Recommendations for working with nine underhyped frontier technologies
This is part of our deep dive into nine underhyped frontier technologies for international development. Check out the full, interactive webpage here.
What is this?
This guide offers five strategic and practical recommendations to help policymakers, funders, and technology implementers identify, support, and integrate our underhyped frontier technologies.
It provides:
A long-term perspective for governance, economic models, and legal frameworks that safeguard technological sovereignty and prevent monopolisation.
Concrete actions to ensure ethical adoption, security, and community empowerment, ensuring that emerging technologies do not reinforce extractivist or exploitative models.
Guidance on participatory and regenerative technology design, ensuring that innovation is led by those who use it and remains embedded in local knowledge systems.
Who is it for?
These recommendations are intended for:
Policymakers and regulators – To create adaptive, community-centred policies and regulatory frameworks that ensure fair access and effective governance of the underhyped technologies.
Funders and investors – To prioritise financing mechanisms that promote long-term, sustainable, equitable impact of the underhyped technologies
Technology implementers and practitioners – To develop approaches that integrate underhyped technologies in ways that foster local autonomy, long-term resilience, and regenerative impact.
Recommendation 1: Strengthen Data Autonomy, Security, and Ethical Information Systems
Data is not neutral. Whoever collects, owns, and governs data defines who has power over knowledge, information flows, and ultimately decision-making. Some of our underhyped technologies depend on data collection. However, if not governed properly, these technologies can reinforce inequalities rather than address them.
This recommendation calls for a paradigm shift: from data extractivism to data as a common good.
This means ensuring that communities control the data they generate—deciding how it is used, who has access, and for what purposes. Ethical and secure information systems should not only prevent harm (such as data exploitation or surveillance), but also create benefits (such as supporting climate adaptation, Indigenous land rights, and local decision-making).
🏞 The recommendation in action: In Western Australia, the Yawuru people developed their own data systems to secure control over their social, economic, and environmental information. Following the recognition of their native title, they established a community-led survey, a cultural mapping project, and a digital data repository to protect and govern their knowledge. This initiative ensured that decision-making over Yawuru well-being (mabu liyan) remained in the hands of the community, preventing external agencies from controlling or misusing their data. More information.
Why It Matters
From data extraction to data sovereignty → Historically, data-driven systems have been designed for profit rather than for resilience. In many cases, communities are "data-rich but power-poor"—producing valuable environmental and social data, yet lacking decision-making authority over it.
Avoiding a new digital divide → As our underhyped technologies gain traction, a new risk emerges: the monopolisation of knowledge. If data governance remains centralised in corporations or institutions, these technologies may deepen inequality rather than transform it.
Building trust for adoption → Many communities reject new technologies due to concerns over privacy, surveillance, and control. Without transparent and participatory data governance, the adoption of our underhyped technologies will face significant barriers.
Potential Actions
1. Establish Community-Led Data Frameworks
Communities should not only generate data but should also be able to establish clear, self-governed protocols on how it is accessed, stored, and shared. This requires developing locally managed data trusts, commons-based governance models, and cooperative decision-making frameworks to ensure that data remains a tool for collective well-being rather than corporate or institutional control.
2. Prioritise Data for Collective Well-Being, Not Commercial Exploitation
Data collection should directly contribute to community resilience, environmental protection, and social justice—not be extracted for profit. Governments, funders, and technology implementers should enforce policies that prohibit data commodification and instead ensure that information generated through our underhyped technologies supports climate adaptation, Indigenous land rights, sustainable agriculture, and public health.
3. Secure Decentralised Data Storage
Technological infrastructures must be designed to prevent reliance on corporate-controlled servers or centralised institutions. This requires investing in decentralised, offline-first storage solutions, local data hubs, and encrypted community networks that ensure data sovereignty and long-term accessibility to those who generate it.
4. Promote Open and Participatory Data Platforms
Our underhyped technologies should integrate open-source, community-controlled platforms that facilitate collective decision-making over data governance. This includes developing user-friendly tools that allow local groups to visualise, analyse, and apply data in ways that strengthen their sovereignty over climate resilience, local economies, and environmental stewardship.
5. Implement Cybersecurity-First Approaches
Security must be embedded into all data governance strategies to prevent surveillance, manipulation, and misuse by external actors. This means ensuring that sensor networks, AI models, and monitoring platforms follow robust encryption standards, transparent algorithmic processes, and ethical cybersecurity protocols that prioritise community safety and autonomy.
Applying this recommendation to the underhyped technologies
🛰️ Sensor Networks for Biodiversity
This is a technology that heavily relies on constant data collection, storage, and processing. Although not necessarily tied with personal identifiable information for communities, the collected data provides an overview of available resources and assets in an area, so these networks must ensure that data ownership remains with local actors, preventing external appropriation or misuse in conservation efforts.
💧 Water Management Networks
Ensuring community oversight of water cycles and control over hydrological data is critical to preventing the privatisation of water resources and strengthening collective water sovereignty. Misuse of this data can lead to the hijacking of a critical community resource.
🌡️ Artificial Biosensors
Data governance models must prioritise transparency to ensure that findings are used for well-being and ecological restoration within a community rather than commercial exploitation.
Recommendation 2. Build Community-Centred Business Models
Business models around the underhyped technologies should not only seek profitability. We believe they must enable localised control of technological infrastructures and ensure that our underhyped technologies do not perpetuate extractivist or exploitative market dynamics.
This recommendation calls for a paradigm shift: from external economic dependency to self-sufficient, community-driven prosperity.
Instead of reinforcing centralised economic systems that prioritise profit over well-being, our underhyped technologies can be used to build circular economies, cooperatively owned energy infrastructures, and localised manufacturing systems that foster resilience rather than extraction.
🏞 The recommendation in action: As public trust in big tech companies declines due to monopolistic practices and exploitative data policies, cooperatively owned technology enterprises offer a compelling alternative. In Germany, Datev—a cooperative founded by accountants in the 1960s—has grown into one of the country’s largest IT firms, demonstrating that collective ownership can drive innovation at scale. Unlike investor-owned tech giants, Datev reinvests its profits into member services, ensuring that technology development aligns with the needs of its cooperative community rather than external shareholders. More information.
Why It Matters
Push back against private interests → Many technological innovations, especially in renewable energy and infrastructure, risk becoming proprietary and being absorbed by corporate monopolies, shifting benefits away from communities.
Aligns business models with ecological regeneration → Conventional economic models prioritise short-term profit over long-term ecological and communal well-being. A nature-inclusive and community based approach ensures that economic activities protect, restore and improve natural systems and communities, rather than depleting them.
Potential Actions
1. Establish Locally Governed Cooperatives for Energy & Tech Systems
Communities should own and manage the infrastructure of underhyped technologies to retain economic benefits locally. Local cooperatives should be established to manage renewable energy systems, bioenergy production, and environmental monitoring technologies, ensuring shared decision-making and a focus on community priorities.
2. Strengthen Regional Trade Agreements & Alternative Financial Networks
Instead of relying on global supply chains and external investment, communities can develop cross-regional trade agreements and financial alliances to exchange knowledge, materials, and resources for underhyped technologies. This fosters financial resilience and prevents price manipulation by external markets.
3. Develop Fair Trade Procurement Models
Technologies such as bioenergy systems, IoT-based water management, and renewable energy components should prioritise local manufacturing, fair wages, and ethical supply chains. This prevents dependency on exploitative global markets and strengthens regional production ecosystems.
4. Secure Alternative Funding Streams to Avoid External Dependence
Many underhyped technologies struggle to scale due to a lack of investment outside conventional market logic. Public institutions, social enterprises, and cooperatives should prioritise community-based financing models, including public funding, cooperative finance, impact investment, and community-backed revolving funds.
5. Promote Circular & Localised Business Models
Shift from linear, extractive economies to circular and regenerative models by supporting waste-to-energy systems, local tech manufacturing, and repairability. Ensure legal and financial structures prioritise local ownership and prevent dependence on global supply chains or corporate monopolies.
Applying this recommendation to the underhyped technologies
🛰️ Sensor Networks for Biodiversity
Where traditional ecological knowledge and technological innovation work together, these networks can support community-led biodiversity/conservation economies. However, they can also be used for extracting key biological compounds from an area, leading to privatisation of natural assets and a quick depletion of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience.
💧 Water Management Networks
Understanding water as a common, interconnected system, not as a commodity. These systems allow communities to manage their water resources, ensuring local control over pricing, access, and distribution, reducing reliance on privatised water systems. Key elements in these networks are distribution and decentralisation, otherwise there’s a risk of having a single point of failure or of control.
🔋 Organic Flow Batteries
Energy autonomy is key to economic sovereignty. These batteries enable community-owned energy storage, allowing local cooperatives to manage and distribute renewable power without dependence on corporate energy providers. The modularity of this technology also allows for scalable and adaptable solutions that can fit within different governance models.
☀️ Thermal Energy Storage
Reducing reliance on centralised power grids, thermal storage supports energy cooperatives that reinvest profits locally. This technology is particularly useful for off-grid communities seeking financial independence from external energy providers and fossil fuel systems. However, some of the materials needed for this technology, if not properly sourced, could lead to damaging externalities in other areas of the world.
💩 Waste-powered Energy
Turning waste into economic opportunity. Cooperative-led bioenergy initiatives generate local jobs, circular economies, and energy independence, reducing costs and reliance on fossil fuels.
🟢 Algal Photobioreactor
Local production of food, fuel, and materials. Algae-based systems provide biofuels, food supplements, and fertilisers, which can be produced and traded within regional networks, reducing economic dependence on industrial supply chains.
Recommendation 3: Develop Self-Managed Governance Structures
The adoption of our underhyped technologies depends not only on technical training but also on knowledge sovereignty. This requires self-determination in governance structures, social capacity-building, knowledge sharing, and open-source technologies that are integrated into local cultural, economic, and ecological systems in ways that respect autonomy, traditions, and relational ways of living.
This recommendation calls for a paradigm shift: from externally imposed technology governance to self-managed, community-driven technological ecosystems.
By investing in education and knowledge-sharing platforms, communities can develop long-term resilience and governance structures that align with their aspirations for autonomy.
🏞 This recommendation in action: In Mexico, the Yaqui community of Vícam uses a digital ecosystem to manage water accessibility in their arid region. By integrating geospatial data, hydrological metrics, and Indigenous governance principles, the platform empowers the community to make informed decisions on water use. Instead of relying on external agencies, the system ensures that water distribution aligns with local priorities and ecological sustainability, reinforcing self-determination. More information.
Why It Matters
Fosters respect of local knowledge & bioregional governance: Conventional governance models often misalign with ecological and cultural territories. Supporting bioregional governance ensures that decision-making is grounded in local, environmental, cultural, and social realities.
Prevents decision-making dependency: Without open governance structures, new technologies risk being monopolised by external decision-making power rather than strengthening community autonomy.
Bridges cultural and political divides: Many communities face barriers to accessing the necessary knowledge for adapting technologies to their contexts. Recognising Indigenous knowledge, relational worldviews, and intersectional perspectives fosters trust and ensures inclusive adoption.
Potential Actions
1. Establish Community-Led Governance Models for Technology Adoption, based on Natural Regions
The adoption of our underhyped technologies should align with bioregional governance models rather than rigid political boundaries rather than imposing state or market-driven governance. By ‘bioregional,’ we refer to geographic areas defined by natural features such as ecosystems, watersheds, landforms, climate zones, and species distributions rather than by political or administrative boundaries. These models should be place-based, decentralised, participatory, and responsive to local social and ecological realities.
2. Strengthen Education and Training for Long-Term Technological Autonomy
Developing long-term governance structures requires building capacity within communities. This means integrating technology education into local schools, apprenticeship programmes, and intergenerational knowledge-sharing initiatives, ensuring that future generations can adapt, repair, and improve these technologies without external dependency.
3. Foster Open-Source Knowledge Platforms & Cross-Community Collaboration
Ensure that knowledge about emergent technologies remains open, transparent, and community-controlled through multilingual, culturally relevant platforms. Support regional and international alliances that enable shared innovation, collaborative governance, and free circulation of research and best practices beyond institutional control.
4. Promote Community-Controlled Infrastructure for Technological Sovereignty
Support self-managed, locally governed technology ecosystems that integrate social, economic, and ecological priorities. This includes local energy cooperatives, community-owned digital networks, and distributed manufacturing hubs, preventing overreliance on external providers.
5. Protect and Expand Community Stewardship over Open-Source Technologies
Open-source technologies must remain open and governed collectively, ensuring that communities, not external corporations or institutions, define how they are used, adapted, and shared. This requires legal safeguards, cooperative licensing models, and community-led protocols to prevent enclosure and ensure continuous adaptation based on local needs.
Applying this recommendation to the underhyped technologies
🛰️ Sensor Networks for Biodiversity
Local governance structures must ensure that data sovereignty remains with those who generate it, preventing biodiversity knowledge from being extracted and commodified.
💧 Integrated Water Management Networks
Water governance must be decentralised, ensuring that local communities—not corporations or centralised governments—control access, distribution, and pricing, ensuring that water remains a shared resource rather than a privatised service.It is also important to beyond seeing water as a resource but embedding this technology with Indigenous knowledge and relational worldviews.
⚡ Harvesting Ambient Energy
Open hardware can lower costs and boost innovation in ambient energy harvesting, due to shared designs and increased collaboration. This collaboration can only happen effectively with adequate training programmes that provide communities with the means to understand, appropriate, and contribute towards open source efforts.
🔋 Organic Flow Batteries
Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, organic flow batteries have the potential to be produced and maintained locally, allowing energy cooperatives to store and distribute power without dependence on corporate suppliers. However, ensuring open-source access to their design and maintenance protocols is essential for long-term community stewardship.
☀️ Thermal Energy Storage
This technology can enhance local energy governance by enabling communities to manage their energy consumption and production, leading to greater energy independence. However, this is a technology that requires highly specialised knowledge and specific resources thus needing adequate training and established cooperation networks.
💩 Waste-powered Energy
Without clear governance structures and knowledge-sharing networks, these technologies risk being absorbed by private utilities or turning waste into a market-driven commodity rather than a locally managed resource.
🌻 Bioremediation
It empowers communities to lead environmental governance, fostering responsibility, sustainability, and green jobs. It is important, though, to not see this technology as a silver bullet that can solve environmental issues, it should be one technology within a bioregional governance framework.
🟢 Algal Photobioreactor
Governance models must ensure that biotech remains open-source and community-controlled, preventing corporate appropriation and market-driven monopolisation of biological resources.This technology requires constant inputs, which may require more efficient collaboration within and outside the community to ensure that the requirements are met for adequate energy production.
🌡️ Artificial Biosensors
Open-source biosensors allow communities to monitor environmental and public health conditions without depending on external institutions. Local governance structures must ensure open access to these technologies and the ability to modify them according to local realities.
Recommendation 4: Ensuring Legal Protection and Ethical Implementation of Technologies
Legal and regulatory systems determine who has access and decision-making power over technology and who is excluded from it. Without appropriate legal frameworks, our underhyped technologies risk being patented, privatised, or enclosed within proprietary systems and walled gardens. This, besides limiting accessibility and decision-making capabilities for the communities that need them most, can lead to unequal power structures that have been commonplace in the implementation of other technologies.
This recommendation calls for a paradigm shift: from technology as private property to technology as a common good.
Open-access models, anti-extractivist patent laws, and decentralised legal tools must ensure that our underhyped technologies remain public goods, safeguarded from monopolisation and market-driven enclosures.
🏞 This recommendation in action: In Barcelona, the DECODE (Decentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem) project has developed a legal and technological framework that allows citizens to control access to and use of their personal data. Instead of relying on large corporations or centralised government structures, DECODE employs open licences, smart rules, and blockchain technology to ensure that citizen-generated data is treated as a common good, respecting privacy and digital sovereignty.
The Barcelona City Council has integrated this approach into municipal platforms, ensuring that urban data is co-governed by the community and safeguarded from commercial exploitation without consent. This model aligns with EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles and promotes a commons-based approach to digitalisation, where open data benefits society rather than being monopolised by private actors. More information.
Why It Matters
Prevents corporate monopoly Over community innovations: Many underhyped technologies risk being privatised and patented by multinational corporations, stripping communities of potential tools for innovation and self-determination.
Legal systems can either protect or extract from communities: Current intellectual property laws prioritise corporate interests over community knowledge, often failing to recognise Indigenous technologies, local innovations, and traditional relationships between Indigeneous peoples and their natural environment.
Ensures open technologies stay open: Open-source tools can only remain accessible if legal frameworks prevent their appropriation, ensuring that future generations can modify, share, and improve them without corporate interference.
Strengthens access to justice & legal empowerment: Many frontier technologies, if designed with justice in mind, can help expand legal protections for marginalised communities, strengthen collective rights, and reduce power imbalances in the digital era.
Shifts from reactive to proactive regulation: Many legal systems respond to technological disruptions only after harm has been done. Instead, adaptive regulatory models should anticipate and proactively shape how new technologies evolve.
Key Actions
1. Establish Legal Frameworks That Recognise Technology as a Commons
Technology should not be enclosed as private property but recognised as a shared resource. Rather than being governed by corporate patents, intellectual property or government control, relevant technologies should be legally recognised as commons—resources that are collectively owned, governed, and maintained by those who use them.
2. Prioritise Open-Access and Community Licensing Models
Legal and financial incentives should prioritise Creative Commons, open-source, and free/libre software licensing to ensure that communities retain control over technological innovation. Funders and policymakers should condition investment on these licensing models, preventing technologies from being locked into proprietary systems that limit adaptation, knowledge circulation, and collective governance.
3. Protect Community Knowledge from Extractivist Patents and Data Appropriation
Establish legal safeguards and collective intellectual property frameworks to prevent corporations from patenting community-led technologies or extracting knowledge from community research labs without consent or due diligence; particularly in biotech, bioenergy, and environmental monitoring, where traditional knowledge and scientific innovation often intersect.
4. Integrate Environmental and Human Rights Protections into Technology Law
Technological development must not come at the cost of territorial sovereignty or ecological integrity. Legal frameworks should ensure that technologies do not contribute to land grabbing, ecosystem destruction, or digital surveillance, reinforcing territorial sovereignty and ecological justice.
5. Promote Participatory Regulation of Emerging Technologies
Technology laws should not be dictated by corporate lobbies or centralised institutions alone. Communities should be directly involved in shaping technology laws, ensuring that regulatory systems anticipate risks and align with collective well-being rather than reacting to crises after harm has occurred.
6. Ensure Ethical and Transparent AI & Digital Systems
AI and digital technologies should be locally controlled, auditable, and accountable to the communities they impact. This includes developing community-led oversight mechanisms for algorithmic governance and ensuring that AI tools used in environmental and social monitoring are not repurposed for surveillance or extractivist industries.
Applying this recommendation to the underhyped technologies
🛰️ Sensor Networks for Biodiversity
These networks must be governed by local communities, ensuring that biodiversity data is used for conservation and land rights—not for financial speculation in biodiversity markets or for knowledge extraction for patenting biological components.
💧 Water Management Networks
Decentralised water monitoring technologies should be legally recognised as tools of the commons to recognise water as a communal and systemic good. Given how essential water is for survival, these networks are particularly vulnerable for corporate privatisation and must be duly protected in an anticipatory manner.
⚡ Harvesting Ambient Energy
This technology needs strong legal frameworks prioritising open-source access to solutions for equitable distribution and fair usage. These frameworks should also address challenges like intellectual property, standardisation, safety, and environmental impact to ensure responsible deployment.
🔋 Organic Flow Batteries
Without strong cooperative ownership models, local energy sovereignty could be undermined by external investors controlling access to storage capacity or external actors using more than a fair-share of the energy that is produced.
☀️ Thermal Energy Storage
Without policies that prioritise community ownership, thermal storage technologies could be restricted by corporate patents or incumbent monopolies, specially as this technology requires adapting daily patterns in the community to better make use of the technology.
💩 Waste-powered Energy
If community-led energy systems lack legal recognition as an energy model, they risk being absorbed by corporate utilities. Likewise, there is a risk that, without proper legal frameworks, the usage of this technology becomes an excuse for biomass animal production that ultimately harms the community where this is deployed.
🌻 Bioremediation
We must legally protect naturally occurring microorganisms and associated processes from being patented. There will be many grey and blurry limits between what is considered a biological asset and what becomes a product under intellectual property rights.
🟢 Algal Photobioreactor
This is a technology that can shift many existing market patterns in development contexts. Without legal protections, biotechnologies like algae-based photobioreactors could be patented and monopolised, limiting access to biofuels and food sovereignty.
🌡️ Artificial Biosensors
Without legal protections, biosensor-generated data could be extracted, monetised, or weaponised without the consent of the producers of that data.
Recommendation 5: Establishing Pluriversal Research and Community Innovation Ecosystems
What It Means
Research and innovation should not be limited to Global North scientific frameworks or extractive research models. Underhyped technologies can only fulfil their potential when they are embedded in diverse knowledge systems, including Indigenous, traditional, and local forms of knowledge production.
This recommendation calls for a paradigm shift: from top-down, expert-led research to pluriversal, community-driven innovation.
Instead of treating communities as passive recipients of external knowledge or as sites where field research is done, this approach recognises them as knowledge producers and technology co-designers. Research must be locally embedded, participatory, and oriented towards strengthening sovereignty over knowledge and resources.
🏞 This Recommendation in Action: In Borneo and Canada, Indigenous communities are leveraging digital tools to preserve and share ancestral knowledge while maintaining control over their technological ecosystems. In Long Lamai, Borneo, the community developed digital archives and virtual platforms to safeguard their linguistic and cultural heritage, ensuring that digital technologies serve their needs rather than external interests. Similarly, in Northern Canada, First Nations communities built KO-KNET, a regional Indigenous-led internet service provider that empowers communities to govern their own digital infrastructure. Both initiatives demonstrate how participatory research and pluriversal knowledge exchange can support technological sovereignty and resilience. More information.
Why It Matters
Strengthens local research capacity: Underhyped technologies should not be developed in distant labs but co-created with the people who will use them, ensuring that knowledge remains in the hands of those who generate it.
Creates jobs and builds skills: Community-driven research spaces ensure long-term capacity-building, community empowerment and sense of belonging, creates meaningful employment opportunities, and builds long-term capacity.
Ensures technologies meet real needs: Participatory assessments ensure that innovation responds to actual community challenges.
Preserves and strengthens traditional knowledge: Technology should support local ways of life rather than disrupting or replacing them. A pluriversal approach values the coexistence of multiple ways of knowing.
Prioritises ecological and social challenges: Research must focus on climate resilience, food sovereignty, ecological restoration, and community well-being, rather than profit-driven technological advancements.
Key Actions
1. Create Community-Driven Innovation & Research Labs
Establish collaborative, locally-led research spaces where communities can experiment, prototype, and adapt underhyped technologies to their specific needs, ensuring long-term scalability and cultural relevance. These labs should be locally governed and co-created with communities and must be free from external impositions.
2. Integrate Youth and Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
Young people should be active research participants, not just recipients of training. Apprenticeship models, mentorship programmes, and intergenerational learning spaces ensure that knowledge flows across generations rather than being centralised in gatekeeping institutions.
3. Conduct Participatory, People-Centred Research Assessments
All research must start with the lived experiences of communities, prioritising local knowledge and relational worldviews. Community-led research methodologies should determine how technologies are adopted, adapted, and scaled. It is always essential to assess who is leading methodologically and what possible biases this could entail.
4. Focus on Regenerative and Decolonial Research Priorities
Technological research must shift from extractivist to regenerative and justice-oriented priorities like water management, climate resilience, agroecology, and ecosystem restoration—challenges that directly impact community wellbeing and planetary health. Research should be non-extractive and reoriented towards decolonial, participatory models that challenge hegemonic notions of progress and expertise.
Applying this recommendation to the underhyped technologies
🛰️ Sensor Networks for Biodiversity
Research must ensure that biodiversity monitoring serves conservation and is supported by local and Indigenous environmental wisdom which is not necessarily as quantifiable as “conventional” scientific methods.
💧 Water Management Networks
Community-led labs can co-develop and adapt these networks, ensuring that technology enhances rather than replaces communitarian and indigenous water management systems.
💩 Waste-powered Energy
Locally governed labs could experiment with paradigm shifts around waste and feces, ensuring that waste-to-energy systems are aligned with cultural sensitivity and community needs.
🌻 Bioremediation
Research spaces should explore locally available bioremediation techniques, integrating traditional ecological knowledge with emerging biotechnologies to restore damaged ecosystems in a culturally appropriate way.
D️ig into this work further
⭐️ Explore the nine technologies on our interactive webpage.
🔮 Explore the scenarios from our foresight phase.