Transnational Diffusion and Cross-Border Partial Adoption of Digital Grassroots Collective Actions

In 2010, the Indian civil society organization Janaagraha launched I Paid a Bribe (IPAB), a crowdsourced website that allows citizens to report cases of bribery anonymously and fosters an alternative space for grassroots anti-corruption activism. Celebrated as a grassroots collective action that relied on digital innovation, IPAB inspired replication efforts around the world, involving 15 official partners, 14 potential adopters, and numerous unaffiliated initiatives. While IPAB demonstrated the potential of spreading digital technologies across borders to strengthen civic engagement around corruption, its diffusion revealed significant challenges. Many diffusion efforts struggled to maintain momentum, reflecting the complex dynamics of transnational transfer of grassroots collective actions across borders. This article examines the diffusion of IPAB through the lens of practice theories, focusing on four key practices—ideating, designing, and maintaining, and the transversal practice of translating—to explain the diffusion of a grassroots collective action that revolves heavily around digital technologies, such as IPAB, and its partial adoption. Taken together, the four practices discussed shed light on how transnational diffusion processes unfold and how the interaction of material, social, and symbolic elements explain how and why digital grassroots collective action are adopted in full or only partially. Using qualitative interviews with IPAB initiators, adopters, and non-adopters in different countries around the world, as well as secondary data, this article draws on empirical research that employs thematic analysis to examine cross-border diffusion, shedding light on the possibilities and limitations of grassroots digital activism in creating sustainable cross-border spaces for civic engagement and collective action.