Identities in flux: from legal personality to digital identity

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 call for the provision of a “legal identity for all by 2030” in its target 16.9. Under the purview of the SDGs, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, states, large private corporations, and consortia have proposed solutions ranging from increasing birth registration rates, to improving civil registry systems, and developing sophisticated identity management platforms, often based on digital technologies, including biometrics, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology.
This paper brings to light two versions of legal identity circulating in the development literature, which have important implications for the legal identity agenda. First, a substantive version of legal identity discursively constructing registration as necessary for someone’s recognition as a person before the law, heavily reliant on a human rights discourse. Second, a thin conception that emphasises the administrative and formalistic nature of legal identity with a noted preference for technological solutions. This paper demonstrates how these two versions often collide in discourses about legal identity, in turn promoting the conflation of this concept with that of digital identity.