The rise of digital innovations is critical to many people and organizations in the Global South. By looking at programmers and their associated networks as digital production environment, this article aims to shed light on digital innovation processes to get a better understanding of those networks’ inherent characteristics. With analyzing coding networks in Zambia’s capital Lusaka, the study combines cultural legitimacy as a perspective from innovation scholars with scale. The case study is built on Geels’ and Verhees’ (2011) conceptualization of frames that stakeholders use to promote technology, and shows how members of coding networks produce and push legitimacy. Looking through the lenses of scale at perceived plausibility and salience of the production of frames, a variety of promoted frames around technology in connection to their actor’s credibility, empirical fit, and macro-cultural resonance are identified. Further, the research identifies influence structures within coding networks effecting their members scope of actions.

The number of scholars working on transition concepts in the Global South is rapidly increasing. In this context, a substantial amount of research output particularly focusses on niches and how they affect transition towards sustainability in a wider framework of the multi-level-perspective. At the same time, there is a growing interest in digital technology and its effect on sustainability challenges. In this article, we combine the two fields, and by utilizing social media data, we create an innovative network science approach to analyze the production environment of digital innovations in Africa. We focus on three innovation hubs that we conceptualize as niches and innovation intermediaries that not only create communities to develop, test and implement new technology but also function as networks to discuss and form new ideas around innovations. Our key findings show how local communities are embedded in larger innovation structures. The connections between local stakeholders and global actors are predominantly created through bridge actors, who hold key positions in their communities. With tools from network science, we demonstrate that these linking elements can regulate and steer discussions and therefore, strongly influence digital niche environments. Utilizing geographical location data, we can also see that the online space of technological innovations in Africa is heavily cantered in urban areas.

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