Author: Waqas, Yousaf

Annotation: Digital sovereignty — the capacity of a state and its society to understand, shape and control the digital systems on which they depend — has moved to the centre of development policy. For developing countries, the stakes are acute: dependence on foreign platforms, imported software, external data infrastructure and expatriated talent reproduces, in the digital sphere, the classic structures of economic dependency. This article examines the IT park — the state-sponsored technology zone offering fiscal privileges, infrastructure and regulatory facilitation to software and IT-service firms — as an instrument for building technological independence. Drawing on the technopole literature and on the experience of export-oriented parks from Southeast Asia and China to Belarus and Central Asia, including the rapidly growing IT Park of Uzbekistan, the article develops a three-layer framework of digital sovereignty — skills, infrastructure and market — and assesses what parks can and cannot deliver at each layer. It argues that IT parks are necessary but insufficient: they reliably build the skills layer and can anchor the infrastructure layer, but sovereignty at the market layer requires deliberate design — local linkages, education pipelines, open-source strategies, public procurement and regional cooperation — without which a park risks becoming a comfortable enclave of dependent outsourcing. Design principles for sovereignty-oriented parks are proposed.

Keywords: IT parks, digital sovereignty, technological independence, developing countries, technopoles, software exports, digital economy, Central Asia.

Pages in journal: 138 - 144