Legal Infrastructure for Inclusive Tech Development: Artificial Intelligence in the Global South

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting economic and legal orders, yet its benefits and burdens remain unevenly distributed. This paper asks whether, and under what institutional and material conditions, the Global South can secure equitable participation in the AI economy. It advances a normative claim grounded in distributive justice, drawing on Rawls, the capabilities approach, and TWAIL critiques, arguing that bridging the AI divide is not a matter of charity but a duty of international cooperation under ICESCR Articles 2(1) and 15. Methodologically, the paper combines doctrinal analysis of international human rights law with comparative assessment across six constraint domains: energy, finance, connectivity and compute, governance, climate risk, and geopolitics. Existing literature privileges principle-level commitments such as fairness, rights, and human-centric AI, yet they underspecify how legal obligations translate into operational mechanisms, standards participation, and capacity-building for low- and middleincome states. The contribution is twofold. First, the paper develops an evaluative framework that operationalizes distributive justice into four tests—benefit allocation, cost-bearance, voice in standards, and capacity building—linked to human rights duties of participation, equity, and progressive realization. Second, it presents a policy toolbox, including renewable-aligned datacentre siting, blended finance, phased compute access, open-weight model strategies, and structured engagement in standards bodies. The result is a prioritized roadmap with legal, institutional, and measurable criteria that enable the Global South to translate justice claims into implementable AI capacity.

Ähnliche Arbeiten