“Whose Voice Counts? The Politics of AI Governance” Presented at the King’s College London Digital Conference

The working paper “Whose Voice Counts? The Politics of AI Governance”, co-authored by Dr Eun Sun Godwin (University of Wolverhampton), Dr Jennifer Castañeda-Navarrete (Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy) and Zoi Roupakia, founder of Noetic AI and Policy Affiliate at Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy, was presented at the Digital Conference organised by King’s College London.

The paper examines AI governance as a space of digital politics in which power relations shape participation, representation and authority. As governments and international organisations increasingly turn their attention to artificial intelligence, questions of inclusion and exclusion are becoming central to how technological futures are imagined and governed.

While national AI strategies often emphasise the adoption and diffusion of AI technologies, considerably less attention has been paid to the political processes through which decisions about the development and deployment of these systems are made. The paper addresses two central questions: whose voices are missing, and how can they be heard?

Building on previous research (Roupakia & Castañeda-Navarrete, 2025), the study reviews AI strategies and legislation in South Korea, the United Kingdom and the European Union. It examines not only the actors involved in policymaking, but also the forms of evidence, data and narratives that underpin AI governance.

Using critical discourse analysis and the Pathways Approach (Leach et al., 2010), the paper explores how policymaking processes can function as mechanisms of political inclusion and exclusion: which voices and forms of knowledge are legitimised, which are marginalised, and what these asymmetries mean for democratic digital governance.

The analysis also considers alternative policy narratives that challenge dominant techno-economic framings of AI by foregrounding three questions:

• Who and what is AI for?

• What forms of social transformation and inequality accompany its deployment?

• What governance mechanisms are needed to anticipate harms and create more democratic and inclusive digital futures?

For Noetic AI, these questions sit at the centre of contemporary debates on AI governance. As AI policy moves beyond technical questions towards issues of infrastructure, institutions and standards, understanding who participates in shaping these systems becomes essential.

The Digital Conference, organised by King’s College London, brought together researchers exploring critical approaches to digital technologies and their social, political and economic implications.