Digital Platforms in the Global South: Foundations and Research Agenda

Abstract

Digital platforms have become integral to many of the everyday activities that people across the globe encounter in areas like transportation, commerce and social interactions. Research on the topic has largely concentrated on the general functioning of these platforms in terms of platform governance, business strategies and consumer behaviour. Despite their significant presence in the global South, the developmental implications of digital platforms remain largely understudied. In part, this is because digital platforms are a challenging research object due to their lack of conceptual definition, their spread across different regions and industries, and their intertwined nature with institutions, actors and digital technologies. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: to provide a conceptual definition of digital platforms, and to identify research strands in international development contexts. To do so, we draw from digital platforms literature, differentiate between transaction and innovation platforms and expose their main characteristics. We the present four strands in the form of research questions, illustrated with concrete examples, that can assist to pursue relevant studies on digital platforms and international development in the future.

Local tech mediators - a human access point to global crowdfunding platforms

“…The role of digital platforms in the global south has recently become increasingly topical in academic discussion (Koskinen, Bonina, and Eaton 2019). We see that the digital platforms could be part of the solution for the small-scale entrepreneurs who wish to improve their livelihoods in the global south.…”

“…Much of the debates have been from a global north standpoint (Koskinen, Bonina, and Eaton 2019;Ahmed et al 2016) with little consideration what those global platforms could mean in resource stricken environments from a local perspective.…”

Digital Platform Workers under COVID-19: A Subaltern Perspective

“…In a similar fashion, the Fairwork Foundation uses the terms gig work and crowdwork for the physical-digital dichotomy in point. 2 As research in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) increasingly turns to digital platforms as a research object [22,35,39] discourse emerged on understanding theoretical links between digital labour platforms and socioeconomic development [33]. Surveys conducted across digital workers in the Global South reveal that these platforms have enabled workers to build earnings and skills [7], and that "positives outweigh negatives" for workers who find previously non-existing employment opportunities in digital work [12, 29, cited in 26].…”

ICT4D 3.0? Part 1—The components of an emerging “digital‐for‐development” paradigm

“…Virtualisation: because of the digitalisation of processes, network structures will have less of a physical and more of a virtual existence (Mowshowitz, ). They therefore cut across the physical barriers of time and space, and they are more flexible—for example, easier to restructure by removing some nodes or adding others. Platformisation: as already noted, digital platforms will increasingly act as both central nodes in digital‐and‐development networks and as the infrastructures that house such networks (Koskinen, Bonina, & Eaton, ). The ownership, governance, management, etc.…”