Collective, democratic, and just: towards a new global agenda on data governance policy and practice

RightsCon is a summit on human rights in the digital age. The three-day conference took place in a hybrid format in San José, Costa Rica, from June 5-8, 2023.

Carolina Rossini, Director for Policy & Research of the Datasphere Initiative spoke at the session “Collective, democratic, and just: towards a new global agenda on data governance policy and practice” on June 6, 2023.

To date, most data governance laws, policies, and frameworks around the world have focussed on addressing individual data harms and creating individual rights.

However, the governance of data needs to better account for data’s relational qualities, collective harms, and public value. This calls for new narratives, policies, and practices of data governance that foreground collective, democratic, and participatory practice: giving communities a powerful voice in data governance. Such approaches complement individual rights and rebalance power over data. They draw on diverse traditions of community decision-making across the globe.

This session explored opportunities to use the G20 over coming years, and other global policy processes, to change the debate about data. In addition, the discussion shared short inputs describing the state of data governance debates in different country and regional contexts, emphasizing the opportunities and challenges for securing more community-centered data governance under the policy leadership of each G20 host country, or within other global policy processes.