When it comes to the opportunity for data analytics to provide new insights and visibility on the challenges of sustainable development, the world is in a pre-dawn fog. Just as clouds bring rain that can irrigate or flood, so too can the flow of data bring succour or harm. Defined currently only by its ambiguity and complexity, the global dialogue on the use of data is shaped by both hope and anxiety. While using data for positive socio-economic gain holds great promise, it is not a certainty. It is imperative to chart a course through this complexity to capture the development benefits that Big Data can bring.
The global narrative on the use of data for development is conflated and incoherent. Competing tensions on data control and ownership, limited technical understanding, the lack of coordination, shifting power dynamics and a lack of effective governance frameworks have conspired to hinder clarity of integrated goals and principles across different communities of interest.
Based on insights from a cross-disciplinary community of policy-makers and experts from industry, academia and civil society convened by the World Economic Forum, this brief article hopes to help clear some of the fog that is currently obscuring the vision of how Big Data might be used to address the challenges of sustainable development.
With a lens focused on identifying various stakeholder relationships, the hope is that new approaches for balancing competing tensions can be advanced. These tensions reflect underlying inequalities in access to data (and the resources, capacity and infrastructure to use the data), and a growing trust deficit that assumes the misuse of data.
To achieve the goals of sustainable development, it is important to build the legal, cultural, technological and economic infrastructures necessary to enable the balancing of competing interests. Balance will require addressing multiple concerns about the use of data and issues such as privacy, human rights, property rights, climate change and national security. The approaches will need to be meaningful, pragmatic, adaptive and proportional. With so much uncertainty, the need for continuous experimentation, learning and sharing is paramount. Investing in small-scale pilots that bring together the private sector, regulators, civil society and local communities will provide the insights and local knowledge critical for long-term resilience and adaptation. While the complicated bits of the puzzle can be solved over time, the complexity is quite challenging with a wide array of development pain-points, such as contextual uncertainties, power dynamics and policy frameworks among others.
So where to begin? How can all stakeholders work through the complexity and identify key points of focus for collective progress? Three areas are emerging as important starting points: addressing the data deficit, establishing resilient governance, and strengthening local capacities and knowledge regarding the individual and the community. As the report by the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development states, “There is a need for showing how resources, actors, forms of collaboration and institutions can evolve, be managed and be deployed to make the data revolution a force for progress and for enhancing possibilities.
This article was written in 2015.
pi STRATEGY