Digital Polycentricity for Socio-Technical Design: Outcomes from the 2024 Workshop on Digital Polycentricity

This paper reports on the results of a Workshop on Digital Polycentricity. The workshop was held at Imperial College London on 25-27 September 2024, aiming to transfer and lift the concept of polycentric governance for urban environments to digital contexts. We argue that just as Ostrom proposed polycentricity in order to emerge intended positive macro-level outcomes from the micro-level interactions of policy actors in the “Market Society,” we need a concept of digital polycentricity to design and operationalise socio-technical systems theory to achieve some Aristotelian forms of macro-level social justice in the “Digital Society.” The participants of the workshop identified key issues related to digital polycentricity, offered a critique of digital polycentricity as an approach and an outcome, and set an actionable research agenda for applying digital polycentricity to the design of socio-technical systems that are fit-for-purpose in the Digital Society, and in the context of digital transformation. The contribution of this paper is thus a research agenda that maps research priorities and directions for different stakeholders.