This chapter explores the dynamics of digital transformation, the humanitarian-development 'nexus' and transition as outlined in the Grand Bargain, digital public infrastructure, and data protection in humanitarian action. It outlines the humanitarian – development nexus and debates about the transitioning of humanitarian response from humanitarian organisations to local and development-oriented actors, including States. It highlights how digital technology is a central yet underexamined dimension of these debates, and introduces a new approach to digitalisation and its potential implications for the humanitarian sector. It describes how the idea of digital public infrastructure reflects a shift from building one-off digital systems and services to setting up the underlying infrastructure – optimising the railway network, rather than buying expensive trains, as the analogy goes. Digital public infrastructure emphasises modularity, so that individual components can be switched out, and interoperability, so that data can flow seamlessly between those components. Digital public infrastructure has focused on areas such as digital identity, data exchange, and payment systems – all central to the humanitarian response – but is now gaining traction in areas such as social protection and beyond. The chapter draws on previously conducted research on the digital systems used in the delivery of humanitarian relief and social protection in crisis and fragile-State contexts to describe the views of humanitarian and social protection experts on the potential implications of increasingly integrated digital systems. It shows how many believe that increasing consolidation is likely and inevitable, and highlights how little data protection, privacy, and wider protection considerations have been taken into account. The chapter then analyses the implications of a digital public infrastructure approach for the maintenance of humanitarian principles and the concept of 'humanitarian space'. It highlights how the interoperability and data sharing inherent in the 'transitioning' of relief and services from humanitarian organisations to actors providing longer-term development support complicate data protection principles such as purpose limitation, and concludes with an outline of digital technology and design approaches that might support a digital public infrastructure approach to digital transformation that could both enable a transition and yet help maintain humanitarian principles and protection.
