Civil Society’s Public Value in Digital Democracy

Sep 30

4 min read

By Daniela Carvajalino, Programatic Director of DemocráTICa

One of the greatest challenges facing digital democracy is moving beyond fragmented approaches and toward an ecosystem-wide perspective, where multiple actors, agendas, and approaches converge to address deeply interconnected issues. Digital democracy encompasses the exercise of human and political rights in digital spaces, the digital transformation of democratic states, and the governance of platforms, data, and digital infrastructure.

Within this interconnected ecosystem, governments, technology companies, civil society, multilateral organizations, academia, and the technical community each bring different capabilities and operate within distinct frameworks. Recognizing the complementarities that emerge from their interaction is essential to understanding how digital democracy is built and strengthened across our region and beyond.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, we face an additional challenge: strengthening the capacities and enabling conditions of a diverse civil society that operates amid shrinking funding, gaps in specialized and technical expertise, and constraints on sustaining collective action. But why does strengthening the work of grassroots organizations, independent media, human rights defenders, and community-based movements matter? The answer is straightforward: their contribution to public value is distinctive, and it takes shape through concrete interventions:

A local organization creating digital spaces that enable young people from Indigenous communities in Bolivia to access information, tell their own stories, and challenge how they are represented in the public sphere;
A specialized organization in Colombia developing tools to help people understand and respond to phenomena such as doxing and online harassment, while providing guidance on feminist strategies such as online public shaming in response to gender-based violence;
A regional network bringing together independent media outlets and fact-checking organizations to examine the impact of artificial intelligence on disinformation during electoral processes and develop collective response mechanisms to detect manipulated synthetic content;
And investigative journalism units across the region examining the governance structures and regulatory frameworks of digital platforms, exposing risks to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and personal safety and integrity, while promoting accountability and citizen oversight.

Through these and other interventions, civil society generates public value by stepping in where the state falls short or where markets lack the incentives to act; advancing the inclusion of underrepresented communities; identifying and bringing risks to light; producing knowledge and evidence; and creating mechanisms for citizen oversight and accountability of decision-makers. Taken together, these capacities help shape and influence the conditions under which our digital spaces are designed, regulated, and governed, contributing to digital environments that are inclusive, open, safe, and secure, and that protect and promote human rights.

If we imagine a future in which civil society has less capacity to influence how the digital environment takes shape, the risk is not simply the loss of individual initiatives. Rather, digital transformation could become increasingly shaped by business incentives and the priorities of actors with the greatest economic, technological, or institutional power. In such a scenario, value chains that incorporate social needs, local knowledge, and the perspectives of traditionally underrepresented communities would be weakened.

Over the past year, DemocráTICa identified 1,898 actors engaged in the digital democracy agenda across the region, mapping a sector far broader and more diverse than what is typically captured by approaches focused exclusively on formally established organizations.

Twenty-two percent of the actors identified do not have legal status. Small organizations predominate, with lean teams and limited funding structures, but strong territorial roots and trusted relationships with their communities.

This assessment led us to a central conclusion: strengthening civil society requires working through two complementary lenses. An organizational lens—essential for measuring results, allocating resources, and strengthening specific capacities—and a systemic lens, still incipient in the region, that focuses on identifying and strengthening the connections, knowledge flows, capacities, and forms of collaboration that emerge among its actors.

This systemic lens also helps us understand the different ways in which civil society engages in the digital transformation of our democracies. At DemocráTICa, we recognize both the potential of digital transformation to strengthen state capacity, expand civic participation, and advance open governance, as well as the risks that can arise when this potential unfolds without adequate checks and balances: censorship, surveillance, disinformation, online gender-based violence, electoral interference, and the concentration of power across digital ecosystems.

Against a backdrop of Latin America’s growing push for digital sovereignty, where many of the standards, models, and technologies shaping the digital frontier are developed outside the region, we have an opportunity to move forward with greater knowledge, awareness, and judgment—ensuring that decisions about our digital future are not shaped exclusively by those who control the resources, infrastructure, and markets. In this context, strengthening civil society’s capacity to influence these decisions is essential.

Finally, steering digital transformation toward democratic goals requires a coordinated agenda among diverse actors, grounded in a regional integration perspective. This means developing enabling regulatory frameworks and governance models that allow the region to compete while ensuring that innovation and technological development contribute meaningfully to the region’s broader development. It also calls for forward-looking cooperation that can identify, anticipate, assess, monitor, and adapt to emerging technologies, allowing us to seize their opportunities while responding to new and evolving risks and challenges.

Making this coordination effective requires resources, technical cooperation, and enabling conditions that foster concrete collaboration and build collective capacities across governments, civil society, academia, and the technical community. Digital sovereignty is not built solely through technology and infrastructure, but by strengthening the capacity of different actors to participate, influence, and shape the future of the digital environment.

Daniela Carvajalino is the Programmatic Director of DemocráTICa. Her work focuses on strengthening civil society, advancing digital democracy and building regional ecosystems capable of shaping how technologies are designed, adopted and governed across Latin America and the Caribbean. Through DemocráTICa, she leads processes that foster collaboration, capacity building and cooperation among organisations, networks and other actors within the digital ecosystem.