Building digital sovereignty: Reflections from FWD50 PD Day

Over the last year, the question of digital sovereignty has increasingly dominated conversations in the geopolitical space.

In the summer, PD published our definition of digital sovereignty: “the agency and capacity of any organisation to make intelligent, informed choices to shape its digital future by design.” Since then, we’ve presented our perspective at major global fora: at the DPI Summit in Cape Town, the Digital Public Goods Alliance members meeting in Brazil, and FWD50 in Canada. The response has been excellent.

At FWD50 PD Day on 20 January, I built on PD’s definition in my keynote speech, and was joined by David Eaves (Associate Professor and Deputy Co-Director, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose) and other leading voices across digital government to evolve our collective thinking around sovereignty - what it means, why it’s needed, and what it looks like in practice.

The myth of total sovereignty

As several speakers acknowledged, ‘sovereign tech’ is often misinterpreted. For some, it means total ownership and control. For others, it’s an industrial policy to promote domestic businesses or a quest for efficiency and global competitiveness.

For many of us in 2026, sovereignty is understood as the goal to shift control from US companies to domestic players. In reality, a ‘purely sovereign’ technology stack is largely a myth, as parts of our digital infrastructure will always operate internationally. More importantly, focusing on a sovereign provider doesn’t actually break the cycle of vendor lock-in, but simply shifts dependency to a different player.

The true aim of sovereignty is agency and the freedom to shape a nation’s digital future. For that, governments must examine how they architect and manage their critical layers.

Building sovereignty: products, platforms and protocols

There are three main properties that enable governments to build and defend their sovereignty:

Products/services: We must shift from slow, “me‑too” digitization to cutting-edge products built with domestic skills. Public services often lag behind the private sector, but the talent to revolutionise them is often right on the doorstep. Using sovereign skills ensures products remain aligned with national interests.

Platforms: Services lead to platforms, and well-maintained platforms embed values. Shared, non-competitive platforms - such as GC Notify in Canada or PIX in Brazil - ensure that governments aren't held to ransom by the shifting commercial strategies of a single global leader.

Protocols: Open standards act as a defensive "moat." By using protocols like openEHR, governments prevent vendor lock-in and stop bad actors from gaining leverage over essential public data.

Governments can - and must - be market shapers

Governments often take a position of learned helplessness, assuming they lack the power to influence the market. In reality, they are well positioned to shape the marketplace to meet the needs of public services.

By creating a more dynamic, competitive and open marketplace, and by bolstering private enterprises capable of building public services, they can move away from domestic oligopolies that simply replicate the problems of global tech giants.

The potential is there for governments to be market shapers, but to do so effectively requires embedding strong digital talent at the highest levels.

Standards are the key to shaping markets

The challenge of building sovereign tech is not the first infrastructure crisis that governments have faced. National physical infrastructure in many countries is privately owned, yet functions effectively thanks to standards. Using the 19th‑century “railway gauge crisis” in the UK and US as an analogy, David Eaves argued that the path to sovereignty lies not in ownership of every layer, but in standardization and portability.

That means governments must be willing to pick ‘winners’ from among the competing providers, and in doing so impose a standard that empowers the public sector.

Engaging international partners is also critical. For instance, interoperable cloud strategies across international groups can break the hold of existing oligarchies.