Principle, "Address Privacy and Security", is framed around the idea of data and how it's collected, used, stored, and shared. Recent community discussions have been increasingly focused on how ICT practitioners can better preempt digital harm issues other than data protection. Claudine Lim sits with John Zoltner of Save the Children US, and development consultant researcher, Priscilla Wahome Majani, to explore how digital development stakeholders are collaborating to advance child protection in the digital space.

When it comes to "openness" in digital development, one of the most important things to remember, and one of the easiest to forget, is why we're doing this work in the first place. Connecting the strategy of openness to social impact outcomes, we sit with Dr. Ronda Zelezny-Green (Program Director, Capacity Accelerator Network at DataDotOrg and Digital Principles Advisory Council Member) to discuss the values and challenges of open educational resources. Amandine Le Pape (Co-Founder, Matrix.org) shares examples of how open technology platforms can speed national digital transformation and Samson Goddy (Co-Founder, Open Source Community Africa) gives us a glimpse of the potentials of an open future.

In the last episode, we discussed ways open source licenses for software can unlock digital cooperation. In this episode, Sarah and Heath explore how that might be able to happen. Lucy Harris (Digital Public Goods Alliance), Bernhard Kowatsch (World Food Program Innovation Accelerator), and Max Mehl (Free Software Foundation Europe's Public Code program) weigh in on how this concept helps and challenges innovation startups, share how one can apply the "open principle" to their ideas, and set clear definitions and checklists for how to better achieve the Sustainable Development Goals through public goods and open source.

"Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation" – what does that mean for your organization? Sarah Farooqi and Heath Arensen of the Digital Impact Alliance's Open Source Center, introduce the principle of openness this mini-season, as it relates to digital development, how it impacts ways of working, and what it means for shared global goals. They chat with Angela Odour-Lungati (Ushahidi) and Hong-Phuc Dang (Open Source Initiative) to explore what "being open" might mean for each type of organization or project, its impact in other fields, and look at a use case in Kenya.

Episode 3 kicks off with a bit of background from Ian Gray on the third hurdle in creating a sustainable business model for digital solutions in the humanitarian and development sectors: the viability risk problem. Essentially, can you procure sustainable funding? This is perhaps the most visceral challenge for businesses in the space, given the way that procurement works, the risk-averse nature of many organizations, and the failure to invest in digital solutions and knowledge across the sector.