To address complex societal challenges, governments need to make evidence-based decisions based of best available data. However, much of relevant data is now held by the private sector. This project investigates how to rebalance the ‘data asymmetry’ between governments and businesses and how the shared private sector data is used in government decisions on societal issues.

This project is the first systematic effort to create an evidence base about when, how, for what purposes, and with what implications the Dutch (local) authorities resort to purchasing data from the private sector to make evidence-based decisions addressing societal challenges.

• Sofie de Wilde de Ligny MA
• dr. M.T. (Mirko) Schaefer
• prof. dr. ir. Fredo Schotanus

Data collaboratives is a new type of cross-sector collaboration (e.g. between governments, companies, or scientists) to leverage the potential of data to solve complex societal challenges. Presently there is much hype about data collaboratives but a complete lack of systematic scientific evaluation. This project aims to ascertain how data collaboratives can be effectively used in particular contexts by reviewing the state of the art of research in this field, mapping the data collaboratives best practice using an international repository of cases, and focussing on two pioneering cases in climate change domain to evaluate the effectiveness of technologies used to support these data collaboratives.