Abstract
Despite substantial digital investment and stakeholder initiatives, billions in the Global South remain excluded from digital participation. This systematic literature review synthesizes 122 empirical studies published between 2003 and 2024 in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania to analyze key stake-holders, their challenges, and the strategies employed to foster sustainable digital inclusion. Drawing on stakeholder theory and digital ecosystems theory, the study identifies ecosystem fragmentation as a central bottleneck. We advance stakeholder theory by introducing the concept of Ecosystem Coordination Stakeholders (ECS), a role-based stakeholder group whose salience derives from coordination capability alongside power, legitimacy, and urgency. The findings highlight the need for policy frameworks that develop and strengthen institutional capacity for coordination, extend ecosystems theory by recognizing coordination as an architectural developmental need, and highlight the importance of design strategies responsive to specific fragmentation patterns in diverse regional contexts. Our study also reveals that work remains concentrated in Asia and Africa, with continued Global North–Global South inequities in authorship and journal visibility. This study offers management and policy insights on digital poverty that may also apply to other complex challenges requiring effective and sustained multi-stakeholder collaboration.
摘要
尽管有大量的数字投资和利益相关者的举措, 但南半球的数十亿人仍然被排除在数字参与之外。这篇系统文献综述通过综合2003 年至2024 年间在亚洲、非洲、拉丁美洲和大洋洲发表的122 项实证研究, 来分析主要利益相关者、他们面对的挑战以及促进可持续数字包容所采用的策略。本研究借鉴利益相关者理论和数字生态系统理论, 将生态系统碎片化确定为中心瓶颈。我们通过引入生态系统协调利益相关者(ECS) 的概念来推进利益相关者理论。我们认为, ECS 是一个基于角色的利益相关者群体, 其显着性在于协调能力以及权力、合法性和紧迫性。研究结果表明,需要制定政策框架来发展和加强制度协调能力, 从而拓展了生态系统理论, 并强调制度协调设计策略在不同区域环境中去应对特定碎片化模式的重要性。我们认为,在作者和期刊可见性方面, 全球南北仍然不平等,还有很大的改进空间。本研究提供了关于数字贫困的管理和政策洞见, 对其他需要有效和持续的多方利益相关者之间的协作也有借鉴意义。