A new digital statecraft for the connected republic: some notes

About 20 years ago, I co-wrote with a bunch of Cisco colleagues a short monograph called The Connected Republic.

The basic thesis was simple.

We argued that it was time to escape the limits of the language of “e-government” and “digital transformation” and recognise that technology had graduated from “enabler” to something altogether bigger.  Even in what now feels like the innocence and wonder of the early days of the Internet, we argued that technology was no longer enabling the traditional work of government.  It was busy remaking that work from the ground up.

It wasn’t an argument universally either accepted or welcomed.

And that’s still the case.

With the arrival of AI, our original argument stands.  And then some. More on that soon.

I have been significantly reinforced in my confidence when I recently came across the work of the Digital Statecraft Academy (DSA) and their new publication Governing Well in the Algorithmic Age: The Foundations of Digital Statecraft.

There is language and framing in the Academy’s work that speaks directly to the anxiety we confronted 20 years ago.

We were concerned the continuing use of the language of e-government and digital transformation was at risk of perpetuating the divorce of “tech” from the mainstream work of government and the public sector.  In other words, a labelling convention was in danger of having the opposite effect of the integration it was pursuing.  In the process, the risk was the further, perhaps permanent marginalisation of tech and digital as a perennially second order issue for public servants and public leaders.

Digital statecraft

So what is “digital statecraft”?

These are some powerful hints from the DSA’s framing of its work and focus:

A definition to start:

“Digital Statecraft is the art (vision & ethics), science (technology & methods), and practice (execution & impact) of designing, governing, and adapting public institutions – and the decisions they make – in a world increasingly defined by data, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. It equips leaders to manage complexity, uncertainty, and systemic change while sustaining legitimacy, accountability, and public trust.”

What it isn’t:

• E-government or the mere digitisation of legacy processes
• Traditional tech policy or incremental digital transformation
• Simply deploying AI or data systems for efficiency’s sake

And to reinforce the point:

“Digital Statecraft is a new operating logic for the modern state: It integrates governance (how we organise authority), leadership (how we exercise it), and foresight (how we anticipate and adapt to it). It is the discipline that ensures technology advances the public interest, rather than allowing technology to dictate governance”.

The stakes couldn’t be higher or more timely as the perennial contest that pits private and often venal self-interest against the instincts and ethics of public purpose continues to hit new levels of intensity in the current battle between machine and humans.

There’s a whole lot more in the Academy’s work and the recent paper which I’ll return to another time.

DSA confirms the obvious: this is not an adaptation project. Rather, ‘it is a generational mandate: to equip public institutions and leaders with the skills, vision, and authority to shape technology in service of society.”

I think that’s right.

Its approach and philosophy, as well as the detailed design of the framework (which starts, promisingly, with the truth that “leadership matters most”), provides the architecture for an updated version of the connected republic.

I’d go further.

Those who currently inhabit the commanding heights of our models and methods of governing, including the skills and capabilities of leadership and practice, must recognise AI has pitched the “tech” game well beyond the comforting terrain of “enabler” and “just another tool”. Otherwise, we’ll continue to fail to realise its full potential (and properly guard against its risks).  In the process, we’ll grow, not shrink the distance between those who think they own and control the rules of governing and public leadership and those who run the digital and tech stacks now relentlessly rewriting those rules.

I don’t think that’s a good outcome.

The principles

In the DSA paper, the framework’s underlying principles are set out:

1. Public Interest First
2. Human-Machine Complementarity
3. Governability by Design
4. Systemic Coherence
5. Hybrid Institutions
6. Adaptive Governance
7. Human Centricity and Civic Agency
8. Accountable and Traceable Authority
9. Judgment Across Time
10. The Non-Delegable Core

To take a couple in more detail as examples of the kind of thinking that’s going on here:

Principle 1 — Public Interest First Digital systems deployed in governing contexts must serve the public interest as the orienting purpose of statecraft. This must be the primary standard against which governing arrangements are judged, and the corrective when that purpose is displaced by private capture or technical logic.

Principle 2 — Human-Machine Complementarity Governing well in the algorithmic age requires the deliberate design and active stewardship of hybrid environments where human judgment and machine capability are co-required – neither automating without governing nor governing without capability.

Principle 4 — Systemic Coherence Digital infrastructure, data, algorithmic systems, and platforms must be governed as a coherent whole – maintaining end-to-end accountability traceable from the hardware layer through to the decisions it enables. Systemic coherence avoids the perils of both centralisation, with its top down accountability, and ungoverned fragmentation, which undermines accountability

Principle 9 — Judgment Across Time Legitimacy extends across time. A decision that forecloses future contestation is not fully legitimate, and accumulated effects must be assessed as a legitimacy question. Digital systems are public assets, held in trust for present and future publics alike.

The digital statecraft framing blurs distinctions between statecraft and digital, suggesting these are no longer two concepts, one (secondary) enabling the other (primary).

The argument is powerful, especially as AI, unlike previous technologies, is “rewriting the world”. These two ideas are in the process of fusing into a new concept.

In that sense, digital statecraft is a suitably provocative name for something entirely new that is taking shape as we learn to combine the way we govern for public value with the digital capabilities to do that work.

I think we’ve been heading here for some time; this is one signpost we might have arrived.