Rebooting the global consensus: norm entrepreneurship, data governance and the majority world

Over centuries, globalisation has led to the adoption of norms as a strategy for governing actions that have implications beyond the national level. This paper explores the potential of international norm-making for scaling up the governance of digital technologies and infrastructures, which have trans- and supra-national effects but are currently only governed within national jurisdictions. We chart the international neoliberal consensus currently being formalised, which affirms that data is primarly an economic commodity and must be treated according to free-market principles. We argue that this is inadequate because it cannot address interests beyond the commercial, namely data’s connections to bodies, land, community and labour. We then explore the history of norm-making and offer two assertions: first, that a norm-making lens can frame challenges to the primacy of market logics in law and governance, and second, that the conceptual exclusion of civil society actors as norm-makers is an obstacle to the recognition of counter-power in data governance. We therefore outline the features of existing norm-making work by civil-society movements with regard to data and its uses (including AI). Naming this as norm-making – in the form of the norm ‘nothing about us without us’ – answers the urgent need to foreground civil society actors’ agency in relation to the international governance of data. The main function of this norm is to place consent, or refusal, squarely in the gift of those groups represented (rather than identified) in the data, and to channel negotiation and permission through structures of democratic representation.