Seeing data like a state: A case of Open Government Data in India’s livelihoods program

Abstract

Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives promise to make governments transparent, enabling citizens to participate actively in governance. Yet, empirical evidence suggests that OGD doesn’t have the democratic impact that its advocates expect. Based on a 14-month ethnography of India’s livelihood program, we argue that the assumptions underlying the design of OGD initiatives vary with citizens’ social context. We show how OGD initiatives are state-centric in their design to make the functioning of the everyday state legible towards controlling corruption. However, citizens and social activists do not always share such an “anti-corruption” view in their engagement with the everyday state. Instead, they prioritise “getting things done”, i.e. accessing the state’s services. The state-centric OGD is of limited value to them due to its techno-official language and its emphasis on aggregate datasets. We suggest complementing state-centric OGD with citizen-centric OGD to enable the citizens to “see the state”.