The Data Republic: fostering a sustainable, inclusive and resilient digital transformation for the European Union

Abstract

In various official documents, the European Union has declared its goal to pursue a “people-centric” digital transformation. While fuzzy in its formulation, this generally entails the defense of individual rights alongside principles such as economic competitiveness, social inclusiveness, digital sovereignty, and environmental sustainability. Hence—we claim—“people-centric” embeds and demands a “collectual” (collective + individual) equilibrium between individual and collective rights and principles. Concretely, we draw on literature to operationalize such an equilibrium in terms of socio-economic sustainability, inclusiveness, and resilience (SIR). From here, we show that the EU’s current human rights-based approach (HRBA) and its emerging digital single market (DSM) maintain an individualistic focus and economic rationale which fail to be collectual and SIR. We identify data commons as a promising collectual and SIR regime for governing the digital transformation. By addressing current barriers and limitations of data common initiatives, we conceptualize the Data Republic as a theoretical setup that can systemically tackle these limitations and barriers to provide a new way for pursuing a “people-centric” digital transformation in the EU.