DELIVERING HUMAN-CENTERED DIGITAL PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE – A PUBLIC VALUES AND GOVERNANCE ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL IDENTITIES

In 2021, an estimated 850m people around the world were lacking means of identification, challenging the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030. Digital identity infrastructure is increasingly considered as a means to tackle this challenge and effectively enable society-wide functions and services. The development of reliable digital identity infrastructure has become a high priority for governments to enable their citizens to take full advantage of the opportunities that digitalization represents. At the same time, critical researchers have uncovered that inadequately designed government-led digital infrastructure often leads to negative societal outcomes, by failing to uphold public values such as inclusion, citizen protection and sustainability. This cumulative thesis investigates how digital identity infrastructure design interrelates with a public values approach, proposing an analytical lens to concisely apprehend governance and institutional design decisions to deliver human-centric outcomes. It does so using qualitative methods borrowed from the information systems and political science domains. It proposes a refined public values framework fit for our new reality of digital public infrastructure deployment, and a taxonomy of strategic governance and institutional decisions when designing digital identity infrastructure. These tools can be used by both researchers and practitioners to guide digital identity infrastructure design and evaluation, and this dissertation concludes with an instantiation thereof. Collectively, these contributions build a foundation for the contextualization of digital infrastructure development with a human-centric perspective.