Speaker
Description
Europe is at the heart of a digital revolution affecting almost every domain of the economy, policies and citizens' lifestyles in general. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation unveiling at the same time important challenges characterizing this socio-technical transformation: 1) it has exposed society's vulnerability to new digital divides, 2) it demonstrated that there are wide variations in digital transformation advances between Member States, and 3) it highlighted the European Union's dependency on non-EU digital players and platforms (Negreiro 2022). On these premises, the European Parliament have launched the 2030 Policy Programme 'Path to the Digital Decade' to reinforce digital sovereignty and to ensure strategic autonomy, ensuring that the digital transformation will promote EU values and respect fundamental freedoms. The final goal is “to boost Europe's global competitiveness and further the digitalization of European industry, which still lags behind, particularly in [SMEs]” (Negreiro 2022). An important pillar of this policy programme is the intention to build a fair and sustainable data economy for Europe. One of the key conceptual foundations of this policy package is the creation of common European data spaces. This focus derived from the awareness that, despite the exponential growth of data produced and the value potential they bear for society and the economy, the use of this data is suboptimal and therefore its value is not fully exploited. There are multiple reasons for this but the most critical are: 1) lack of trust between data providers and data users; 2) data protection and regulatory aspects, 3) limited accessibility and availability of data (Otto, ten Hompel, and Wrobel 2022b).
This is the context in which the “Water Data Space” project was funded. The purpose of this project is for the water sector, in collaboration with universities and SMEs, to “establish an open data space that can systematically facilitate the complex task of collecting, organizing and displaying data from multiple data sources, so that it is possible for a large diversity of actors to develop new knowledge and business models for the innovation of the water sector”. Our role within this project is to study how and if the emergence of sustainability transition pathways within the water sector can be facilitated and supported through the sharing of data, when this data sharing is made possible by means of innovative, open and accessible “water data spaces”. An evidence-based approach seeks to document the knowledge co-production of emerging water data space imaginaries within this project to become a reference point for further initiatives nationally and internationally. The results from this study will provide the basis for a broader involvement of actors with the capacities needed to support the establishment of those transformational imaginaries bearing potentials for the acceleration of the twin (digital and green) transitions in Europe and beyond.
References
Negreiro, Mar. 2022. “BRIEFING - EU Legislation in Progress Proposal for a Decision of the European Parliament and of the Council Establishing the 2030 Policy Programme - Path to the Digital Decade programme”. EPRS - European Parliamentary Research Service, PE 733.519
Otto, Boris, Michael ten Hompel, and Stefan Wrobel. 2022. Designing Data Spaces - The Ecosystem Approach to Competitive Advantage. Edited by Boris Otto, Michael ten Hompel, and Stefan Wrobel. Designing Data Spaces. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93975-5.
| Keywords | Knowledge co-production, socio-technical imaginaries, transformational capacities, institutions |
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