Digital sovereignty is an emerging concept at the heart of the global development of national digital identity systems (Zulkifli et al., 2023). Yet, as governments around the world increasingly pressure policymakers to pursue digital sovereignty through these systems, competing and often mutually inconsistent definitions (Fratini et al., 2024) have led to significantly different approaches to developing national digital identity systems. This presents a clear need to systematically examine how different approaches to digital sovereignty are actively influencing the design, governance, and implementation of national digital identity systems across diverse national contexts.
This Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) seeks to articulate how competing approaches to digital sovereignty are impacting the global development of national digital identity systems through the following research question and theme-related sub-questions:
How are global approaches to digital sovereignty shaping the development of national digital identity systems?
A systematic literature review was conducted in February 2025 to identity eligible studies. These studies had to be peer-reviewed, discuss both digital sovereignty and digital identity in the context of public digital services, address one or more of the thematic sub-questions, be published in English and be authored between 2015 - 2025. Studies that discussed sovereignty outside of a digital context were excluded. 42 studies were selected to inform the REA.
The reviewed literature positions national digital identity systems as mechanisms through which digital sovereignty is both asserted and reconfigured. This is discussed by examining a variety of contested sets of technical, legal and socio-technological design choices.
This REA finds that policymakers are at a crossroads: caught between the urgency to "solve digital identity" (Stokkink & Pouwelse, 2018) and the complex trade-offs required by competing digital sovereignty agendas — with states continually negotiating between approaches that centralize risk, exploit citizen data, and adhere to the traditional notion of state control, versus models that place citizens at the center of identity management ecosystems to protect their privacy and security within borderless digital infrastructures. This REA concludes by urging policymakers to continue to develop hybrid approaches to technology and infrastructure that balance state control and infrastructural independence, experiment with new governance processes that encourage collaboration, and make a decisive shift toward citizen-centred approaches that get closer to the lived experiences of citizens.