  The connection between digital and inequality has traditionally been
understood in terms of the digital divide or of forms of digital inequality
whose core conceptualisation is exclusion. This paper argues that, as the
global South moves into a digital development paradigm of growing breadth and
depth of digital engagement, an exclusion worldview is no longer sufficient.
Drawing from ideas in the development studies literature on chronic poverty,
the paper argues the need for a new concept: "adverse digital incorporation",
meaning inclusion in a digital system that enables a more-advantaged group to
extract disproportionate value from the work or resources of another,
less-advantaged group. This explains why inequality persists - even grows - in
a digital development paradigm. To help ground future research and practice on
this issue, the paper inductively builds a conceptual model of adverse digital
incorporation with three main component sets: the processes, the drivers, and
the causes of adverse digital incorporation. The paper concludes with thoughts
on a future research and practice agenda that seeks to deliver digital justice
in the global South: a necessary reconfiguration of the broader components of
power that currently shape the inclusionary connection between digital and
inequality.
