Towards a Transdisciplinary Governance of Artificial Intelligence in Africa

Abstract

The governance of artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa faces competing pressures from demands for regulatory intervention alongside concerns about institutional capacity, innovation costs, and economic vulnerability. Debates surrounding algorithmic discrimination, biometric surveillance, and extractive data practices by global platforms have sharpened questions about the appropriate roles of states, markets, and civil society in governing AI systems. Yet existing governance scholarship tends to address these questions through either ethical principles or state-centric regulatory frameworks, leaving a significant analytical gap where law and technical design intersect. This article introduces legal-technical governance as an analytical framework for examining Africa’s emerging AI regulatory landscape. Distinguishing governance from regulation, the article argues that AI governance in Africa is already distributed across data protection statutes, fintech guidelines, cybersecurity frameworks, and content moderation policies imposed by global platforms, making a broader, systems-level analytical tool both necessary and timely. Legal-technical governance foregrounds the co-constitutive relationship between legal norms and technical operations, including data labelling, model training, and algorithmic auditing. It accounts for the various actors shaping AI outcomes, from multinational technology firms to standards bodies and affected communities. To examine the gaps where legal frameworks and technical systems diverge, the article draws on Dooyeweerd's modal aspects as a philosophical lens. Applied to African AI governance domains, this framework reveals how institutional fragmentation, infrastructural dependency, and global platform dominance undermine state-centred regulatory models. The article concludes by advancing legal-technical governance as a productive framework for scholarship and policymaking at the intersection of law, technology, and development in Africa.