Technology and Diplomacy: The Rise of Multilateralism in the Bay Area

In 2018, Diplo, in cooperation with Swissnex in San Francisco, the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, and the Geneva Internet Platform (GIP) conducted a techplomacy mapping exercise to explore how different diplomatic representations interact with the San Francisco Bay Area ecosystem.

Since the publication of the report, a lot has changed in the practice of tech diplomacy. The digital foreign policy of governments has matured, and recent events have propelled global digital policy issues as a topic on the diplomatic agenda. The COVID-19 crisis accelerated the use of digital technologies by everyone and the conflict in Ukraine shifted the narrative on neutrality used by global technology companies.

Additionally, the growth of US security concerns over Chinese based technology companies, and the bottlenecks around the regionalisation of the semiconductor supply chain have put the interactions between tech companies and governments into the forefront and brought Silicon Valley closer to the global debate.

These considerations brought us to update the 2017 mapping. The research done over the past few months led to the following key observations:

• Tech diplomacy has matured, moving from informal engagements to more structured, formal engagements, which brings both benefits and issues to the parties involved
• Governmental representations in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the structures within tech companies that act as partners to the conversation have both become more diverse and complex, adding challenges in reaching one another
• There is an important culture and language divide between the tech and diplomatic world, which calls for specific support
• Over the past few years, San Francisco is seeing more and more collaborations between diplomatic representations and tech companies to achieve common goals, thus bringing multilateralism into the Bay Area.