Digital Democracy in the South Pacific and SDI's Approach to Impact Investing
It's no secret that the political landscape has been eventful over the past year, and this has also opened up new possibilities at SDI. Artificial intelligence, the rise of impact investing in non-profits, and a widening of the Overton Window in political contestation have all made themselves felt. In this newsletter, we share some impressions from our time working with the UNDP in the South Pacific this year, our increased focus on impact investing, and the planned reorientation of our Digital Democracy Report.
Bringing Parliaments and People Together in the South Pacific
In early 2025, we received an exciting opportunity to support the UNDP Pacific Office in Fiji with the Knowledge Exchange Workshop for Pacific Parliaments. Many South Pacific nations are dispersed across a vast geographic area and struggle to include all residents in face-to-face participation. At SDI, we worked with experts in the region to identify software that could help them achieve their goals to increase citizen involvement in the legislative process. This culminated in a workshop where participants were introduced to Citizens' Foundation and TRM/Episdemos. Some of you will recognize Citizens' Foundation from our previous reports, where the Icelandic software has often scored highly across a wide range of functionality. TRM/Episdemos may be less familiar as a promising new project that is currently beta testing its app and that aims to field candidates in the 2026 US Congressional elections (if you wish to participate in testing, you can join the waitlist at the bottom of the link provided).
In addition, our Managing Director, Dr. Fuller, advised the UNDP on principles of digital democracy, the capabilities of artificial intelligence vis-a-vis decision-making, and how to deepen the level of participation with their citizens.
Overall, it was a fascinating experience that provided us with an insight into life and challenges in the South Pacific, and gave us the opportunity to meet some of the passionate and far-sighted people who make it their home.
To find out more about this initiative you can read the full post on the SDI website here.
Impact Investing & the Evolution of the SDI Digital Democracy Report
Impact Investing
For the past several years, like many grassroots organizations, we have struggled with the rise of a new phenomenon: impact investing. Impact investing describes a new type of philanthropy that differs widely from conventional ideas of giving. Impact investors are typically extremely wealthy individuals who make targeted investments in both for-profit and non-profit enterprises with the explicit goal of forcing societal change by starving 'undesirable' activities of capital, while simultaneously providing 'desirable' activities with unrealistic levels of capital that could never be raised on the open market.
This profoundly anti-democratic approach has caused a severe skewing or market distortion, not just of the economy, but also of 'civil society'. By our estimates, ca. 80% of NGOs overall and 95% of NGOs cited in media are funded by 'impact investors'. These organizations often lack member support and are largely staffed by employees.
NGOs, thinktanks and 'experts' in the area of democracy are no exception to this rule, and this has had a disruptive impact on our work (much as impact investors promised it would). The chief root of this disruption has been the fact that funding for many democracy organizations comes almost exclusively from sources that themselves take extreme stances on partisan politics (often American), with funders often also donating to political parties. Unsurprisingly, this has subordinated all aspects of these organizations to various 'causes', all of which are seen as 'objective reality' despite the existence of significant and obvious levels of disagreement in the wider population around these causes. These organizations, in other words, are no longer devoted to democracy, but rather to achieving the policies their funders believe democracy should be delivering - a very different thing.
Relevantly for us at SDI, this funding complex has had catastrophic consequences for many NGOs and producers of 'democracy' software, who came to take a stance that explicitly privileged one side or the other of the very specific political divide so important to their funders. Again, this meant that some organizations that were supposed to provide the infrastructure for participation, and thus had a duty to be neutral so far as this provision went, were instead pursuing their own objectives under a veneer of 'engagement'.
This isn't particularly surprising, because it is what impact investing is meant to achieve - to 'invest' in civic activities in order to guarantee the outcome of those activities.
However, it did create an issue for us, because our mission as an organization is to research and educate in the areas of participatory and digital democracy. At the very least, we need to capture the effects of impact investing in our data in the interests of fully informing our readers. Going further than that, in many cases, we also need to assess whether the software in question is still active in the pursuit of democracy at all.
At SDI, we are therefore changing our criteria for judging software to reflect whether or not it truly supports democracy or is merely a cover for the imposition of pre-decided outcomes.
In the meantime, we recommend readers who are seeking to understand the dimensions of the modern giving complex to read this Report produced by The Institute for Policy Studies. This is, itself, an American 'left' organization, with its own policy bent, but the data in the Report provides a good primer on the scale of the giving complex and its frequently negative consequences.
Our New Criteria
We will continue to use many of our previous criteria for the SDI Report - these have actually served us surprisingly well in identifying successful software. However, in addition to the problems presented by providers abandoning policy neutrality, breakthroughs in advanced machine learning (otherwise known as artificial intelligence), create new challenges around security and the utilization of prediction models, while also opening up new possibilities for language use, and we will be taking these changes into account as well. Furthermore, despite all of the challenges, the field of digital democracy has grown to the point where we can begin to more precisely compare like-with-like software (e.g. voting-only software, participatory budgeting software, etc.). Our new criteria will thus be more precisely adapted to these use cases, rather than the one-size-fits-all criteria we previously used.
Our New Publication Schedule
As part of this re-orientation, we will be publishing the SDI Digital Democracy Report sequentially, by featuring one to two vendors at a time, on our website and in our newsletter, before releasing an overall report at the end of the review cycle.
We will be starting with Italian software Eligo and American project TRM/Episdemos and plan to share these reports with you later this year.
If you wish to suggest other vendors or if you have any other feedback, please email us here.
For more on the status of digital democracy, check out our website at
http://www.solonian-institute.com
Sincerely,
Solonian
Democracy
Institute