SIG GlobDev 2026: Eighteenth Annual SIG - ICT and Global Development

Eighteenth Annual Pre-ICIS SIG GlobDev Workshop

ICIS 2026 Lisbon, Portugal

Sunday 13 December 2026

Theme: Digital Collaboration and Development in an Unequal World

Workshop Co-Chairs: Meke Kapepo (University of Cape Town) and Pitso Tsibolane (University of Cape Town)

Call for Papers

Digital Development in an Unequal World

We live in an unequal world where digital technologies too often perpetuate, rather than address the digital divide between and within societies and economies. Digital technology is envisioned to reshape societies, economies, institutions, and everyday life, in order to create new opportunities for participation, innovation, service delivery, knowledge production, and economic development. However, inequalities and asymmetries persist through unequal access to knowledge, resources, capabilities, infrastructure and power. These conditions continue to influence who participates in a digital world, who benefits from it, and who remains excluded.

The entanglement of digital technologies and development raises important questions about how to address persistent and emerging development challenges. Sahay et al. (2025) argue for a move beyond traditional Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) towards the broader concept of digital development, recognising that digital and development concepts are inseparable. Digital development encompasses three interconnected dimensions: digital in development, digital for development, and development in a digital world (Roberts, 2025), a lineage that Heeks (2016) traces in his early examination of the term. Sahay et al. (2025) emphasise the importance of examining what changes, how, why, when, and for whom, recognising the role of power dynamics, information asymmetries, infrastructure, competing interests, and historically embedded contexts in shaping digital development.

The ICIS 2026 theme, Digital Collaboration and Coexistence, acquires a distinctive meaning when read from an unequal world. Collaboration across the Global South and Global North is rarely symmetrical: research partnerships can be extractive as easily as equitable, data and invisible labour flow from South to North while value and theory flow back on unequal terms, and the infrastructures on which digital collaboration depends are owned, governed, and priced elsewhere. Coexistence, likewise, is not an abstraction - communities coexist with hyperscale data centres that consume their land, water, and energy; workers coexist with algorithms that manage them; indigenous knowledge systems coexist with, and are frequently subordinated to, dominant theoretical traditions (Chughtai & Young, 2025; Masiero, 2023). This workshop asks what genuinely collaborative and just digital coexistence would require, and what Information Systems research must change, conceptually, methodologically, and institutionally.

We therefore invite critical and interdisciplinary contributions that engage with these challenges. The workshop particularly welcomes perspectives from the Global South and the Global North that challenge dominant assumptions in ICT4D research, including indigenous and alternative theorisation (Sahay et al., 2025), and that advance a collaborative exchange of knowledge in which diverse theoretical, methodological, and contextual contributions are recognised on equal terms. We welcome research from scholars and practitioners working towards more collaborative, equitable, inclusive, and just digital futures.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

· Digital health and inclusive development

· Artificial intelligence, generative AI, and digital inequalities

· Digital platforms, infrastructures, and the material and environmental costs of the digital economy, including data centres

· Digital labour, gig work, and platform work in the Global South

· Digital public infrastructure, digital identity, and data governance

· South–North research collaboration, knowledge asymmetries, and decolonial approaches to Information Systems

· Indigenous and alternative theorisation in Information Systems

· Digital inclusion and exclusion

· Data, algorithms, and governance

· Information Systems and digital development theories

· Philosophical and methodological perspectives on digital development

· Intended and unintended consequences of a digital society

Full papers (12 pages maximum) and research-in-progress papers (7 pages maximum) should be submitted via Easy chair by 13 September 2026. Papers should use the SIGGlobDev Workshop template (see below) be fully anonymized for submission.

Paper submission template: workshop template

For any questions about the workshop, please feel free to reach out to the chairs at meke.kapepo@uct.ac.za

Important dates

13 SEPTEMBER 2026: Submission Deadline (full and research-in-progress papers)

30 SEPTEMBER 2026: Decision Notification

14 OCTOBER 2026: Camera-ready papers to be submitted

13 December: Pre-ICIS SIGGlobDev Workshop

References

Chughtai, H., & Young, A. G. (2025). Decoloniality and information systems: Making local contexts relevant to research. Information Systems Journal, 35(4), 1285–1293.

Heeks, R. (2016). Examining “digital development”: The shape of things to come? Development Informatics Working Paper No. 64. University of Manchester.

Heeks, R. (2022). Digital inequality beyond the digital divide: Conceptualizing adverse digital incorporation in the global South. Information Technology for Development, 28(4), 688–704.

Masiero, S. (2023). Decolonising critical information systems research: A subaltern approach. Information Systems Journal, 33(2), 299–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12401

Roberts, T. (2025). Bringing critical ICT4D from the margin to the centre. In A. Akbari & S. Masiero (Eds.), Critical ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) (pp. 40–61). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003395966-5

Sahay, S., Srivastava, S. C., Barrett, M., Davison, R. M., Madon, S., Schlagwein, D., Brown, I., & Sarker, S. (2025). Digital development: Reimagining research beyond ICT4D. Information Systems Research, 36(3), 1269–1292. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2025.editorial.v36.n3