Legal identity in the sustainable development agenda: actors, perspectives and trends in an emerging field of research

The issue of legal identity has in recent years seen a rapid ascent on the agendas of policymakers. Most significant was its inclusion into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which now aim to ‘provide legal identity for all’ by 2030. A proliferation of registration and identification initiatives has accompanied the implementation of this goal, with little scholarly scrutiny. This article casts legal identity as an emerging site of scholarly human rights research. It maps the legal identity space, including the actors and different perspectives on legal identity, and takes stock of the main developments five years after the adoption of the SDG legal identity target. The article highlights three trends and challenges that have influenced the operationalisation of the legal identity target: firstly, the adoption of birth registration as the only indicator for the target; secondly, the growth of technological solutions to legal identity problems, which increasingly conflate legal identity with digital identity; and finally, the risks associated with identification systems, especially with regards to the SDGs' premise of ‘leaving no one behind’. The conclusion points to a future research agenda for the legal identity space.