AI Governance from the South: From Red Lines to Baselines

As part of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, we participated in the roundtable AI Governance from the Global South: From Redlines to Structural Baselines, organized by IT for Change alongside a broad network of partners. This space brought together civil society organizations, researchers, and public policy actors from across the Majority World, with a clear objective: to move AI governance debates beyond identifying risks or harmful use cases, and to challenge the structural foundations on which the current technological paradigm is built. Rather than focusing solely on mitigating harms once systems are already deployed, the conversation centered on defining non-negotiable conditions across the entire AI value chain.

In other words, what needs to change at the root for these systems to be compatible with human rights, social justice, and ecological sustainability? Building on this premise, the dialogue was structured around key questions:
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*What governance baselines must be in place for AI systems to align with principles of justice and rights?*What would it mean to treat labor regulation, public procurement, competition policy, and environmental oversight as central components of AI governance?
*How can governance reshape the political economy of AI innovation, rather than merely respond to its downstream impacts?

These discussions reflect a shared concern: the current model of AI development is deeply shaped by power concentration, labor precarity, exclusion, and environmental harm. In response, it is not enough to regulate we must reimagine the paradigm. In this context, the roundtable engaged with the framework ReGenAI: A New Deal for the AI Economy, an alternative proposal that calls for reorienting AI toward more diverse economies, strengthened local capacities, democratic governance, public value, and ecological sustainability. This New Deal is grounded in shared political and ethical commitments, and advances a vision centered on: