From Digital Divide to Digital Justice in the Global South: Conceptualising Adverse Digital Incorporation

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of 'adverse digital incorporation' to explain how digital engagement in the global South can perpetuate or exacerbate inequality through disproportionate value extraction by more advantaged groups.

Contribution

It proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding digital inequality beyond exclusion, emphasizing adverse digital incorporation and its drivers in the global South.

Findings

Develops a conceptual model with processes, drivers, and causes of adverse digital incorporation.

Highlights the need for reconfiguring power structures to achieve digital justice.

Argues that digital inclusion can still perpetuate inequality through adverse digital incorporation.

Abstract

The connection between digital and inequality has traditionally been understood in terms of the digital divide or of forms of digital inequality whose core conceptualisation is exclusion. This paper argues that, as the global South moves into a digital development paradigm of growing breadth and depth of digital engagement, an exclusion worldview is no longer sufficient. Drawing from ideas in the development studies literature on chronic poverty, the paper argues the need for a new concept: "adverse digital incorporation", meaning inclusion in a digital system that enables a more-advantaged group to extract disproportionate value from the work or resources of another, less-advantaged group. This explains why inequality persists - even grows - in a digital development paradigm. To help ground future research and practice on this issue, the paper inductively builds a conceptual model of adverse digital incorporation with three main component sets: the processes, the drivers, and the causes of adverse digital incorporation. The paper concludes with thoughts on a future research and practice agenda that seeks to deliver digital justice in the global South: a necessary reconfiguration of the broader components of power that currently shape the inclusionary connection between digital and inequality.