From Voice to Leverage in Data Governance

Paper by Stefaan Verhulst, Adam Zable, Begoña Gonzalez Otero and Jacqueline Lu: “Contemporary data governance has converged on participation. Citizens’ assemblies, deliberative polls, co-design workshops, and community advisory panels are now routinely suggested to build trust and secure a social license for the re-use of data. Yet this consensus rests on an unexamined assumption: that giving affected communities a voice will, on its own, change what data holders do. This paper argues that the field needs to complement voice with leverage-the capacity of individuals and communities to make their participation consequential by attaching credible legal, institutional, contractual, economic, or reputational costs to being ignored. Drawing on labor-relations bargaining theory, the sociology of disputes, and James C. Scott’s account of legibility, we develop leverage as an analytic category defined by three properties: it is counterfactual, enforceable, and durable. We further argue that leverage presupposes epistemic legibility-affected publics can rarely impose costs on a system they cannot see, document, or contest-and that most existing transparency instruments equip regulators and procurers rather than the governed. We then map six sources from which communities and data subjects can derive leverage (legal and regulatory; institutional decision; contractual; economic; data access; and political and reputational), examine the intermediary structures that aggregate and sustain it, and propose a six-dimension evaluative framework-obligation, enforceability, consequence, monitoring equipment, revocability, and institutional durability-for auditing whether any social license process actually redistributes power. The paper’s central claim is that a social license worth the name must share the properties of a legal license: conditions, a licensor, and enforceable remedies for breach…(More)”.