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Original article here.
Digital sovereignty has been at the centre of the EU’s policy agenda for some years now. In her 2019 political guidelines, the then candidate for President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen stated that it was ‘not too late to achieve technological sovereignty in some critical technology areas’. A plethora of policy instruments emphasising technological and digital sovereignty followed up, including the European strategy for Data, the 2030 Digital Compass: the European way for the Digital Decade, or the Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030.
More recently, policy documents such as the 2024 Draghi Report on Competitiveness and, most notably, the 2025 EuroStack report have diagnosed structural weaknesses and underinvestment hindering EU’s competitiveness and undermining its digital strategy. The tone is similarly sombre: Draghi’s report dissects EU’s economic and geopolitical decline relative to global peers such as the US and China, while the EuroStack authors focus on the critical dependence on non-EU technology providers. Both reports point to two prevalent dynamics stifling Europe’s capacity for growth and innovation: insufficient coordination (e.g. in industrial and digital policy) and excessive fragmentation (e.g. R&D efforts, access to funding, regulation). Insufficient coordination and fragmentation feed off each other.
Compounding these issues is the insufficient attention to regional and local governance levels. The EuroStack authors note that ‘another missed opportunity lies in underestimating the potential of regional and local levels, which act as critical intersections for supply and demand dynamics’ (p. 99). Draghi’s report also acknowledges that ‘refocusing the work of the EU’ requires being ‘more rigorous in applying the subsidiarity principle’ (p. 68).
Yet, both Draghi and Eurostack’s roadmaps treat local and regional innovation superficially and lack further actionable vision. By relegating regional successes to tokenistic mentions, the reports fail to take regional and local hubs’ capacity for autonomous decision-making seriously, especially if compared with the consistent granular focus given to top-down, member-state coordination.
Cities and regions are the locus of Europe’s digital innovation and the EuroStack report provides examples of ‘thriving, world class start-up ecosystems’ in Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam or Barcelona (p.100). It also features the LUMI supercomputer in Kajaani, a rural region in Finland leveraging cheap hydropower and local expertise (p. 57). Those success stories are treated in these roadmaps as national assets, abstracting them from their local and regional context, the specific drivers of their growth, and the intricate web of local collaborations that underpin them. The policies, funding mechanisms, and overarching visions remain determined by Brussels and national capitals, often failing to directly empower the very cities and regions that enable the local innovation ecosystem in the first place. While celebrating these local achievements and recognising the need to strengthen democracy, the report consistently frames strategic decision-making around the EU and national levels. Federation and decentralisation are referred to in relation to infrastructure but their logical correlation– decentralised governance– is overlooked.
Take the proposed governance designs as an example. A new ‘EuroStack Steering Committee’ providing strategic oversight and leadership would include “representatives from EU institutions, member states, industry leaders, academia and civil society’. No explicit mention to regional or local representatives is made. Likewise, the suggested ‘Competitiveness Coordination Framework’ in Draghi’s Report — to implement Competitiveness Action Plans — would ‘involve a wide range of stakeholders: Member States, technical experts, the private sector, and EU institutions and agencies’. No mandate to engage local or regional governments or civil society networks either. This pattern is standard EU practice: the European Artificial Intelligence Board (AI Board) mandated in the Artificial Intelligence Act is composed of representatives from each EU Member State; the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) set by the GDPR is similarly composed of the heads of national data protection authorities (DPAs).
Prior to the release of the 2024 report, Mario Draghi encouraged Europeans ‘to reinvent a way of growing’ alerting them that ‘to do this, we need to become a State’. But this Westphalian inertia perpetuates a top-down model that disregards the subsidiarity principle and ignores the polycentric reality of Europe’s digital ecosystem.
The Westphalian trap — the failure to decentralise power, sidelining subsidiarity and polycentric models that could harmonise local autonomy with shared strategic aims — reflects a pervasive lack of political imagination, replicating the failures of past EU digital policies, where digital sovereignty is in practice ‘reduced to protecting national interests in cyberspace’ (Gábriš & Hamuľák 2021).
Subsidiarity is not just a legal obligation enshrined as a principle in article 5(3) of the Treaty of the European Union. Any EU digital policy not taking it seriously will remain a patchwork of national interests ill-equipped for the rapid, agile policymaking that the digital age demands.
Reimagining the governance of digital ecosystems — one that could draw inspiration from Europe’s own history of city-state innovation — may offer the key to unlocking Europe’s digital renaissance.
Data commons, localism, participatory governance
Concepts such as ‘data sovereignty’ or ‘sovereign AI’ reassert the narrative of the nation state. Roadmaps for European digital industrial policy need to develop in practical terms what it means to decentralise and leverage local and regional potential. They also need to substantiate claims about European policy safeguarding citizens and democratic values, given existing disparities within and across states. This is crucial because state sovereignty discourses and neomercantilist tendencies risk prioritising digital surveillance over digital democracy.
People-centric and polycentric processes, practices and infrastructure
Firstly, reclaiming European agency in the digital sphere needs people-centric and polycentric policymaking. The European Commission itself recognises in another case of transformational transitions, the European Green Deal, the importance of centering people (2019): ‘Recent political events show that game changing policies only work if citizens are fully involved in designing them (p.22)’. In our view, this means thinking and designing from an outcomes-based perspective and deeper democratic practice. As stated by Beveridge and Koch (2024): ‘It is surely an affront to democracy that we have, including in formally (liberal) democratic systems, so little capacity to control the places we inhabit, to act together on the processes which shape our daily lives (p. 146)’. As the authors propose, seeing democracy ‘like a city’ rather than as a state, or located in ‘practices and places’ rather than institutions alone, can help us put in place the processes and infrastructure required for enabling self-governance and diversity in the types of and number of authorities that contribute to decision-making.
To do this, roadmaps like Draghi’s or the Eurostack proposal need concrete pathways for building more democratic processes, practices and infrastructure. As we posit elsewhere, approaching this requires a multidimensional lens, including who is at the table (for example ensuring these processes include all residents, not only formal citizens), what multiplicity of models of democracy are we tapping into (representative, deliberative, direct democracy, etc), what instruments of democracy are we mobilising (hard law, soft law, policies, principles, etc), or at what scales are we developing these processes, practices and infrastructure (local, sub-national, national, state, regional).
Strengthening local governance capacities is key to polycentric governance, as stated by the authors of this empirical study from the energy sector (Schmid et al., 2025). The authors find that key elements to meaningful involvement in the European energy system include extensive intermediation by nongovernmental actors, subnational support, thriving associational and professionalised local initiatives, and both EU and national funding and schemes to support this thriving locally-led ecosystem.
A democratic and polycentric roadmap also needs Europe to protect civic space and civil and political rights through different governance instruments, including hard and soft law. Funding initiatives like the civil society-led Monitoring Action for Civic Space -and its new ‘Early Warning System for civic space restrictions’- can contribute to this effort, ensuring support for local innovation and mobilising to thrive from the very local level, grounded in the realities and needs of places and communities.
Enabling sustainable data and knowledge commons
Secondly, and in line with the need for polycentric governance, for intermediaries and for support to locally-led networks and initiatives, we need ecosystems that enable collective and individual agency in how data and technologies are used and governed. Data and knowledge commons are one example of ecosystems for distributed governance, inclusive participation and innovation. These ecosystems offer agile, flexible, participatory and open processes for data and knowledge sharing and collaboration. They also provide a mechanism to counterbalance centralising and extractive economic or political forces. The Wikimedia work on how to address scraping bots offers an example of how these questions need to be addressed in a systemic way. Knowledge and data commons are a key element of a polycentric and people-centric digital industrial policy that can resist both dependence from dominant actors as well as the vulnerability that can come with openness without boundaries and without collective decision-making. This responds to a shift in norms in the context of data and AI systems, which recognise the need to balance openness with data governance. Europe can further support these ecosystems by promoting the infrastructure for innovative licensing and copyright, such as public interest or impact-driven licenses that data and knowledge commons can use as leveraging power.
Collective intelligence and deliberation
Thirdly, we need spaces for literacy, knowledge and dialogue. Data and digital literacy must be a key area of investment by Europe that taps into existing education, information ecosystems and decision-making forums, across scales, sectors and ages. Once more, it would be wrong to assume that this needs to be top-down exercise. Communities and people from all walks of life and European corners need better information on data, AI and emerging technologies but they also have lived experience and knowledge that is missing from the oversight and advisory boards and committees that reports like Draghi’s or the Eurostack recommend. In addition to integrating lived, local-level experience in these boards and advisory and scientific panels, spaces for representative, inclusive and informed deliberation in relation to Europe’s digital infrastructure and its governance need to be enabled and sustained. The Conference for the Future of Europe -an EU-wide citizens’ assembly- and the EU-wide representative deliberative panels that have followed on specific topics, the permanent citizens assembly in the Paris City Council, and the many other similar deliberative forums that have taken place at many levels in the last few decades, are examples of spaces and practices that need to be taken seriously as democratic infrastructure in a digital policy roadmap. Ultimately, a people-centric and polycentric strategy needs to build the spaces for critical and active citizenship, understood in its broadest terms, that is, a practice that all residents in Europe from all backgrounds can enact as key stakeholders of any strategic decisions on data and digital policy that Europe will undertake.
An Europe open to the world
Finally, Europe needs not only to be open to bottom-up innovation and governance as a key policy driver but also to be open to innovation and learning from all over the world. Dependency has proven to be harmful but so is ignoring that we live in an interconnected world that requires collaboration, sharing knowledge and ensuring digital industrial policies considers the wellbeing of all societies and the planet.
In the same way that regulation, interoperability and standards help to link decentralised infrastructure, the EU needs to invest in the infrastructure, processes and practices for decentralised ecosystems of governance that respond to the agency and realities of places and communities but which are interconnected to existing national, state and EU-wide institutions.
A transformational roadmap for a European digital industrial policy must include practical steps for these ecosystems to thrive. Most importantly, it has to actively enable and sustain their collective agency, rather than assuming it as a byproduct of state-led, top-down approaches. Key to building Europe’s polycentric digital future is paying attention to its local capacities for innovation. This is the bedrock of our European digital future.
References
Beveridge R and Koch P (2024) Seeing democracy like a city. Dialogues in Urban Research 2(2): 145–163.
Bria, F., Timmers, P., Gernone, F. (2025) EuroStack — A European Alternative for Digital Sovereignty. https://www.euro-stack.info/
Chwalisz, C. (2022) A Movement That’s Quietly Reshaping Democracy For The Better. Noema. https://www.noemamag.com/a-movement-thats-quietly-reshaping-democracy-for-the-better/
Colom and Poblet (2025) A polytopic approach to democratising decision-making on health data reuse in the EU, Participatory AI and Research Symposium, Paris.
Draghi, M. (2024) The future of European competitiveness, European Commission.
European Commission (2019) The European Green Deal. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52019DC0640
Gábriš, T., & Hamuľák, O. (2021) 5G and Digital Sovereignty of the EU: The Slovak Way. Sciendo, https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/bjes-2021-0013
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Schmid B, Debourdeau A, Fahy F, et al. (2025) Four pathways for energy citizenship initiatives to contribute to a more democratic European energy system. Journal of European Integration 47(2): 339–360.
Tarkowski A (2025) Data Governance in Open Source AI: Enabling Responsible and Systemic Access. Open Future and Open Source Initiative. Available at: https://opensource.org/data-governance-open-source-ai.
