Multistakeholder Governance for DPI

Digitalization life cycle

Digitalization programs share common stages. The Universal Digital Public Infrastructure Safeguards Framework suggests that DPI has five distinct life-cycle stages. 1 Each stage is associated with different functions, opportunities, and risks.
The cycle is iterative, meaning that its stages can and should be returned to as the DPI initiatives evolve, new technologies and functions are added, unforeseen innovations and goals arise, and more information on what works and what doesn’t is collected.

A. The Conception and Scoping stage focuses on the purpose, goals, constraints, and boundaries of a DPI initiative.
B. In Strategy and Design stage, the plans for DPI are socialized among responsible authorities and other stakeholders, impact metrics are identified, and potential barriers to implementation are addressed.
C. In the Development stage, a prototype DPI is built according to defined specifications, ensuring functionality, reliability, and scalability. Here, the focus is on testing and iterating prototypes and on identifying additional risks.
D. During the Deployment stage, the DPI is rolled out, operations begin, and a monitoring and redress system is put in place.
E. Regular Operations and Maintenance then commences, with the focus on monitoring the DPI initiative’s function and use, and learning to support continued improvements and adaptations.

Examples

• The World Bank’s ID4D’s CSO engagement guide contains stakeholder mapping and engagement plan templates. 2 Software that can enable this in a form of tailored customer relations management, such as SimplyStakeholders, provides off-the-shelf tools.
• The UNDP’s DPI Approach Playbook provides a complementary view of stakeholder engagement across the technology, governance, and sustainability dimensions of DPI, helping practitioners gauge the depth of involvement each group requires. 3

Examples

• The UNDP’s DPI Approach Playbook offers guidance on how institutions can embed the DPI approach and identify leadership, as well as a checklist for identifying champions. 4
• The UN Universal DPI Safeguards Framework sets out the typical personas, roles, and responsibilities of governments within the DPI ecosystem, which can help clarify where institutional responsibility is best located. 5

Examples

• A recent Digital Impact Alliance report explores the financial, political, and institutional-trust barriers facing African CSOs engaging DPI and offers recommendations for supporting them. 6
• The UCL Applied Governance for Digital Public Infrastructure Course offers structured training tailored to senior policymakers, civil society organizations, and private sector professionals, and can be used to bring participants to a common baseline ahead of substantive engagements. 7

Example

• The PDIA Toolkit provides specific tools for problem discover and validation: Section 1 and Worksheet 1 guide teams through constructing a problem statement grounded in local evidence, while Section 2 offers the “5 whys” technique (Worksheet 2) and the Ishikawa or fishbone diagram (Worksheet 3) for deconstructing root causes. The accompanying videos provide short, accessible introductions to each concept that can be shared with participants unfamiliar with the approach. 8

Example

• The UNDP’s DPI Approach Playbook Play 2 sets out a six-stage scoping assessment that supports governments to link national priorities to specific development goals and translate them into a publicly documented DPI roadmap, with the checklist prompting reflection on timelines, responsibilities and documentation. Play 6’s alignment assessment provides a further tool for verifying that stated goals reflect the DPI approach and its emphasis on open technology, robust governance, and resilient local ecosystems. 9

Examples

• The UN Universal DPI Safeguards Framework describes the DPI life cycle as inherently iterative rather than linear and emphasizes the need for continuous learning and refinement during E Operations and Maintenance, underlining that scoping is not a one-off activity. 10
• The PDIA Toolkit’s Section 7 on learning from iterations, including the iteration check-in tool (Worksheet 12), provides practical mechanisms for structured reflection that can be adapted to revisit goals over the course of a multistakeholder process. 11

Examples

• The OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit treats joint chairing as an advanced step within its co-ownership and joint decision-making standards and documents how countries like Nigeria and the Philippines have operationalized it through co-chaired steering committees. 13
• The “OGP National Handbook” section on multistakeholder forums provides further guidance on the composition, mandate, and chairing of these bodies, including how to ensure civil society co-chairs are selected through transparent, independent processes. 14

Example

• The OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit sets out three routes for formalizing multistakeholder forums, with their relative advantages and disadvantages: administrative decree, new or existing legislation, and formal agreement. It also lays out the main decision-making models (consensus, majority, qualified majority and mixed rules) with their trade-offs. The tool kit’s seven principles of public life offer a readymade ethical framework that can be adapted into conduct rules for DPI forum members. 15

Examples

• The World Bank’s ID4D’s CSO engagement guide offers methods of CSO engagement (written submissions, regular consultation meetings, standing committees, collaborative research) directly transferable to DPI. 16
• The OGP National Handbook’s Multistakeholder Forum section covers how to enable remote participation, engage actors from different branches and levels of government, and establish diverse avenues for engagement.OGP, “OGP National Handbook,” accessed August 3, 2026.[/footnote]
• The UNDP’s Guide to Digital Participation Platforms explains when and how digital platforms can extend meaningful participation, and its matrix of over 80 platforms in the appendices helps governments identify options suited to their context, while flagging the limits of purely digital approaches for communities affected by the digital divide. 17

Examples

• The UNDP’s Guide to Digital Participation Platforms addresses these inclusion considerations in its “Commit to inclusion from the very start” section, and its discussion of citizens’ assemblies notes the importance of stipends, childcare and similar supports to achieve representative participation. 18
• The OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit describes the OGP Multi-Donor Trust Fund as a potential source of co-funding for governments seeking external support for such activities. 19

Examples

• The OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit’s IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation identifies deliberative polling, workshops, and expert advisory panels as useful techniques. 20
• The Ada Lovelace Institute’s Participatory Data Stewardship framework extends the IAP2 Spectrum to data governance, providing a digital-specific vocabulary that the OGP toolkit does not. 21
• UNDP’s Guide to Digital Participation Platforms addresses the opportunities and risks of using AI tools to translate, summarize, and cluster participant contributions, along with the guardrails needed to preserve fairness. 22
• Participedia serves as a searchable repository of tested deliberative methods that governments can adapt to their context.

Example

• The OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit’s section 6 on developing action plans sets out the participation and co-creation standards that apply at each stage, including how to provide adequate notice, publish contributions and reasoning, and agree commitments jointly with civil society. Checklist 2 offers a ready-made set of prompts for governments running an action plan development cycle, and Case Study 5 on Australia illustrates how these principles can be operationalized in practice. 23

Examples

• Nesta’s Testing Innovation in the Real World addresses this directly in its guidance on “organising and funding the real-world testbed appropriately,” which emphasizes the need for patient funding and the flexibility to change course, and on “analys[ing] risk and embed[ding] in real-world testbed design” which sets out how to treat failure as a source of evidence rather than a reputational risk. 25
• The World Bank’s How to Build a Regulatory Sandbox provides a useful parallel by showing how evidence-gathering environments allow regulators to permit well-bounded experimentation before committing to wider rollout. 26

Examples

• Nesta’s Testing Innovation in the Real World sets out how to map stakeholders, avoid “too many cooks” and ensure quality of leadership. The NHS Testbeds case study illustrates the importance of identifying local champions with the authority and credibility to drive implementation. 27
• The Urban Living Lab Way of Working Handbook similarly highlights the convening role played by dedicated facilitators and partner organizations that maintain continuity across multiple pilot cycles. 28

Examples

• The World Bank’s How to Build a Regulatory Sandbox offers a full operational blueprint: section 2 provides a decision process for assessing whether a sandbox is the right tool; section 3 sets out five core design elements (eligibility, governance, timing, test restrictions and exit options); and section 4 covers organizational design, consultation and test implementation. Annex 2’s templates for feasibility assessments, project plans and testing protocols offer ready-to-adapt working documents. 30
• The OECD’s Regulatory Sandbox Toolkit provides a complementary, cross-sectoral perspective on setting up controlled testing environments that can be adapted to the DPI context. 31
• UNICEF’s Safeguarding DPI for Children recommends testing innovations with high-risk groups as a practical way to verify whether design assumptions reflect lived realities and explicitly identifies which groups are most at risk of exclusions. 32

Examples

• The Urban Living Lab Way of Working Handbook provides a structured yet flexible approach for designing and running collaborative experiments across policymakers, researchers, businesses, and citizens, with clear steps for planning participatory workshops and capacity-building activities throughout the living-lab cycle. 33
• Better Evaluation’s Monitoring and Evaluation for Adaptive Management hub curates specific tools suited to this purpose, including Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation, Reflection and Learning for Community-Based Adaptation, which can be adapted for DPI contexts where communities are directly affected by new service designs. 34

Examples

• Nesta’s Testing Innovation in the Real World sets out practical guidance on structuring reflection points, identifying what to measure and establishing baselines that make subsequent comparison meaningful. 35
• Better Evaluation’s Monitoring and Evaluation for Adaptive Management hub provides specific methods well-suited to structured reflection, including real-time evaluation and contribution analysis for adaptive management, both of which support iterative learning rather than end-of-program assessment. 36

Examples

• Nesta’s Testing Innovation in the Real World specifically highlights how the NHS structured its testbed program into two-year “waves” with accompanying handbooks so that lessons from the first wave were captured and incorporated into the next. This model is directly transferable to iterative DPI development. 37
• Better Evaluation’s Monitoring and Evaluation for Adaptive Management hub includes dedicated resources on disseminating evaluation findings and accessible reporting. 38
• The World Bank’s How to Build a Regulatory Sandbox offers a procedural review template that prompts teams to capture, document, and publish lessons systematically after each sandbox cycle. 39

Example

• The Social Licence to Operate Guidelines for Europe emphasize that long-term engagement with stakeholders is the way to build trust, and outlines how formal and informal engagement should be sustained across a project’s full life cycle. 43 The MIREU SLO Toolbox provides specific relationship-building activities—familiarize, introduce, reach out, establish, strengthen—that can be adapted to the rhythms of DPI operation. 44

Examples

• The Social Licence to Operate Guidelines for Europe treats procedural fairness as a core driver of SLO and provides a set of diagnostic questions under Stakeholder Frame 3: SLO Grounded in Effective Legislation and regulation, 45 which probe how permitting, dispute resolution and accountability are experienced by affected stakeholders.
• The “Social License for Technology” resource extends this thinking directly to the introduction of new technologies, which makes it particularly useful for governments applying SLO concepts to DPI. 46

Examples

• The Social Licence to Operate Guidelines for Europe identify distributional fairness alongside procedural fairness as a core driver of trust. Its Stakeholder Frame 1: The Company Works with the Local Community sets out the kinds of questions that probe whether benefits are being shared equitably. 47
• The OECD’s Framework on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions provides a systematic approach to designing trust surveys that generate actionable evidence disaggregated by demographic group, which can be adapted to monitor who is benefiting from and who is excluded by DPI-enabled services. 48

Examples

• The Social Licence to Operate Guidelines for Europe set out the role of government as a fair, impartial mediator and the case for independent oversight bodies. 49
• The OECD’s Framework on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions identifies responsiveness, reliability, and integrity of public institutions as central drivers of public trust, offering a framework for designing and evaluating independent oversight arrangements that demonstrably serve those purposes. 50

Examples

• The Stakeholder 360 Measurement Methods resource provides an introduction to established techniques for measuring SLO, with a bibliography for deeper study. 51

  Key takeaways

  • Maintaining trust requires providing populations with multiple accessible channels for raising concerns over DPI initiatives.
  • Clear protocols for investigating raised issues, assigning responsibility, and establishing timelines for responses demonstrate that accountability mechanisms have teeth.
  • Closing the loop by informing citizens about how their inputs are handled and the outcomes of any decisions made is essential to maintain trust.
  • Accountability frameworks that evolve with DPI initiatives allow multi-stakeholder governance bodies to recommend regulatory updates based on frontline knowledge of how systems function in practice.

  Policy and practice guidelines

  Establish formal grievance redress mechanisms accessible to affected communities

  In practice, this means setting up a structured, publicized channel—with dedicated staff, clear time frames for acknowledgement and response, accessible intake points (including non-digital routes for those without reliable connectivity), and safeguards against retaliation—through which users, community members, and civil society can raise concerns about DPI-enabled services and obtain redress, with the mechanism itself designed in consultation with the communities it is intended to serve.

  Examples

  • The CAO’s Grievance Mechanism Toolkit provides a full operational framework: section 4 sets out a four-step design process (identify and engage key actors, understand the current environment, define the scope of grievances, and determine purpose and goals) together with guidance on building trust in the mechanism; section 5 details the six-step workflow (receive, acknowledge, evaluate and investigate, collaborative resolution, implement resolution, monitor and close) and the role of an independent appeals committee for complex cases. The tool kit’s supporting resources, including a Grievance Mechanism Assessment tool, Terms of reference for a Grievance Officer, and Managing Common Barriers tool, help governments translate the principles into fit-for-purpose DPI arrangements. 54
  • UNICEF’s Safeguarding DPI for Children guidance note covers the need for child-friendly grievance channels and for retaliation protections for vulnerable groups. 55

  Regularly audit DPI systems for security, privacy, and inclusivity compliance, using defined standards

  In practice, this means defining specific standards, and where relevant, levels of assurance, prior to commissioning independent, periodic audits—technical, procedural, and rights-based—that assess whether DPI is operating in line with its legal and policy obligations. It is also critical to publish the findings, and commit to a transparent remediation cycle when issues are identified, so that compliance is verified by third parties rather than self-certified by implementers.

  Examples

  • The OHCHr B-Tech Foundational Paper provides guidance on how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights apply to digital technologies, including the expectation of ongoing human rights due diligence, and offers a rights-based lens that can be incorporated into DPI audit frameworks alongside security and privacy reviews. 56
  • The CoST Infrastructure Data Standard sets out the data points that should be proactively disclosed across the infrastructure life cycle—procurement, implementation, performance, and outcomes—and provides a useful parallel for what a comparable disclosure and assurance regime looks like when applied to DPI. 57

  Publish open data on DPI performance, usage, and impact

  In practice, this means making operational data available in accessible, machine-readable formats under an open license—including service uptake, geographic and demographic reach, error and downtime rates, costs, and user-reported experience—and doing so on a regular cadence, so that researchers, journalists, civil society, and parliamentarians can independently interrogate whether DPI is delivering on its stated public purpose. Examples of countries that proactively publish open data and statistics include Brazil (Pix) and India (Aadhaar).

  Examples

  • The CoST Infrastructure Data Standard provides a directly relevant framework for proactive disclosure at scale, defining what data should be published at each stage of an infrastructure project, and demonstrating how a disclosure standard can be operationalized across jurisdictions. 58
  • Nesta’s Towards Public Digital Infrastructure argues for treating DPI as genuinely public infrastructure, including the transparency and accountability norms that follow, and offers a useful frame for the kinds of performance data governments should be committing to publish. 59

  Maintain sustainable financing arrangements with multistakeholder input

  In practice, this means securing a financing model that extends beyond the initial build phase—covering operations, iterative development, security patching, user support, and eventual decommissioning—with the forum of stakeholders established at earlier phases continuing to have visibility of and input into financial decisions, so that cost-cutting does not quietly erode the features that made DPI safe, inclusive, or trustworthy in the first place.

  Examples

  • Nesta’s Towards Public Digital Infrastructure addresses the question of how DPI should be funded and stewarded over the long term, including the case for diversified, public-interest-oriented financing models and the role of civil society in governance of public digital assets. 60
  • The CoST Infrastructure Data Standard’s emphasis on life-cycle disclosure—including budgets, variations, and outcomes—provides a mechanism through which financing decisions can be made visible to the multistakeholder forum and the wider public. 61

  Ensure redressal and accountability pathways for harms arising from DPI operation

  In practice, this means establishing—in addition to the day-to-day grievance mechanism—clear pathways for investigating and remedying systemic harms, including independent review of serious incidents, published findings, compensation arrangements where appropriate, and preserved access to judicial remedy, so that affected people have real and proportionate options when DPI contributes to exclusion, harm, or rights violations. Traditional redress mechanisms, such as call centers and provider-level complaint inboxes, cannot deal with many DPIs’ hundreds of millions of daily transactions. There is a growing call for the integration of online dispute resolution (ODR) systems that include automated intake, evidence submission, rule-based workflows, and appeals processes to ensure that DPI redressal matches the scale of DPI adoption. 62

  Examples

  • The OHCHR B-Tech Foundational Paper addresses access to remedy specifically in the digital technology context, setting out what effective grievance and remedy pathways look like under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights. 63
  • The CAO’s Grievance Mechanism Toolkit sets out seven parameters for tracking grievance mechanism performance, including average time to respond and resolve, complainant satisfaction, and complaints by location, unit and issue, which together provide the evidentiary basis for assessing whether redressal pathways are genuinely working. The tool kit’s guidance on appeals committees and its troubleshooting tool help governments design the escalation and external review arrangements that complement day-to-day grievance handling. 64

  Continuously evolve governance to address emerging technologies, risks, and user needs

  In practice, this means building periodic review points into the DPI’s governance charter—triennial reviews of the regulatory framework, annual reviews of the risk register, ongoing horizon-scanning on emerging technologies such as AI, and a clearly documented amendment process—so that governance keeps pace with changes in technology, use patterns, and public expectations rather than being frozen at the moment the initiative was launched. One example of this would be Brazil’s Pix Forum creating a specific subcommittee focused on developing solutions for the growing issue of fraud. One example of this is Brazil’s Pix Forum creating a specific subcommittee focused on developing solutions for the growing issue of fraud. Multistakeholder governance bodies are well positioned to drive this kind of continuous evolution, drawing on their diverse perspectives and frontline knowledge of how systems are functioning in practice to identify where regulatory frameworks require updating; governments, as the ultimate regulatory authorities, can then bring those recommendations into formal review processes.

  Examples

  • Nesta’s Towards Public Digital Infrastructure frames DPI as a long-term public asset that must be governed adaptively, with explicit mechanisms for updating its rules as context changes. 65
  • The OHCHR B-Tech foundational paper highlights the need for continuous human rights due diligence as technologies evolve, a principle particularly relevant when DPI is extended with AI or other fast-moving capabilities. 66
  • The CAO’s Grievance Mechanism Toolkit discusses closing the loop, demonstrating how operational learning from complaints and performance data should feed back into systemic governance changes rather than being treated as isolated incidents. 67
  • The World Bank’s ID4D’s CSO engagement guide’s discussion of social accountability mechanisms—particularly the Pakistan NADrA Strategic reform Unit case—is a strong, DPI-adjacent example of continuously evolving governance. It also demonstrates the closing-the-loop principle in operational terms. 68