The 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked a watershed moment in the geopolitics of the digital age. By adopting the BRICS Data Economy Governance Understanding, member nations moved beyond broad declarations to outline a concrete framework for data governance. This initiative is a direct response to a critical challenge for the Global South: navigating a digital world dominated by competing governance models that often fail to serve the unique needs of developing countries. The “Understanding” charts a third path, one that seeks to balance the crucial principles of national data sovereignty with the economic necessity of cross-border data flows. The summit represents the first concrete step toward operationalizing cooperation in this domain, while previous BRICS declarations had only alluded to it in broad terms. This is not merely a new policy proposal; it is the foundational blueprint for an alternative global digital order, architected by and for the emerging economies.

The Fractured Global Digital Order: Beyond the Existing Models

For decades, the global discourse on data governance has been shaped by two primary frameworks: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR). The institutional competition between these two regimes reflects structural tensions of data sovereignty and economic interests, indicating the geopoliticization of global data governance. The GDPR represents a top-down, rights-based model that prioritizes individual privacy, while the CBPR offers a more voluntary, business-friendly approach designed to facilitate trade.

However, neither of these frameworks fully responds to the needs of developing countries. The high compliance costs of GDPR can act as a significant barrier to trade for small and medium-sized enterprises in developing nations, while the flexibility of CBPR has been criticized for offering weaker enforcement and less comprehensive protection for individuals’ data rights. This has fueled a growing narrative around “data colonialism,” where the extraction and processing of data by foreign entities can reinforce economic dependency and widen the digital divide. As developing countries are determined to avoid or revert “data colonialism” and contribute their own voices to global order setting rather than following the steps of major powers, it is essential to establish an inclusive, equitable data governance system. The BRICS initiative is a direct response to this imperative.

Architecting a Third Way: The BRICS Vision for a Fair Data Economy

The BRICS Data Economy Governance Understanding is built on a pragmatic recognition of the current landscape. Presently, BRICS countries’ domestic law tends to draw on the framework of GDPR, more strictly regulating the access and process of data in order to protect individuals’ rights and data sovereignty. Along with this tight management, the existing regulatory framework among BRICS+ countries is also fragmented, making the exchange of digital goods quite difficult. The new “Understanding” signals a strategic shift toward greater openness, designed to facilitate the Global South’s deeper integration into the digital economy. It masterfully outlines a framework to resolve the central paradox of the modern digital economy: how to facilitate the cross-border data flows essential for economic growth while simultaneously respecting and preserving national data sovereignty.

To achieve this, the framework is built on three interdependent operational pillars:

• Interoperability: This principle targets the prevention of technological fragmentation and data silos. The goal is to facilitate the compatibility of technical standards and regulatory policies across member states, allowing disparate systems and platforms to communicate and collaborate without creating transnational barriers.
• Portability: This pillar focuses on the practical mechanics of data movement. It seeks to guarantee secure, efficient, and reliable cross-border data transfers, empowering both developers and end-users to move their data between services and across jurisdictions within the BRICS ecosystem without facing undue restrictions or vendor lock-in.
• Standardization: Serving as the bedrock for the other two pillars, standardization involves the cooperative development of unified or compatible technical standards. This includes common formats for data and metadata, shared definitions and classifications, and harmonized application programming interfaces (APIs). Such standards are essential for enabling different systems to interpret shared data accurately and reliably.

From Principles to Practice: The Path Forward

The success of this ambitious vision hinges on overcoming significant challenges, most notably the existing regulatory divergence among member states and disparities in digital infrastructure. The framework wisely proposes a flexible and incremental approach to implementation. Rather than a rigid, top-down bureaucracy, it calls for an annual BRICS Data Economy Session and the use of time-limited, issue-specific task forces to address specific challenges through targeted, expert-led initiatives.

Furthermore, the strategy of using targeted bilateral frameworks as test cases is already taking shape. A recent Memorandum of Understanding between India and Brazil to deepen cooperation in Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a prime example. This agreement, which focuses on sharing scalable, people-centric digital solutions like India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Aadhaar identity system, explicitly reinforces and gives practical shape to the BRICS Digital Economy Framework. This collaboration does not require Brazil to abandon its own legal framework; rather, it creates a pathway for two sovereign digital systems to interoperate, serving as a powerful test case for the entire bloc.⁴

While the Understanding outlines what must be achieved, the concurrent rise of open-source AI provides the crucial answer to how. A digital ecosystem built on proprietary, closed-source technology would inherently contradict the BRICS vision by forcing member nations into technological dependency. An open-source ecosystem, by contrast, offers the perfect technical substrate for the BRICS political project. It allows for the collective development of common standards (Standardization), provides a shared language for different systems to communicate (Interoperability), and empowers developers to build applications that function across this federated network (Portability).

Conclusion: A New Era of Collective Digital Advancement

The BRICS Data Economy Governance Understanding marks a pivotal step toward reconciling data sovereignty with cross-border flows. Its success will depend on the bloc’s ability to navigate its internal complexities and translate its shared principles into practical, interoperable systems. By prioritizing a flexible, collaborative approach and coupling governance with digital infrastructure development, BRICS+ can transform its vast demographic and data potential into collective leverage. The framework is more than a roadmap; it is a foundational step toward ensuring the Global South shapes, rather than merely adapts to, the rules of the digital era, enlarging its voice and ensuring the benefits of the data economy are distributed more equitably among developing countries.