Colloquium

Implications of New Technology for Civil Registration and Identification: Research and Policy

21—24 April 2015

Many countries around the world, but especially the poorest countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, face a choice in the current generation in the development of the basic administrative systems for registering the identities of their people. These registration infrastructures are of tremendous significance to the architecture of states, setting up the foundations of state capacity and citizens' entitlements, the media they interact with and the key agents of institutional development. On the one hand are older (often pen- and paper-based) state systems for establishing and recording civil registration events: births, deaths, marriages, divorces especially. On the other hand there are newer computerised registration systems, the increasing use of advanced biometrics, and sometimes a connection to firms providing financial services. Social scientists are, simultaneously, developing much more sophisticated tools for studying the evolution, effects and administrative workings of the many different forms of registration that exist globally (Breckenridge and Szreter, 2012; About, Brown, and Lonergan 2013).

An extensive body of international and national law is informed by civil registration practices that have a history of more than 2,000 years during which the basics of the practice barely changed (e.g. Hukou in China since Qin). Countries in the West and the Far East have been successful in reaching registration completeness. On the other hand there are over 100 countries where stagnation has been common, investment in civil registration systems has been negligible. But many of the same countries replace their national IDs or introduce them anew, at high cost. Research firm Acuity estimates that over USD 50 billion will be invested in national e-IDs during the 2013—2018 period. Biometric identity cards are increasingly used for the delivery of government services. Elections have become much more frequent following democratization in Africa and Asia. Expensive biometric voter registration has become more common, to the extent that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon found it necessary to warn against their use by the poorest countries in the world.

At this colloquium social scientists and policy researchers will examine the various forms of civil registration and identification currently used and introduced around the world to consider the opportunities and implications of the choices that poor states, in particular, currently face. The conference will allow us to consider what is now a formidable body of established research across many fields, but it will also allow us to commence mapping out a set of comparative questions that will frame research and support policy makers in designing the best possible recommendations for the states that must still confront the intractable difficulties of mass identity registration.

People

Workshop Participants

Carla AbouZahr | Independent Consultant in Health Strategy and Policy

Carla AbouZahr’s involvement in civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) started while she was employed at the World Health Organization from 1989 to 2011. The challenges of monitoring progress in reducing maternal mortality led her to focus on the need for investment in national systems to register births and deaths and generate vital statistics on fertility, mortality and causes of death. She was responsible for WHO’s work in health information system strengthening of which CRVS is a key component. She led and managed the development of a series of papers on civil registration and vital statistics published in the Lancet in 2007 (http://www.thelancet.com/series/who-counts). Since her retirement in 2011, she has provided consultancy support to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) for the Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, November 2014. http://www.getinthepicture.org; to the Asian Development Bank for the International Identity Management Conference in Seoul, Korea, September 2014.

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Juliana Vengoechea Barrios | Open Society Justice Initiative

Juliana Vengoechea Barrios is an Aryeh Neier Fellow with the Open Society Justice Initiative .Prior to OSJI Vengoechea was an assistant professor and the director of the Center for Studies in International Law "Francisco Suárez, S.J" at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Vengoechea has also worked as a human rights and international humanitarian law advisor for the Vice-presidency of Colombia, as fellow of the Program in Asylum and Refugee Law at University of Michigan, working at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington D.C, as well as legal fellow of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research are citizenship and nationality, forced migration, socio economic rights and International Human Rights Law. Vengoechea holds LLB degrees from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and University of the Basque Country , a LLM degree from the University of Michigan and is a member of the New York State Bar.

Jackie Bhabha | Harvard School of Public Health

Jacqueline Bhabha is FXB Director of Research, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago.  Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the editor of Children Without A State (MIT Press, 2011), author of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton University Press, 2014), and the editor of Human Rights and Adolescence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Bhabha serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies. 

Keith Breckenridge | Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research

Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and the Deputy Director at Wiser. His book -- Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014) – shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. He has also published widely on the history and contemporary politics of biometrics,  with important papers in Africa, History Workshop, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Public Culture and comparative anthologies on systems of identification (the full list is here).  This interest in biometrics has also drawn him in to the global institutional history of state documentation, especially the forms of birth, death and marriage registration that are ubiquitous (but very poorly understood) in Europe, Asia and the Americas (see

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Helge Brunborg | Statistics Norway

Helge Brunborg is a researcher in demography. He has mostly been employed by Statistics Norway but he has also worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the University of Botswana and the Central Statistics Office of Botswana, as well as having been involved in a number of consultancies in many countries. He has taken a special interest in registration issues, both from a statistical and human rights perspective. In particular, he believes strongly in organizing individual population data from civil registration and population censuses in a central population register, which can be of immense value for statistics, research and administration, including for the registered individuals. These ideas are discussed in the report “Status Analysis on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS)”, http://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_attachment/20.... On the issue of registration, specifically, he has published VO Nielsen, H Brunborg, V Aalandslid, D Roll-Hansen & C Hendriks: Status Analysis on Civil Registrat

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Armando Cutolo | Dipartimento di Studi Sociali, Politici e Cognitivi (DISPOC),University of Siena

My interest, as an anthropologist, in registration and legal ID in Cote d’Ivoire has started during my research on the Ivorian nationalism and on the movement of jeunes patriotes. But in fact, I had started taking field-notes on “the social life of ID cards” quite a few years before, since the second halve of the nineties. The research I was carrying at that time focused on kinship, ethnicity and local notions of personhood in the Anno region. Here akan and mande social identities were connected within a common regional political frame that was affected by the “ivoirité” ethno-nationalist ideology - where the mande-dioula Ivorian nationals were implicitly equated with “strangers” coming from northern bordering countries. Travelling in the region I was able (obliged) to spend some time at police checkpoints, witnessing the transactions, the negotiations and the tactics centred around the “cartes d’identité nationales” and the “carte de séjour d’étranger. These ethnographic observations brought me to focus the specific, mobile configurations connecting legal identity, person and personhood within identification practices. After the conflict started, in

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Mariana Dahan | World Bank

After starting her career in the telecommunications industry in 1998, Mariana Dahan became interested in the patterns of diffusion of innovations – a topic she has studied extensively in her PhD research work, while being at the European Business School in France and at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the United States. Having worked for mobile operators in both developed and developing countries, Dr. Dahan gained valuable insights on mobile technologies’ impact on economic growth. Since 2009, Mariana Dahan works with Governments from low- and middle-income countries, as part of the Global Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Practice of The World Bank, based in Washington, DC, in the United States. Currently, Dr. Dahan is the Coordinator of the Identification for Development (ID4D) Working Group: a bold initiative that aims at formulating a coherent cross-sectoral approach to identification systems and coordinating closely with other development agencies. As part of her previous work at The World Bank, Dr. Dahan has also managed the Identity Management (IDM) Experts Group, building strategic partnerships with Governments, private sector, research labs and civi

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Sanjay Dharwadker | WCC Smart Search & Match

Sanjay Dharwadker heads the global ID consultancy practice for WCC, Utrecht (www.wcc-group.com). The organization offers a versatile tool-box for identity search and match, that is currently being tuned to address diverse social issues related to migration, crime and not the least, national identity. WCC works closely inter alia, with the Netherlands government (IND), the European Union (EU-VIS), UNHCR and on projects such as the border-crossing of migrant workers across Mexico – Guatemala. Earlier he worked in Africa for nearly a decade on projects such as identity management and personalized engagement for effective ARV dispensation among key populations. Before that, in India, he was part of the team/s that evaluated and considered the possibilities of using large-scale identity management tools (registration, smart cards and biometrics) for welfare, and participated in the standardization process that helped accelerate low-cost implementations in the last decade, leading finally to the nation-wide Aadhaar program. But it was the earlier decade that provided him the real insights into developmental challenges, when he worked for the Tech

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Kevin Donovan | History and STS, University of Michigan

Kevin Donovan is in the PhD program in Anthropology & History at the University of Michigan. His dissertation studies the history and contemporary politics of regionalism in East Africa, including the emerging regional identification regimes. Prior work focused on the emergence of mobile money and the use of biometric registration in South Africa and Kenya. Resulting publications can be found at: https://umich.academia.edu/KevinDonovan/

Amanda Flaim | Center for Population Health and Aging

Amanda Flaim, a Development Sociologist and specialist in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University, is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University in the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Duke Population Research Institute and the Social Science Research Institute. She has served as a lead research consultant on statelessness for UNESCO in Thailand for UNHCR. Her chapter, "Problems of Evidence, Evidence of Problems: Expanding Citizenship and Reproducing Statelessness among Highlanders in Northern Thailand," is available in the forthcoming volume Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Encounters with Blood, Birthright, and Bureaucracy (Lawrance and Stevens, eds). She has a forthcoming article in Comparative Education Review, where she reveals the perpetual inadequacies of human rights frameworks to resolve problems of exclusion from schooling among stateless populations. Her dissertation, "No Land’s Man: Sovereignty, Legal Status, and the Production of Statelessness among Highlanders in Northern Thailand" (2015), is available through Cornell University Libraries.

Laurent Fourchard | Sciences Po Bordeaux

Laurent Fourchard is currently a senior researcher with the French Foundation of Political Science (FNSP) at the research institute ‘Les Afriques dans le Monde’ at Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. His research is located at the intersection of African history and African politics and his interests focus on urban comparative research, violence and exclusion, citizenship and process of identification in Nigeria and South Africa.

Alan Gelb | Center for Global Development

Alan Gelb is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Development. He was previously with the World Bank, where his most recent positions included Director of Development Policy and Chief Economist for the Africa Region. Prior to that, he managed the program of research on countries in transition from socialist systems and also led work in the area of financial systems. In addition to the topic of identification for development his current areas of research and operational interest include: growth and diversification of African economies; the management of resource-rich countries; and instruments to provide aid on the basis of results. He has written several books and many articles on these and other topics. His interest in the topic of individual identification originated from the recognition that accurate identification and authentication of individuals could contribute to the more effective implementation of economic and development policies. A first focus was on the use of biometric identification systems for cash transfer programs: see http://www.cgd

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Radha Govil | UNHCR

Radha Govil has worked as a Legal Officer in UNHCR’s Division of International Protection for the past five years, focusing on issues relating to nationality and statelessness. She holds an LL.B and a BA from the University of Melbourne and a Masters in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Mia Harbitz | Inter-American Development Bank

Mia Harbitz is the lead specialist in identity management and registries in the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) with over 25 years of experience in development projects. Since 2004 Mia Harbitz has been coordinating IDBs activities in the area of identity management, including a series of studies assessing the practical implications of under-registration of citizens in Latin America. She has designed and managed several projects with the objective to modernize and strengthen the capacities of civil and identification registries in Latin America, projects that are also linked to improving the quality of national vital statistics systems and promoting universal birth registration and civil identification. She has authored as well as contributed to a number of publications on topics pertaining to legal identity, identity management and implications of under registration, as well as books on social inclusion as a means to poverty reduction. Her work in the IADB requires extensive and worldwide coordination with other multilateral agencies, development banks and governments. She has a background in engineering, and prior to coming to Latin America in 1991, she worked in develop

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Marianne Henriksen | Norwegian Directorate of Taxes

Marianne Henriksen has a law degree from the University of Oslo with 20 years of professional experience in the public sector. From 1996 to 2010 she worked for the National Insurance Administration. Since 2010 she has worked for the Norwegian Directorate of Taxes, since 2012 as program manager for modernizaton of the Population Register. She has also been managing projects linked to serious and organized crime and fraud against the Norwegian welfare system. She has substantial experience in working across different businesses and agencies to achieve the best results. Through her work experience, she has obtained a strategic view of how Norwegian society works and how the welfare system may be sustainable through development and modernization of the National Population Register.

Eddy Higgs | History, University of Essex

Most of my early work was on the history and use of census records in England, which were intimately linked to births, marriages and deaths registration since they are required for the calculation of vital rates. This has been a continuous theme in my activities, either in terms of commentaries on the source, or the creation of digital datasets. This led on in the 1990s to a consideration of the development of the London General Register Office, the body responsible for civil registration and census-taking in England from 1837 onwards. In the early years of the present century, I expanded my interests in official data gathering to the English state as a whole from 1500 onwards. In more recent years I have also written on the history of personal identification in England over the same period – from medieval seals to biometrics.

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Eivind Hoffmann | Norwegian Directorate of Immigration

Eivind Hoffmann joined the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) in February 2004 as head of its Statistics and Analysis Division. From February 2011 to February 2014 he represented UDI in the Norwegian Contact Point for the European Migration Network (NO EMN NCP). Following his retirement from UDI he is currently working as an independent consultant. Assignments for UDI have involved support for UDI’s EMN involvement and R&D projects sponsored by UDI. From January 2015 he is supporting the Norwegian National ID-center’s work to present statistics on the control of foreigners’ identity and the statistics, as well as evaluating their quality. Eivind Hoffmann joined UDI after having worked in the Bureau of Statistics of the International Labour Office (ILO) 1984-2003. In ILO he worked on developing and providing guidance on a wide range of standards and methods for labour statistics, including the direct use of administrative records and statistics on the international migration of workers. Before joining the ILO he worked as research coordinator for spatial data in the Norwegian Computing Centre (NR) (1981-84). In Statistics Norway (1968-81) he headed its section for lab

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Milen Kidane | UNICEF

Milen Kidane has been working with UNICEF Eastern and Southern Regional Office (ESARO) as a Child Protection Specialist, focusing on civil registration and justice for children programming since June 2011. Milen has over 15 years of experience in managing child protection programmes throughout Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Milen joined UNICEF- Eritrea in 2000 as a consultant and has worked with as an Emergency Child Protection Specialist in Afghanistan, Eastern DRC, Northern Uganda and Iraq as well as Trinidad and Tobago. As a child rights advocate, Milen has been involved in advocacy for child legal reform, including child justice systems and enhanced prevention and response services for children affected by violence and abuse in both development and humanitarian settings. As a member of the Regional CRVS Core Group, Milen leads the CRVS systems reform work for UNICEF in Africa. Milen holds Master’s Degree in International Human Rights and Democratization, from the University of Padua, Italy. She is a national of Eritrea and grew up in Vienna, Austria.

Jonathan Klaaren | School of Law and WISER, University of the Witwatersrand

Jonathan Klaaren teaches, researches, and writes at the University of the Witwatersrand in the areas of human rights, law, and sociology, having written over forty peer-reviewed publications and co-written several books, including on the South African right of access to information which has to some extent transformed South African law. http://wiser.wits.ac.za/content/promotion-access-information-act-commentary-11662 Klaaren also has written on the overlap of national security and the right to information. http://wiser.wits.ac.za/content/promotion-access-and-protection-national-security-information-south-africa-11663 His early research also encompassed the field of migration, where he researched the current status and interaction of laws of registration, identity, citizenship and migration throughout Southern Africa. http://wiser.wits.ac

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Mary Lagaay | Plan International

Mary Lagaay currently works as a Researcher for Plan International, where she is responsible for coordinating research related to the protection and realisation of children’s rights in developing countries. This has included the coordination of Plan’s recent report ‘Birth registration and children’s rights: a complex story’ which investigated the benefits of birth registration for the individual and for the state. Most recently, she has coordinated a study into the humanitarian consequences of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Prior to her role at Plan, Mary has held roles within the Policy and Public Affairs team at the National Children’s Bureau and at Brighton Oasis Project. In 2012, she completed an MSc in Social Policy Research at the London School of Economics and was awarded an academic prize for her research on the experiences of mothers who completed intervention for problematic substance misuse.

Bronwen Manby | LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights

Bronwen Manby is an independent consultant and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and previously worked for the Open Society Foundations and Human Rights Watch. She has written widely on human rights, democracy and good governance in Africa and her current focus is on statelessness and the right to nationality, with ongoing work for the Open Society Foundations, for UNHCR and IOM and others. She is completing a book whose provisional title is “Citizenship and Statelessness in Africa: The law and politics of belonging”, which will also be submitted as a doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Law of the University of Maastricht, with the anticipated defence in 2015. She is involved in ongoing advocacy for the adoption of a protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the right to a nationality in Africa, and was the lead author of the section on nationality for the General Comment on the right to a name, birth registration and a nationality adopted in 2014 by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Publications on nationality include the following:

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Laura Mann | African Studies Centre, Leiden

Laura Mann is a postdoctoral researcher at the African Studies Centre (ASC) in the University of Leiden. She has published articles in the Journal of Modern African Studies, the Review of African Political Economy, Critical African Studies and the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries and has forthcoming articles in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and New Political Economy. She is currently pursuing research on big data, informal economies and economic governance in Kenya and South Africa. In September 2015, she will be joining the London School of Economics’ International Development department as an Assistant Professor. Some relevant blogs/papers:

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Giulia Piccolino | German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Giulia Piccolino is a post-doctoral research fellow sponsored by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. She is interested in post-conflict reconstruction and statebuilding, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining GIGA, she worked as an electoral observer for the Carter Center and as an electoral advisor for the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) and attended relevant training courses. These experiences arose her interest in voter registration and voter registration technologies. She subsequently conducted research on the Permanent Electronic Electoral List in Benin as part of the European Union Framework Programme 7 funded project “The economic, social and political consequences of democratic reforms. A quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis”. Her analysis of the joint civil/voter registration process in Côte d’Ivoire and the voter registration process in Benin and Ghana have resulted in two journal articles forthcoming on Development and Change and Democratization. Her work looks at the role of voter registration and registration technologies in the processes of state building and democratiz

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Jan Pronk | Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

Johannes Pieter "Jan" Pronk (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjɑn ˈprɔnk]; born 16 March 1940) is a Dutch politician, diplomat, and professor. Since 2009, he is visiting professor at the United Nations University for Peace in Ciudad Colón, Costa Rica.

Anna Rader | SOAS

Anna’s doctoral research explores practices of identification in Somaliland in the Horn of Africa. Her thesis considers the ways in which identity is verified by reference to personal and national genealogies, and how these topographies are incorporated and sometimes co-opted by state systems of legibility. As part of this work, she is studying practices of ‘horizontal’ identity authentication, in particular vouching, and how these fit with conceptions of citizenship in Somaliland. She is also investigating the voter registration process of 2008-10 to understand more about attitudes and ideas towards identification. Anna has spent six months in Somaliland since 2012 as part of ongoing fieldwork. In December 2012 she worked as an international observer for the local council elections, and has conducted a range of qualitative interviews and observations, predominantly in the capital Hargeisa.

Ashley Rockenbach | History, University of Michigan

Ashley Rockenbach is an advanced doctoral candidate in African History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, provisionally titled, Home in Exile: Banyarwanda settlers and the making of the Ugandan state, 1911-present, investigates the history of Rwandan migration and settlement in 20th century Uganda. Despite decades of political exclusion, many Banyarwanda consider Uganda to be their “home.” Their stories highlight “displacement” as a historical and gendered process, one that has been integral to postcolonial state-formation. In addition to her doctoral research, Ms. Rockenbach is also part of on-going efforts to catalogue and digitize Uganda's state and district archives.

Ornit Shani | Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa

My research from 1997 to 2007 explored the rise of belligerent Hindu nationalism in India from the mid-1980s that posited itself, in the main, in opposition to Islam, as it sought to redefine India as a primarily Hindu state. I argued that rather than stemming from historically entrenched or newly emergent religious antagonisms, the intensifying sectarian conflicts from the mid-1980s were largely driven by growing caste tensions among Hindus. These tensions were largely stimulated by the state’s articulation of key resource distribution policies (reservations) for the backward castes as well as the politics that surrounded them. In state policies, particularly in identifying the backward castes, religion was inadvertently made an intrinsic criterion for compensatory policies for weaker groups in the society. By addressing issues of inequality as if they were synonymous with religious rights, the state’s reservation policy appeared and was even experienced by upper caste Hindus as “preferential treatment” of religious minorities – a policy that, in effect, enabled caste conflicts to develop and communal rivalries to deepen (Shani 2007, 2011).

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Ravi Sundaram | SARAI / CSDS

Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. Sundaram published Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi. (2009), emerging from years of field and archival work. Cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America are now increasingly shaped by low cost media, which has blurred the boundaries between technology, culture and everyday life for large urban populations. Sundaram argues that this is the context of new ‘pirate modernity’, a grey zone between informality and legal media regimes, visibility and disappearance. A number of essays on non-legal media circulation emerged along with Pirate Modernity, as book chapters.   Sundaram was one of the initiators of Delhi’s Sarai programme, which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: The Public Domain (2001),

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Simon Szreter | St Johns College Cambridge and History and Policy

My publications have focused on a) further supporting the argument made by Peter Solar (Economic History Review 1995) that the Poor Law of 1601 (a parish-based precocious social security system) was a more important contributor to England’s early economic development than has been realised b) arguing that the equally early parish registers played an important role in maintaining the viability of that early welfare system over two centuries, along with a system of accessible justice c) exploring the original motives for the creation of the parish registers in the reign of Henry VIII and d) exploring why this package of institutions appears not to have become established elsewhere among British settlements in North American and the Caribbean. Secondly, I have also been involved in policy-engaged advocacy publications i) pointing out that development policies premised on notions of human rights need to address practical issues of citizen registration if the abstractions of rights are to be turned into practical policies benefitting the poor ii) engaging with the long-standing professional interest of public health in vital registration systems as providing the crucial basis for

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Jaap van der Straaten | CRC4D

Jaap van der Straaten is the founder and chief executive officer of CRC4D, the Civil Registration Centre for Development, The Hague (est. 2010, www.crc4d.com). CRC4D’s work is and has been commissioned especially by UNICEF, UNHCR and Plan International, providing advisory services in the field of civil registration and identity management, with an emphasis on Africa. He led the work of three associates on UNICEF’s A passport to protection. A guide to birth registration programming (2013). A selection of other reports produced for UNICEF, UNHCR and Plan International includes: A report on children lacking birth- and/or citizenship certificates in Montenegro (2011), Fulfilling the rights to identity and social protection in South Sudan, Civil registration support in Cameroon (2012),

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Laura van Waas | Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion

Laura van Waas is a co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness and one of its two Directors. She is also a part-time Assistant Professor in the Department of European and International Law at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. She is one of few people to date who has conducted doctoral research on statelessness and her PhD manuscript, 'Nationality Matters' (published by Intersentia in 2008), is widely used as a reference for understanding international statelessness law by researchers and practitioners all over the world. In more than a decade of working on the issue of statelessness, Laura has carried out a wide array of research and teaching projects, both within academia and for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other actors. She has worked as a consultant for UNHCR's headquarters in Geneva as well as the regional offices for the Middle East and North Africa in Beirut and for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok. She has supervised or conducted studies on statelessness for, among others, Plan International, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Open Society Foundations, the Women's Refugee Commission, t

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Edgar Whitley | Department of Management, LSE

A good introduction to my work on identity policies and its real world impact can be found at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/researchImpact/caseStudies/whi...
As co-chair of the Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group I helped formulate the Identity Assurance Principles that underwrite the new UK Gov.verify Scheme - https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2014/12/04/how-were-embedding-the-...
I have written extensively about the UK identity scheme
Whitley, E. A., and Hosein, G. 2010. Global challenges for identity policies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitley, E. A., Martin, A. K., and Hosein, G. 2014. “From surveillance-by-design to privacy-by-design: Evolving identity policy in the UK,” in Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond K. Boersma, R. van Brakel, C. Fonio, and P. Wagenaar (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 205–219.

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Papers

The role of the health sector in CRVS and the potential of unique individual identifiers for improved mortality statistics

Carla AbouZahr

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Rights and vital statistics

Country health and statistical systems are facing growing pressures to demonstrate results and promote accountability. This has led to an upsurge in health sector interventions to track vital events – notably births and deaths and their causes – in order to understand the dimensions of premature mortality and develop and monitor interventions to avert such deaths. This proactive health sector engagement in CRVS development is characterized by innovative approaches – including the use of electronic and mobile communication methods – to improve the identification, reporting, and registration of births and deaths and causes of death in facilities and at community level. In settings where each individual has a unique identification number from birth, it is possible to significantly enhance the availability and quality of mortality statistics through record linkage across databases. For example, computerized algorithms can be linked to death certificates of reproductive-aged women with maternal identifiers on birth and foetal death certificates, or to compare records between the death registry and hospital discharge databases. This enables more complete identification of maternal and neonatal deaths, reductions in misreporting and more accurate monitoring of maternal and neonatal mortality. It also contributes to improved understanding of the causes and circumstances of deaths. Sharing of individual record data should be promoted as part of public health surveillance but requires a supportive legal and administrative framework, with agreed standards for confidentiality and data security.

Documentation of identity: Implications for Citizenship and Participation

Juliana Vengoechea Barrios

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Rights and vital statistics

Most documentation of identity systems in place today (with a few notable exceptions such as India) document only citizens. Before the advent of widespread identity cards, individuals habitually resident in a country were generally assumed to be citizens, even in the absence of official documentation. The introduction of identity cards, closely linked with requirements to present such cards to obtain services, enter into private contracts such as employment, purchase a property, or leasing, and to exercise rights such as voting, has shifted this assumptions. Individuals without documentation of identity are now often treated as, if not assumed to be, non-citizens. This presents a fundamental human rights issue. In principle, individuals should not be deprived of citizenship without due process of law (generally understood as an individualized, judicial determination of their nationality). In practice, the rapid rollout of requirements for documentation, paired with the inevitable shortcomings of state bureaucracies, means that individuals are being effectively deprived of their citizenship rights. What are the implications for documentation of identity schemes? How must schemes be structured so as to protect individuals’ right to citizenship and to due process?

Documentation of identity: Implications for Citizenship and Participation

Juliana Vengoechea Barrios

Most documentation of identity systems in place today (with a few notable exceptions such as India) document only citizens. Before the advent of widespread identity cards, individuals habitually resident in a country were generally assumed to be citizens, even in the absence of official documentation. The introduction of identity cards, closely linked with requirements to present such cards to obtain public services, enter into private contracts such as employment, purchase of property, or leasing, and to exercise rights such as voting, has shifted this assumption. Individuals without documentation of identity are now often treated as, if not assumed to be, non-citizens. This presents a fundamental human rights issue. In principle, individuals should not be deprived of citizenship without due process of law (generally understood as an individualized, judicial determination of their nationality). In practice, the rapid rollout of requirements for documentation, paired with the inevitable shortcomings of state bureaucracies, means that individuals are being effectively deprived of their citizenship rights. New international soft law recognizes the effective loss of citizenship suffered by individuals who do not obtain documentation of identity. What are the implications for documentation of identity schemes? How must schemes be structured so as to protect individuals’ right to citizenship and to due process?

Addressing Invisibility? Probing India's Aadhaar Card and its Promise of Inclusion.

Jackie Bhabha

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Rights and vital statistics

Universal or unique identification systems are all the range. Over 100 countries world wide use identity cards to short circuit cumbersome identification procedures across a broad range of situations, from rationing food to monitoring terrorist threats. This proliferation includes countries in the global south. From Pakistan to Nigeria, from Afghanistan to South Africa, governments struggling with dramatic social inequality, very significant deficits in civic identification including birth registration, and inefficient/corrupt systems of welfare distribution, are turning to forms of universal and unique identification as a potential solution. India, the world's largest democracy and home to its most numerous population of people living below $1.25 a day, is no exception. The Aadhaar Card, an identifier based on biometric information and therefore unique to each individual, was introduced by the Indian Government in 2009. Enrollment in Aadhaar has been brisk and is expected to reach one billion people by the end of this year. Two key promises lay at the heart of this highly funded and politically visible initiative. One was that Aadhaar would reach hitherto invisible or unreached populations and enable them to access welfare and other benefits to which they were entitled. The second was that the card would promote benefit "portability" - ensuring that the millions of migrant workers moving east to west or south to north would not lose out on their entitlements because of documentary deficits. Have these promises of inclusion been met? My paper will probe this issue and review the evidence so far available relating to it. In the process it will also raise broader questions about the concerns associated with the spread of universal identification systems.

How can a comprehensive population register contribute to civil registration and the lives of individuals?

Helge Brunborg, Marianne Henriksen

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Rights and vital statistics

Norway has a long experience with civil registration and vital statistics. Registration of births, deaths and marriages was started by the church almost 300 years ago. A unique personal identification number (PIN) and a central population register (CPR) were established in 1964. The CPR has been an extremely valuable data source for administration, policy making, statistics and research, and has contributed to improving the lives of people living in Norway. A PIN called F number is assigned to all births and new immigrants to Norway who intend to reside for at least 6 months. A special PIN called D number is allocated to non-residents who need a unique identification number. Both numbers consist of eleven digits including date of birth, gender and two control digits. The system will run out of digits in in 2029 (D numbers) and 2014 (F numbers), which makes it necessary to redesign the system. There is also a need to protect better against misuse, which have increased in recent years. There are no biometric data in the CPR and no guarantee that a registered person has been given one identification number only. There are also examples of loaning passports to persons with a similar appearance. This facilitates illegal immigration, which is difficult to detect as long as there are no unique biological markers in the passport register (only in the chip in passport). Currently a temporary D number is often allocated to an asylum seeker by a medical doctor because s/he needs treatment, which often leads to duplicate PINs and errors. It has been suggested that there should be a grading of the basis for identity registration in the revised CPR: (1) Unique identity based on biometric information (such as finger prints or photo, stored outside the CPR), (2) a qualified ID check according to national guidelines, or (3) no satisfactory ID control. This will be useful for users of the Register.

The social life of ID Cards. Ethnography of identification in Côte d’Ivoire

Armando Cutolo

Panel: Technical limits and capacities of biometric and paper-based registration

In 1990, a law required by the Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara imposed to strangers residing in Côte d’Ivoire a new Alien Resident ID Card. This had dramatic implications in a country whose population included 28% classed as “foreigners” (census of 1988). It introduced an unprecedented materialization of nationality in the public space of a country where any ECOWAS citizen could until then reside freely, and where immigration from the northern territories and bordering countries had produced a multitude of so-called “allochthones” in the south. From that moment on, through the rise of the “ivoirité” ideology and by the programs of identification and registration launched under Gbagbo’s governments, ID Cards have played a central role in social life and politics, finding finally themselves at the heart of the Ivorian “guerre pour les papiers”. The paper will be based on an ethnographIc approach to “the social life of documents”. Police roadblocks, public administrative procedures, voters registration and the popular practice of producing documents “from below”, will be observed as contexts of interaction and symbolic transaction, where ID Cards and other “papiers” have a performative value. I will focus on concepts of “identity”, “person” and “personhood”, showing the singularity of their mutual relations and combinations in different political and historical Ivorian contexts. The ambivalent character of ID cards and documents will thus be brought to light: constituent parts of an apparatus of control and exclusion on the one side, symbols and instruments of citizenship and emancipation on the other.

The Role of Identification in the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Mariana Dahan, Alan Gelb

The post-2015 development agenda is being shaped as we speak. The role of identification and its importance to development outcomes places it within the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda—specifically as one of the proposed SDG targets (#16.9), but also as a key enabler of the efficacy of many other SDG targets. Although there is no one model for providing legal identity, this SDG would urge states to ensure that all have free or low-cost access to widely accepted, robust identity credentials. Regardless the modalities to achieve it, the recognition of legal identity – together with its associated rights – is becoming a priority for governments around the world. Political will is central, and the SDGs – unwieldy as they may seem today – provide a useful reference point for accountability. But new approaches expand the horizon of what is possible, and should serve as a stimulus to development ambition. Seizing these opportunities requires strong leadership, a supportive legal framework, mobilization of financial and human resources, and – critically – the trust of each country’s residents. Incentives, technology, foreign assistance and reforms will all be critical in achieving tangible results. Equally important is donor coordination at the global, regional and national levels, to ensure inclusive oversight and concerted global action.

Waste and Failure to Reap Benefits from the Citizen-centric Approach to Identification

Mariana Dahan

Panel: Technical limits and capacities of biometric and paper-based registration

Official ID is fundamental to the enjoyment of a number of basic human rights, as well as more general economic and political rights associated with the basic concept of citizenship. It is no accident that those without robust and well-recognized identification ヨ starting off from the birth certificate but including also ID that enables adults to function fully within a modern nation-state ヨ are invariably the poorest and most marginalized segments of society in the poorer countries of the world. Development agencies today are actively engaging into the global agenda of identification for development that looks into promoting a more holistic view and coherent approach toward integrating existing fragmented systems into a multi-purpose, foundational, unique national ID system. The success of these systems requires a primary focus on user centricity. This paper analyzes experiences from both developed and developing countries with respect to important determinants of a citizen-centric identity systems approach, deduced from functional and foundational ID usability issues, interrelated with factors for user perception as provided by the Technology Acceptance Model. The analysis reveals the need for a stronger consideration of citizensメ perception of what constitutes the advantage of the new ID systems and the provision of tangible benefits addressing a perceivable value.ᅠ

Protecting Identity or Expanding Identification? Exploring the Mixed Implications of Universal Birth Registration in Thailand

Amanda Flaim

Panel: The effects of registration systems on administrative capacity and state architectures

Across the world, the campaign for Universal Birth Registration (UBR) is underway. In the eyes of many human rights and development advocates, universal birth registration is key to preventing statelessness, securing the legal bond of nationality for children of non-citizens, promoting perinatal and vaccination programs, preventing child marriage, and reducing child labor violations. As enthusiasm for UBR grows, the campaign is gaining traction in countries that have maintained longstanding reservations on rights to birth registration. In 2011, Thailand removed its reservation on Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and now guarantees all children born in on Thai soil the right to birth registration. While the move was widely lauded, the implications of the program remain unclear, particularly for groups of minorities whose "rights to belong" as citizens of Thailand remain tenuous at best. This paper draws on evidence from extensive ethnographic and survey research in Thailand to examine how and whether the promotion of UBR is affecting highlanders in the northern borderlands. Results of the study indicate that UBR is likely contributing to changing birthing practices among highland minority women who increasingly give birth in hospitals in order to register their children at birth. Enhanced contact between these women and state health care providers may be enhancing perinatal care, vaccination rates, as well as HIV/AIDS testing and treatment among groups who remain at highest risk in the country for HIV/AIDS and maternal and infant mortality. At the same time, however, findings also indicate that, among children born to non-citizens, those who are not registered at birth may be significantly more likely than those who are registered to eventually acquire citizenship. Rather than securing the bond of nationality, these findings suggest that expanding the technopolitical agenda of UBR in states that do not recognize jus soli citizenship may contribute, not to secure rights and recognition for minorities and marginalized groups, but rather to expanded programs of state surveillance and exclusion of these groups under the law. In other words, in non jus soli states like Thailand, UBR may undermine statelessness prevention campaigns by providing "legitimate evidence" that a child does not belong.

Citizenship in an Age of Increased Need for Authentication of Identities

Alan Gelb, Mia Harbitz

Panel: The implications of revenue models and sustainability for registration systems

For reasons relating to security and to the increasing formalization of economies and societies, proof of legal identity is assuming a more prominent role for accessing rights and benefits in many countries.ᅠ Individuals increasingly need identification to access social programs, to transact in the formal economy, to register SIM cards, to vote, and to travel internationally. In response to such needs, countries have been implementing a range of civil identification programs, often using biometric technology.ᅠ The trend will only continue with the further development of e-ID.ᅠᅠ Some programs, notably in Latin America (Peru, Chile, Uruguay) , have a solid foundation in birth- and civil registration.ᅠ Many others are detached from traditional registration programs (Indonesia, India, most voter ID programs); others seek to use the national ID infrastructure to strengthen birth- and civil registration (Pakistan).ᅠ The paper will document the trend towards more extensive ID programs and consider the implications for citizenship, here considered as a bundle of rights and responsibilities.ᅠ While noting the benefits of a consistent approach (now lacking in some countries where different credentials are used to access parts of the bundle (Indonesia)) it will pay attention to the risks, in particular: (i) the privacy of personal data (are ID programs outrunning data protection laws and capacity?), (ii) increased discrimination among citizens due to the costs and difficulties of obtaining legal identification, and (iii) exclusion, in particular the risk of increased statelessness, internally displaced populations, refugees and irregular migrants (dimensions and cases). The paper will suggest approaches to mitigate the risks, as well as the need to ensure that resources are not wasted on a range of transient ID initiatives that fail to build on and strengthen the civil registration process.ᅠ

Citizens, Communities and the Rise of Biometrics in England

Eddy Higgs

Panel: Biometric and civil registration systems as alternatives or complements

Historically the ムcitizenメ, or at least the individual who could claim rights, in England was identified communally. Baptisms, marriages and burials were rites of passage into and out of the local community of the parish faithful, and their registration underpinned the communally recognized rights to property and welfare that went with them. One claimed rights to poor relief by being recognised as belonging to a parish via the concept of a settlement. The right to vote was attached to property, or status, that was also recognised by the community. Only deviants were identified through the body via external marks of shame (brands, tattoos, mutilation) that symbolized an inner, unique soul given over to evil. The 20th century saw the blurring of this distinction, with increasing use of the body and bodily structures to identify all citizens. Biometrics is an extension of this, which does not even identify a unique individual but deals in the probability that two sets of data are the same. What are the political, social and emotional consequences of this effacement of the individual and the community?

Who are you? Issues and processes when determining the identity of a person

Eivind Hoffmann

Panel: Biometric and civil registration and the national security imperative

The context for this note is that an individual (I) presents herself/himself to a case officer responsible for registering individuals who are to be granted certain rights and/or to be subject to certain responsibilities. A typical example is that I is applying for a visitor’s visa or a residence permit in a foreign country, Another is that I presents claims to certain benefits or is considered for carrying out certain duties. In such situations the case officer has to decide whether the conditions for granting the rights or imposing the obligations are satisfied for this particular I. To do this s/he also has to consider whether s/he has identified the correct I for the rights or obligations, on the basis of the available evidence of identity (EiO). For that task narrowly considered the ideal situation would be if all newborns came equipped with a unique as well as easily observed and understood mark, e.g. in their forehead. As that situation is neither realistic nor, for many reasons, desirable the case officer will have to consider the EiO presented, using the available technical equipment and guidelines as well as her/his training. A basic issue, that is seldom discussed, is which identity the case officer should establish for I: e.g. whether I is Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens. Most relevant legislation and guidelines seem to ignore that many of the characteristics used to establish an identity for I may have been changed over time for perfectly acceptable reasons: both some of the biometric characteristics and the ‘social’ characteristics. However, the rest of this note will also assume that there is only one identity for I that (potentially) is to be established or verified.

The Regulation of identification: Where to Globally From Here?

Jonathan Klaaren

Panel: The limits and capacities of privatised registration, privacy law and regulation

The global regime regulating registration and identification policy and practice is currently rapidly changing, under several sources of influence. This paper addresses the effects of registration systems on administrative capacity and state architectures and explores the limits and capacities of privatised registration, privacy law and regulation within South African and transnational contexts. The South African regime is significant as a complex of laws of registration, identity, citizenship and migration have historically been influential throughout Southern Africa and the world. Recent South African developments have pushed its regimes in directions simultaneously of transparency, secrecy, and privacy. It is likely that a domestic information regulator will begin to operate in South Africa in 2015, implementing already enacted legislation. The South African case demonstrates that developments in the transnational regulation of privacy are likely to be influential in the regulation of identification and registration. Indeed, close and instructive parallels that could be drawn between the differing regulatory regimes for the protection of privacy and those regarding registration and identity promotion and protection. The ‘older (often pen- and paper-based) state systems for establishing and recording civil registration events: births, deaths, marriages, divorces especially’ may be likened to privacy policy tools of legal instruments and regulatory agencies. The ‘newer computerised registration systems, the increasing use of advanced biometrics, and sometimes a connection to firms providing financial services’ may be likened to the privacy policy tool of self-regulation. A third set of privacy policy tools -- regulation by technology – building “privacy rules into the machinery and protocols of the communication flows dealing with personal data” – might be associated with either the ‘older’ or the ‘newer’ civil registration and identity systems.

Birth registration and children’s rights: a complex story

Mary Lagaay

This paper will highlight some of the key findings from Plan International’s exploratory research ‘Birth registration and children’s rights: a complex story.’ Whilst birth registration is a stand-alone right under the UNCRC, it has also been linked to an array of other rights and benefits, such as securing a child’s access to essential services. However, there is a lack of available empirical research exploring the effects of birth registration and how it benefits children in practice. This led Plan International to commission a study to investigate the benefits of birth registration for the individual and for the state. The research utilised qualitative and quantitative methods and focused on India, Kenya, Vietnam and Sierra Leone as case studies. The findings provide a detailed and complex picture of the relationship between birth registration and children’s rights, in particular with regards to legal identity, access to services, child protection and governance. Within this paper, we will focus on the connection between birth registration and legal identity. Whilst this was found to be an important relationship, the research raises some key questions with regards to the potential exclusion of marginalised groups. These will be further explored alongside the importance of placing birth registration within a broader CRVS context.

Biometric identification and the right to a nationality in Africa: Three case studies

Bronwen Manby

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Statelessness

There is a major push to improve both civil registration and “identity chain management” in many African countries, driven by concerns both to improve delivery of public services and to ensure national security in the face of terrorist threats. Countries that have not previously had them are introducing identity card systems, and existing systems are being converted to biometric technology. The introduction of new national identity systems is a notorious point for the creation – or uncovering – of stateless populations. At the same time, there is increasing advocacy for and recognition of the documentation of legal identity – of which nationality is one component – as foundational for other rights. Yet question of defining who is a national is rarely even discussed, still less seen as problematic, in the presentations about legal identity and the infrastructure to ensure documentation. Nor are there effective systems for appeal on the determination by untrained junior staff of whether someone is a national under existing law (however flawed). This paper presents three case studies — from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Mauritania — to illustrate the problems in practice. The introduction of new “foundational” national identification systems for adults, without first addressing the legal framework for nationality, risks making the problem of lack of legal identity worse rather than better. Indeed, it risks creating stateless persons where previously there were only undocumented ones. This part of the legal framework needs as much attention as the data protection and other privacy concerns.

Keywords: civil_registration, identity_cards, biometric identification, Africa, nationality, citizenship, statelessness, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Nigeria

A Political Economy Approach to the Big Data Revolution in Development

Laura Mann

Panel: The limits and capacities of privatised registration, privacy law and regulation

In recent years, a number of international organizations have promoted a ‘Data for Development” (D4D) research agenda. Initiatives such as the UN’s Global Pulse and Orange’s ‘D4D’ Challenge have posited that data scientists can use ‘big data’ (i.e. high volume, digital-born data) to solve ‘developmental challenges’. The ‘Development’ in D4D has been understood primarily as humanitarian development, with the poor characterized as users of developmental solutions or social services. Criticism has focused on the privacy implications. Likewise, D4D business models tend to involve risks and public goods for the poor but business opportunities for companies. There has been little (if any) discussion about the commercial opportunities for African producers, nor the potential for this data to be used for the purposes of industrial policy and economic transformation. The aim of this paper is to urge more explicitly political economy thinking within the growing field of ‘Data for Development’. It has three aims: first, to describe current trajectories within the D4D field for those unfamiliar with the terrain, second, to offer an alternative view of D4D that takes account of the possibilities of economic transformation and third, to use the case of Rwanda to highlight the importance of looking at power and political context when assessing big data’s developmental potential.

Making Democracy Legible? The Politics of Voter Registration and the Permanent Electronic Electoral List (LEPI) in Benin

Giulia Piccolino

Panel: The effects of registration systems on administrative capacity and state architectures

The capacity to make its population ‘legible’, through the development of accurate registration and identification mechanisms, is a core component of the infrastructural power of the modern state. In discussing the relationship between democratization and statebuilding, the electoral process as a technical process has received little attention. Yet, the introduction of competitive elections presupposes the registration of voters and thus requires the development of the ‘legibility’ capacities of states. This is particularly evident in Sub-Saharan Africa, where democratizing states have been confronted to the weakness of their existing records and forced to develop new mechanisms for registering voters in a reliable manner. This article looks at the experience of the Liste Electorale Permanente Informatisée in Benin, discussing the potentialities and limits of voter registration as a statebuilding tool.

Verification and Legibility in Somaliland's National Identity Card Scheme

Anna Rader

Panel: The social and political effects of civil registration and identification systems on human agency: Statelessness

In early Autumn 2014, twenty-three years after a council of elders and soldiers had declared independence in the wake of a bitter and bloody civil war, the unrecognised state of Somaliland began an ambitious programme to register and document all adults over the age of fifteen. Termed 'civil registration', this was in fact a programme to produce national ID cards using biometric identifiers. Although the registration began almost on time, the Ministry of Interior has faced criticism for insisting on the priority of the national ID card over the biometric ID card being produced by the National Electoral Commission for the June 2015 parliamentary and presidential elections. Opposition parties, civil society and international observers have added to this debate over sequencing by expressing concern that voter registration will be seriously delayed, impeding the holding of timely elections. Obscured by these election concerns is the politicisation of institutionalised identification in Somaliland, in which the authority to make legible Somaliland's citizens is claimed by different agents, including clan leaders. In this paper, I explore the rationale for the national identity card, placing it within the narratives of statehood, nationhood and capacity that have been variously used to justify and explain the project. I argue that the ID carries a burden of state-making, which has brought the government into tension with the international community and the opposition parties over the relative importance of civil and voter registration, leading to overt nationalistic policies when it came to the development and implementation of the card. I further consider how the scheme works in concert with ‘traditional identification’, and draw some conclusions about the success, or rather ambiguity, of this hybridity.

Making Democratic Citizenship in the World’s Largest Democracy: The Preparation of India’s First Electoral Roll on the Basis of Universal Adult Franchise

Ornit Shani

Panel: The effects of registration systems on administrative capacity and state architectures

This paper investigates the process of devising the instructions for the preparation of India’s preliminary draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise. It suggests that in effect, this process became an all India administrative exercise in guided democratic political imagination, which imbibed the notion of universal franchise within the administrative machinery around the country. This exercise, I argue, resulted in instituting and operationalizing the procedural aspect of the idea of equality. It also set in motion the creation of a new national polity for India. By contrasting this process with colonial discourses on franchise and preparation of electoral rolls, focusing particularly on the enrolment of women and the attitudes towards other groups at the margins of the franchise the paper explores key changes in the bureaucratic political imagination in the transition from colonial rule to independence.

The ecology of Aadhaar: Biometrics, Paper ecologies and governance

Ravi Sundaram

Panel: Technical limits and capacities of biometric and paper-based registration

The last decade has have seen the rolling out of massive informational infrastructures in India that have little parallel in any postcolonial society. Biometric identification, GIS mapping, transportation databases, city-wide CCTV cameras are among the many initiatives underway. The ‘informational turn’ poses a cluster of new questions for research on postcolonial media infrastructures. The informational turn has mobilized regime modernizers, corporate reformers and social movements. Transparency discourses are significant, as technologies of visibility seek to reassemble undocumented populations into enumerated biometric databases. We are witnessing a major attempt to transform the existing technologies of managing urban populations since 1947. New information infrastructures attempt to rearrange the relationship between urban governance and traditional politics, seen as expressive of a corrupt and opaque urban system. I look at the vast ecology of the biometric Aadhaar project, while linking it to earlier histories of paper-based enumeration.

The Economics of Civil Identity Management: The Case of Africa

Jaap van der Straaten

Panel: The implications of revenue models and sustainability for registration systems

After half a century of stagnation, civil registration in Africa has shown hesitant signs of progress. Yet, there are still countries where registration rates have retrogressed, which is uncommon in any other part of the world. Birth registration, still, covers less than one in two births. At the same time hi-tech national ID systems are launched and elections are conducted using sophisticated identification technology and ICT at considerable cost. The モAfrican wayヤ of budgeting for and sequencing of the development of civil registration and identification systems in Africa is unorthodox. Industrialized countries have followed a quite different roadmap to reach nearly complete coverage levels and high degrees of reliability, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their civil identity systems. This departure of the orthodoxy of developing the civil identity management infrastructure is raising several questions, addressed in the other articles in this issue. While touching on these questions, this paper is, rather, focused on the economic aspect: is the モother pathwayヤ economically sound from a countryメs (rather than from a providerメs, or any other micro- economic) point of view? Which way is in the common interest, which way is モgood governanceヤ of an institution central to モgood governanceヤ and economic growth? In order to answer the question central to this paper the national identity management orthodoxy is discussed, as well as the status of and developments in civil registration, the use of national IDs and voter registration, and how these are related functionally and organizationally. Estimates of the costs of civil registration, national ID systems and voter registration are presented. The savings possible from civil identity management orthodoxy are estimated to well exceed the amount The World Bank and World Health Organization have estimated that the fixing of civil registration worldwide would cost.

Multiplicity and legibility: Questioning uniqueness in identity infrastructures

Edgar Whitley

Panel: Technical limits and capacities of biometric and paper-based registration

The design of many identity infrastructures is based on a reified notion of a unique identity. Identity schemes such as the Indian Aadhaar scheme use biometrics to uniquely identify residents, while other civil registration systems draw on official records (birth, marriage, death certificates) to achieve this same goal. Uniqueness is presented a policy objective that removes the risk of fraud and misallocation of resources. Unique identifiers, however, can also raise significant social welfare issues including privacy risks. A unique identity can be particularly problematic for individuals in witness relocation programmes, those affected by abuse who have a new identity to ensure their safety and transgendered individuals. The UK Gov.verify service is a high profile identity infrastructure that is explicitly not based around uniqueness. Instead, it is explicitly designed to be privacy enabling and is based on multiplicity: citizens can have multiple verified identities managed by multiple accredited identity providers. This paper uses this UK scheme to question the assumptions and consequences of uniqueness as a lead policy driver for identity infrastructures.

Panels