Throughout the transcript, there is a notable absence of discussion regarding the ownership structures, financial models, and profit motives behind the infrastructures being adopted. While Owango repeatedly emphasizes technical integration—“we are literally leveraging on existing technology…”—there is no mention that the DOI system is operated by powerful, for-profit and non-profit consortia, many of which have deep entanglements with commercial publishing giants like Elsevier. Nor is it acknowledged that DOIs and related identifiers often carry fees, shaping who can afford to participate fully in these infrastructures.
This deliberate omission obscures the political economy embedded within so-called neutral technical decisions, masking how choices about infrastructure adoption are also choices about whose economic interests are served. As Tarleton Gillespie (2010) argues, platforms and infrastructures are never “just technical”; they are sites of economic strategy and governance. Ignoring these dynamics depoliticizes technology adoption decisions, foreclosing critical conversations about sustainable, community-owned alternatives.
The digital infrastructure is presented as a neutral and technical solution to knowledge management. Owango asserts, “we are literally leveraging on existing technology to produce our digital object container,” framing this as a pragmatic inevitability. However, the proposed system explicitly makes indigenous knowledge legible through its incorporation into existing global classification schemes—“Visualize the digital object container… and you have your indigenous knowledge… If there’s any publication… there’s an ID assigned to it.”
This process of assigning persistent identifiers does more than organize information; it renders indigenous knowledge visible only through the dominant epistemological frameworks of global scholarly infrastructures. Such legibility, as scholars like James Scott (1998) have argued, is a prerequisite for control, management, and ultimately commodification. Similarly, Bowker and Star’s (1999) cannonical work has demonstrated how classification systems are not neutral but actively shape what becomes knowable and valuable. This infrastructural arrangement risks further standardizing and disciplining diverse knowledge systems under global capitalist logics, contributing to what could be termed a digital enclosure of the knowledge commons.
Knowledge is repeatedly framed through a market-oriented lens. Owango asks, “What contribution does indigenous knowledge contribute to research, innovation, and commercialization?” rather than posing questions about community ownership or non-market values. The initiative openly promotes the link between indigenous knowledge and intellectual property, stating: “We want to support commercialization and the patents that come out of it.” This perspective reduces cultural heritage to an economic asset, aligning with a commodification logic rather than resisting it.
The Africa PID Alliance positions African actors as late entrants to an already-established global infrastructure. Joy Owango states, “Africa really needs to be part of the conversation,” framing participation as integration rather than transformation. While the initiative claims leadership—“we are starting from Africa”—it simultaneously acknowledges that it is “leveraging on existing technology” and partnerships with dominant global actors like Crossref and DataCite. This positions African stakeholders primarily as users and implementers of external infrastructures, not as creators of new epistemic or infrastructural paradigms.