The last piece looked at how state DMVs, wallet providers, TSA, GSA, and NIST are each building their own piece of digital ID, on their own timeline, without one office responsible for making the pieces work together. That’s a real pattern, and it’s worth having actual vocabulary for it, not just a description.
Two lenses for the same problem
Systems thinking is one way to read what’s happening: look at the parts, look at how they connect, and pay attention to where the connections are thin. It’s useful because it doesn’t require picking a villain. State DMVs, TSA, GSA, and NIST are each doing their own job well enough. The gap is in what links them, not in any one piece failing.
Polycentric governance is a narrower, more specific version of the same idea. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom used the term to describe systems built from multiple independent authorities that don’t report to a single boss. Her original definition, from a 1961 paper with Vincent Ostrom and Robert Warren: many centers of decision-making, formally independent of each other, where whether they add up to a working system or to chaos is an open question rather than something built in from the start.
That’s a fair description of state DMVs, TSA, GSA, and NIST: four independent authorities, each with real power in its own lane, none accountable to the others.
The second framework sharpens the first. Systems thinking says: look for the gaps. Polycentric governance says: here’s specifically what to check for inside those gaps. Ostrom’s research on which multi-authority systems actually function found three recurring ingredients: a shared set of overarching rules everyone operates under, some way for the independent parties to monitor and adjust to each other, and a low-cost way to resolve disagreements when two of them conflict.
Systems missing one of these tend to drift instead of coordinate.
What this adds to the digital public infrastructure (DPI) picture
Line this up against the digital public infrastructure gap from the last piece. DPI frameworks call for publicly accountable governance holding the whole system together, and that’s the piece the US digital ID rollout doesn’t have yet. Polycentric governance describes what “accountable” would actually require in practice: a shared rulebook, a way for state DMVs, TSA, GSA, and NIST to adjust to each other’s timelines, and a mechanism for resolving the kind of conflict that leaves a Delaware resident with an ID that works at the DMV but not at the airport.
That reframes what the fix could look like. Ostrom’s research suggests decentralized systems can work well under the right conditions, without a single agency running everything. US card payment networks are one example: independent banks and merchants operate under a shared rulebook set by Visa, Mastercard, and EMVCo, and the system holds together without one company owning every piece. Digital ID doesn’t have that layer yet. Ostrom’s three conditions give a way to check for it, piece by piece, instead of just naming the problem.
What comes next
Both frameworks point at the same missing piece: the rules, monitoring, and conflict resolution that would let independent authorities function as one system instead of four separate ones. The next piece walks through the same gaps in AI governance.
Nicole
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