Governing for Digital Resilience: Rethinking Inclusion for WSIS+20 and Beyond

ABSTRACT

At the WSIS+20 juncture, this article asks what conditions enable individuals to participate meaningfully in digital life, and how governance arrangements should be assessed accordingly. Multistakeholder governance has distributed authority across actors, but not necessarily the capacity to shape or respond to digital conditions. We argue that assessing this gap today requires attention to the different forms of power through which these conditions are produced, and to individuals' experiences as evidence of how those governance conditions operate in practice. Building on socio‐ecological resilience theory and the capabilities approach, we reconceptualise digital resilience not as an individual trait but as a process shaped by governance conditions and by the substantive freedom people have to adapt, recover, and participate over time. We then introduce the DRIVE (Digital Resilience Indicators for Veritable Empowerment) framework, an indicator‐based diagnostic architecture spanning six drivers and five levels—individual, familial, communal, platform, and state—that shifts assessment from individual preparedness towards enabling conditions. Using fraudulent advertising on Meta's platforms as an illustration, we show how DRIVE can identify evidenced constraints, evidence gaps, and appropriate sites of remedy. Rather than offering a universal score, DRIVE provides a flexible architecture for context‐specific assessment of the conditions under which digital resilience develops.