Prof. Sharon received the grant for her project titled:

DigiPub: Safeguarding the Autonomy and Integrity of Public Sectors in the Digital Transition

Societies worldwide are undergoing digital transitions. In Europe, the digitalization of public sectors is expected to help solve a host of challenges these sectors currently face, from personnel shortages to unequal access to services. But public sector digitalization brings with it important risks. First, the growing dependency of public sectors on services and infrastructure provided by Big Tech can lead to a loss of autonomy and democratic oversight of public sectors. Second, the promises or values that digitalization brings to public sectors, such as increased efficiency, convenience and personalization, often conflict with core values of these spheres, such as empathy and continuity of care in healthcare, or socialization and personal development in education. These core sectoral values risk being marginalized, leading to a loss of integrity of public sectors.

Yet, current conceptual and regulatory approaches that seek to address digitalization harms first by curbing the power of Big Tech through regulation and increased “digital sovereignty”, and second by protecting “public values” in digitalization processes, are still too limited for safeguarding sectoral autonomy and integrity. This is because Big Tech expansionism into public sectors raises risks that escape EU regulation, while it is still unclear what the concept of digital sovereignty should mean in different public sector. And second, because public values, which are cross-sectoral, do not capture the sectoral specificity of values that are stake in public sector digitalization.

Drawing on approaches and methods from moral philosophy, empirical philosophy, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and critical data studies, DigiPub will develop a novel, sphere-centric framework for public sector digitalization grounded in the notion that digitalization should support spherical autonomy and integrity. The project has three objectives:

(1) Empirical: To better understand the effects of digitalization on three key public sectors: health, education and public administration, through the lens of the concepts of spherical autonomy and integrity.

(2) Conceptual: To develop a sphere-centric theory of justice fit for the digital age, informed by various sphere-centric traditions in moral philosophy and the empirical findings of WP1.

(3) Normative: To develop recommendations and assessment tools for practitioners, policymakers and technology developers that contribute to autonomy- and integrity-enhancing digitalization.