Authors: Lars Gjesvik (NUPI), Eneken Tikk (TalTech)
Published in February 2025
Digital technologies increasingly shape economies, societies, and geopolitics. Yet global governance has not evolved around a single, coherent framework. Instead, digitalisation governance has expanded into a crowded institutional landscape spanning cybersecurity, data, emerging technologies, standards, human rights online, trade, and development finance.
The NAVIGATOR working paper Institutional Landscape of Global Digitalisation Governance maps this landscape and asks a central question: how can policymakers navigate a fast-growing and fragmented governance arena, and what does this mean for the EU’s role in global digital cooperation?
From internet governance to a hybrid digital governance arena
Global digital governance used to be associated primarily with internet coordination and technical standard-setting. Today, it is far broader and more politicised. Digitalisation intersects with economic competitiveness, critical infrastructure, security, and democratic resilience, drawing new actors and new forums into international cooperation. This expansion has produced a hybrid arena where formal multilateral organisations coexist with informal, club-like formats, and where state-led diplomacy overlaps with multi-stakeholder processes that involve the private sector and technical communities.
A landscape that is vast and still growing
One of the paper’s key messages is scale. Already in 2015, a UN mapping exercise identified over 40 issue areas and more than 680 mechanisms connected to cyber and digital governance, and the ecosystem has expanded significantly since. This matters because a multiplication of venues does not automatically strengthen cooperation. It can create duplication and confusion, and it can encourage forum shopping, where actors choose the venue that best suits their preferences rather than the one best suited to deliver collective outcomes.
How the working paper approaches complexity
Rather than attempting to list everything, the paper proposes a pragmatic way to orient in the governance environment by identifying a “core” of institutions and processes that repeatedly appear across mapping efforts and are frequently referenced by states.
The authors compile 20 mapping resources, building an initial dataset of 621 organisations, processes, and venues. They then assess prominence by examining which venues are referenced in foreign ministry strategies across twelve G20 countries, as well as in statements by major technology companies. Applying repeated independent mentions as a threshold yields 89 core venues for closer analysis. The objective is not to suggest that everything outside this core is irrelevant, but to provide an orientation map that supports prioritisation and strategic engagement.
What sits at the centre of digitalisation governance?
The analysis shows that global digital cooperation still revolves around familiar anchors. These include key UN cyber processes, and widely recognised internet and digital governance bodies such as the ITU, the Internet Governance Forum, and ICANN. Agenda-setting platforms like the G7 and G20, along with the OECD and the Council of Europe, also play an important role in shaping priorities, principles, and policy language.
Beyond this core, the ecosystem expands quickly into regional organisations, standards bodies, capacity-building initiatives, development banks, and security-focused institutions. This illustrates how deeply digitalisation governance is embedded across policy fields and how difficult it can be to maintain coherence across them.
The governance trade-offs: openness, formality, and norm-setting
A central contribution of the paper is a framework for understanding why some venues deliver certain outcomes better than others. It focuses on formality, openness, and normativity, and illustrates how these characteristics interact using visual charts (pages 15–17). One striking takeaway is the structural tension between inclusiveness and the capacity to produce formal outcomes. In practice, highly open venues tend to be less formal, while more formal processes are often more closed. This helps explain why digital governance frequently alternates between broad, inclusive debate and smaller settings where concrete commitments are easier to achieve.
What this means for the EU
For the EU, this governance environment is not only complex, it is strategic. Digital issues sit at the intersection of security, economic policy, fundamental rights, trade, and development. This increases the risk of fragmentation even within EU action, and it also makes venue selection more consequential.
The working paper points to the value of regular review of venues and processes, clearer thinking about which settings fit which objectives, and stronger tools to assess effectiveness across governance forums. It also highlights that the EU has regulatory and institutional assets with global reach, including GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, and agencies such as ENISA, raising important questions about how these assets can be channelled into international cooperation pathways.
Looking ahead
Global digitalisation governance is unlikely to stabilise soon. It is evolving through constant institutional churn as new issues emerge, new initiatives form, and political competition intensifies. In this context, effective governance will depend on combining multilateral legitimacy with pragmatic engagement across a hybrid landscape.
By mapping the institutional terrain and highlighting key trade-offs, the NAVIGATOR working paper offers a structured entry point into one of today’s most important areas of global cooperation, and a useful basis for thinking strategically about the EU’s role within it.
