The new report published this week by The Bennett Institute for Public Policy, co-authored by Dr Antonio Weiss and  Dr. Tanya Filer seeks to address this gap by calling for governments to create small, agile, digitally enabled and focused networks of leaders to foster strong international cooperation on digital governance issues.

Here are the key findings of the report:

• Already beginning to prove effective, digital minilateralism has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policy.

• National governments should recognise and reinforce the strategic value of digital minilaterals for their qualities of trust, open conversation, and ad-hocness in which their value lies.

• As digital minilateral networks grow and mature, they will need to find mechanisms through which to retain (or adapt) their core principles while scaling across more boundaries.

• To demonstrate their value to the global community, digital minilaterals must feed into formal multilateral conversations and arrangements.

We’d love to hear your views on digital minilateralism and the need for more collaboration around government technology usage and governance. Please do get in touch at hello@thepsc.co.uk. 

Author: Dr Antonio Weiss