Governments have been using data to conduct business for a long time. Not by coincidence, the term statistics derives from the word State, a discipline that emerged from the use of data from censuses, courts, and other official records to understand social issues and craft policies to manage these phenomena by increasingly powerful bureaucracies. As famously described by Scott, however, States have also used data to standardize, subject and control populations.
The interest in the use of data by Governments has received a renewed attention in recent years, to a large extent due to the increased generation of large volumes of data and the technologies to analyze them. For example, the World Bank dedicates its latest World Development Report to the topic. Titled Data For Better Lives, it explores how data can better advance development objectives, and finds that it can do it through three main pathways:
first, by improving policy making and service delivery; second, by prioritizing scarce resources and targeting them to reach marginalized populations and areas; and third, by holding government accountable and empowering individuals to make better choices through more information and knowledge.
Other international organizations interested in the use of data by Governments have provided similar categorizations of data’s positive impacts in Governments’ action. Charlotte van Ooijen, Barbara Ubaldi & Benjamin Welby (2019) from the OECD, for example, argue that data can be used (i) to anticipate and prepare for events, (ii) to design and deliver services, and (iii) to evaluate performance.
Given the amount of data generated in cities, city governments are particularly well-placed to leverage data to improve their functioning. In their famous book, the Responsive City, Stephen Goldsmith (former mayor of Indianapolis and former deputy mayor of New York City) and Susan Crawford, explain the various applications in which city governments can use data. In another article, Goldsmith and Jane Wiseman identify 10 examples of improved government action through the use of data in three main policy areas: public safety, infrastructure management and internal government operations.
Despite this interest by practitioners and organizations at international, national and city levels, the scholarship on the use of data by city governments is still fragmented and undertheorized. Only recently have scholars attempted to systematically understand what are the conditions that enable city governments to use data effectively. In two recent papers, Ruhlandt and co-authors (2020a and 2020b), define a list of such condition variables for 22 US cities, and identify the existence of several different plausible causal pathways and a set of necessary and sufficient values of the condition variables to enhance cities’ utilization of data. Although the studies have major limitations (for example, their units of analysis may vary widely across the 22 cities, making the measurements, comparisons, and findings too coarse), they are important steps in a key line of inquiry where further systematic and empirical research is needed.
As noted by Batty and Milton (2021) in their study in which they present a large-scale urban model, the main barriers for governments’ use of data for better city functioning do not come from technological constraints such as data availability or computational power. Instead, the key factor that determines whether city governments can leverage data to generate public value lies in the capacities to use data and to deal with the associated governance challenges.