From Digital Cooperation to Coordinated Governance: A Critical Interdisciplinary Analysis of Centralization in the United Nations’ Pact for the Future and Global Digital Compact

Abstract

Purpose: This article examines whether the United Nations’ Pact for the Future and its annexed Global Digital Compact (GDC) constitute a substantive move toward centralized digital governance or a more limited form of coordinated multilateral steering. It addresses a key weakness in current debate: official accounts often understate institutional concentration, while critical commentary sometimes overstates the emergence of a de facto world government. Design: The study employs qualitative document analysis of the principal United Nations digital-governance instruments from the World Summit on the Information Society to the 2025 implementation architecture. This core analysis is complemented by comparative examination of adjacent regulatory and policy developments in platform governance, digital identity, digital public infrastructure (DPI), artificial intelligence (AI), information integrity, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Findings: The analysis shows that the UN framework does not create a binding global sovereign. It does, however, deepen transnational coordination through agenda-setting, standards diffusion, expert authority, implementation networks, and infrastructural interoperability. Centralization therefore operates not mainly through direct legal command, but through discursive, technical, epistemic, and infrastructural pathways. While this architecture may enhance inclusion, interoperability, and human-rights language, it also creates risks of epistemic concentration, function creep, infrastructural dependence, and expanded public-private governance over identity, information, and access to digital services. Originality/value: The article advances the debate by distinguishing formal sovereignty from institutional thickening and by showing that the GDC should be interpreted neither as empty symbolism nor as an imminent world-government project. Instead, it is best understood as a polycentric architecture of coordinated governance. The article further contributes an integrated normative framework that combines global governance theory, surveillance capitalism, governmentality, and a restrained Christian ethical lens centred on subsidiarity, human dignity, and limits on power. Practical implications: The article proposes safeguards grounded in due process, privacy, contestability, transparency, epistemic pluralism, and dignity-preserving governance.