13 Principles for DX4D Research and Consulting

Richard Heeks, Bookie Ezeomah, Gianluca Iazzolino, Aarti Krishnan, Rose Pritchard, Jaco Renken & Qingna Zhou

What good-practice principles can be drawn from the literature on digital-transformation-for-development (DX4D)?

“Digital transformation” has become something of a buzz term within international development, with recent release of DX4D policies, strategies, reports, briefings, programmes and projects.  Alongside this comes a growing body of more academic literature.

From a review of that literature – learning from both shortcomings and insights – a multi-disciplinary, multi-national team from the University of Manchester’s Centre for Digital Development, drew out a list of 13 DX4D principles.  We do not claim these to be the last word on the subject.  Instead, they can be used as a starting point for DX4D evaluation.

Intended particularly for use in DX4D research and consulting – targeting especially how we understand DX4D – the principles could also be modified for analysis of DX4D policies and strategies; a task on which we are currently working.

PRINCIPLE 1: DX4D should incorporate a (single) definition of digital transformation.
It is surprising how many documents talk about digital transformation without ever defining what it means.  (Our simple definition of DX4D: “radical change in development processes and structures enabled by digital systems”)

PRINCIPLE 2: the extent of change envisaged and incorporated in DX4D must be transformative; involving significant systemic disruption.
Too often it’s seen as the bottom half of this diagram when it should be the top half

Source

PRINCIPLE 3: although it necessarily involves technological changes to digital data and systems, digital transformation for development involves and requires broader, parallel transformative changes in structural relations, development processes, formal/informal institutions, and resource distributions.
To be truly transformative, there need to be significant changes in socio-economic structures: power relationships, value chains, organisational hierarchies, law and policies, norms and values.

PRINCIPLE 4: digital transformation impacts both organisations and societies, and macro-scale, societal transformation must be incorporated into the understanding of DX4D.
DX4D isn’t just about digitalisation within organisations but about broader, higher-level change across societies and their economies.

PRINCIPLE 5: digital-transformation-for-development derives from the micro-level, proactive actions of individuals but both creates and responds to macro-level societal changes deriving from digitalisation: digital-transformation-of-development.
This is very similar to the differentiation in development studies between two things: a) imminent development, seeing DX4D as the intentional actions of individuals and organisations; and b) immanent development, seeing DXoD as broader changes that emerge over time

PRINCIPLE 6: transformation of digital ecosystems is not the goal of digital-transformation-for-development; development – understood as the transformation of societies – is.  Digital-transformation-for-development should be explicit about the developmental transformation that it is seeking to bring about, or wishes to emerge
For example, this could be through express reference to the development paradigm that encompasses the desired societal transformation.  See our prior blogpost summarising the different transformation goals of different paradigms.

PRINCIPLE 7: digital-transformation-for-development overall is not associated with any specific digital technology, but it could be associated with new “Development 4.0” models.
As yet, though, there has been no categorisation of “Development 4.0” models: ways in which the potentially-transformative affordances of digital technologies can be used to reinvent traditional approaches to delivery of the SDGs.

PRINCIPLE 8: even allowing for islands of significant digitalisation – which may or may not be transformative – digital-transformation-for-development is a future more than present phenomenon.
Overall, digital development to date has been incremental in its impact, so digital transformation in the global South is as yet just at a formative stage.

PRINCIPLE 9: the impact of digital-transformation-for-development emerges not deterministically from technology alone but from a mix of social and technological factors.
Technology (the trajectory of which is itself heavily shaped by social context) may alter the landscape of development, but it is social factors that tend to shape the specific impact path taken through that landscape.

PRINCIPLE 10: there must be recognition of both positive and negative impacts associated with DX4D because, without this, there can be no understanding of, or attempt to mitigate DX4D’s downsides.
DX4D may be especially associated with two mechanisms that increase inequality: the digital divide (rising gaps between those included in and excluded from DX4D systems) and adverse digital incorporation (rising gaps between different included groups such as owners vs users of DX4D systems).

PRINCIPLE 11: alongside traditional ICT4D barriers, DX4D faces barriers of a specific size and nature due to the scope of transformation that it entails.
The specific barriers would include things like absence of transformative leadership, and presence of barriers to structural change.

PRINCIPLE 12: implications or recommendations for DX4D practice should be provided wherever feasible, taking into account the specificities of digital-transformation-for-development.
Recommendations to date have tended to cover traditional digitalisation strategy or ICT policy, not recognising the ways in which DX4D is different.

PRINCIPLE 13: DX4D recommendations will need to cover not just the content of organisational (private, public, NGO and international agency) strategy and government policy but also their underlying processes and structures.
This is a fairly standard prescription: that recommendations should cover not just the what but also the who and how of strategy-/policy-making and implementation.

As noted, these are seen as a starting point, and we welcome suggestions for amendments and additions to guide DX4D research and consulting. For further details, please see the full paper, “The Principles of Digital Transformation for Development (DX4D): Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda”.

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Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Can digital platforms help change social values in rural China?

Digital platforms have been extensively used in supporting rural development in the global south. There is a recognition that digital platforms create economic value for businesses in rural areas – however, can they be leveraged to help change social values in areas such as rural China?

Social challenges in rural China

Rurality has the effect of exacerbating the related conditions that increase vulnerability and limit opportunities to alleviate poverty [1][2]. Distance from markets and limited resources create disadvantages for rural populations whilst relative isolation and dispersed populations may also allow neglect of the problems caused by social and economic distance. Geography can render the vulnerable in rural regions less visible and harder to reach with knowledge, networks and other resources. Many social problems thus hinder rural development. In rural China, persistent and entrenched social problems have been identified e.g., social stigma, rural-to-urban migration, left-behind children, etc. Development of new social values in rural areas is therefore equally important as development of economic value to create positive change.

The Covid-19 pandemic gave a significant boost to digitalisation, including livestreaming e-commerce in China [3]. It has transformed the way e-commerce is undertaken in China and become an essential marketing channel for most vendors on platforms such as Taobao, even in the countryside. However, traditional social norms in some rural communities have restricted its potential. For example, in some regions, it is seen as improper for a woman to present too much of herself to the public, meaning livestreaming e-commerce is regarded as an improper practice for some female e-vendors within their local community. Rural female live-streamers have therefore faced community prejudices against their identity and their profession [4].

How can we leverage digital platforms to mitigate rural social problems?

From this, it can be seen that both economic and social development are required to address the current problems in rural China.  But can digital platforms themselves help to deliver both economic and social value?

Digital platforms possess capabilities to deploy resources for transformation [5]. Four different digital platform capabilities have been identified that are afforded by the digital and social infrastructures within which platforms are embedded:

• Disembedding: helping disconnect from previous thinking modes [6].
• Disintermediation: reducing or eliminating intermediaries from the value chain [7].
• Collaboration: enabling engagement in a broader entity within the ecosystem
• Knowledge spillovers: allowing knowledge to be shared across forms and functions within and outside boundaries.

These capabilities combine both economic and social aspects: for example, while disintermediation can increase economic efficiency, disembedding can help disrupt conservative institutional values that constrain gender equality.

There is already some empirical evidence that these capabilities can serve as the basis for generating both economic and social value in marginalised communities [5].  This blogpost would therefore like to advocate for further research to investigate both forms of value co-creation based on digital platform capabilities, focusing on rural areas such as rural China.

[1] Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. (2014). Entrepreneurial opportunities and poverty alleviation. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 38(1), 159-184.

[2] Anderson, A. R., & Obeng, B. A. (2017). Enterprise as socially situated in a rural poor fishing community. Journal of Rural Studies, 49, 23-31.

[3] Guan, Z., Hou, F., Li, B., Phang, C. W., & Chong, A. Y. L. (2022). What influences the purchase of virtual gifts in live streaming in China? A cultural context‐sensitive model. Information Systems Journal, 32(3), 653-689.

[4] Tang, N., Tao, L., Wen, B., & Lu, Z. (2022). Dare to Dream, Dare to Livestream: How E-commerce livereaming empowers Chinese rural women. 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

[5] Ahuja, S., Chan, Y. E., & Krishnamurthy, R. (2023). Responsible innovation with digital platforms: Cases in India and Canada. Information Systems Journal, 33(1), 76-129.

[6] Sandeep, M., & Ravishankar, M. (2015). Social innovations in outsourcing: An empirical investigation of impact sourcing companies in India. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(4), 270-288.

[7] Wang, C. C., Miao, J. T., Phelps, N. A., & Zhang, J. (2021). E-commerce and the transformation of the rural: The Taobao village phenomenon in Zhejiang Province, China. Journal of Rural Studies, 81, 159-169.