Opening up government-held data in New Zealand: implications for governance in the digital age

Many countries around the world, including New Zealand, have embarked upon open government programmes in order to make non-personal data held by government agencies more accessible to the general public. Initially, the... [ view full abstract ]

Many countries around the world, including New Zealand, have embarked upon open government programmes in order to make non-personal data held by government agencies more accessible to the general public. Initially, the underlying political vision for this programme in New Zealand was to better close the feedback loop with the general public: in other words, by making government-held data publicly available, citizens would be able to ask better questions from policy-makers so that greater government accountability and improved policy development could be achieved. Since the launch of the open government programme in 2008, the New Zealand Government has taken an interest in the wider sharing and use of so-called ‘Big Data’ in order to develop more effective and efficient public policy and service provision, and set up the New Zealand Data Futures Forum in 2013.

Using the New Zealand experience with opening-up government-held data as a case study, this paper aims to empirically explore and analyse the meaning, influential factors, and implications of achieving ‘open government’ in New Zealand since 2008. In order to do so, the paper uses a qualitative empirical and inductive research approach, drawing from the public governance and digital governance literature in order to understand and explain the New Zealand case experience. The case study is constructed on the basis of secondary data, strategy and policy documents, and other forms of publicly available information (e.g. websites). The research findings demonstrate that opening up government data is not similar to achieving open governance, and that other, often non-technical factors are of critical importance to do so.