Governance for Digital Technologies
Digital technologies are important tools for supporting economic development and collective action and solving relevant public problems. On the other hand, they have many associated risks, requiring governance mechanisms to protect vulnerable groups of so
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Governance for Digital Technologies
Abstract Digital technologies are important tools for supporting economic development and collective action and solving relevant public problems. On the other hand, they have many associated risks, requiring governance mechanisms to protect vulnerable groups of society and to enhance public well-being. This chapter focuses on the design of institutions essential to governing the digital world. It also presents theoretical concepts that might be part of the construction of a digital governance framework. Keywords Institution • Grammar • Polycentric governance • Cybersecurity • Multistakeholder • Decision-making process • Transparency • Accountability • Coordination • Self-governance • Adaptive capacity The previous chapter discussed how digital tools can help build better governance processes. This chapter focuses on governance mechanisms and processes for digital tools and resources that constitute the digital world’s core. A famous aphorism mistakenly attributed to Marshall McLuhan says: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” The quote was actually written by Father John Culkin (Culkin 1967). Tools such as Google, Waze, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Alexa, WeChat, YouTube, Spotify, Uber, and WhatsApp are powerful © The Author(s) 2021 F. Filgueiras, V. Almeida, Governance for the Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55248-0_4
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examples that illustrate how digital resources shape society and create new patterns of behavior around the world. The digital world is still a confusing scenario with many unanswered questions—especially related to the role of governments, society, and big tech companies in the creation of rules and models for oversight, transparency, accountability, and management of global digital platforms. Current and future digital tools must be governed so that their use and ownership by governments, firms, and society can be applied to solve some of society’s biggest challenges. The digital world requires governance in a way that promotes and protects human rights, and preserves ethical values and society’s well-being (IEEE 2019). While governance has the potential to promote digital technologies to improve human organizations, governance also has to find ways to address the complexity and ubiquity of digital technologies. One of the challenges is to find out which institutions need to be designed to govern the digital world to achieve the desired results. The design of institutions to govern the digital world faces a context of increasing adaptation. Adaptation requires an institutional dynamic to be able to respond to specific challenges associated with the growth of the digital world. The design of institutions should consider the inherent uncertainties of the digital world, caused by a number of factors: fast pace of technology evolution, quasi-permanent turbulence in institutional environment, conditions beyond historical experience, and a diversity of impacts on differen
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