Towards Proactive Disclosure: Barriers to Open Data in the Middle East

Abstract

Open data is becoming a global phenomenon. Governments around the world are opening up their datasets to the public in the hopes of generating a variety of economic, political, and social benefits. However, many other governments are not too keen about the movement towards transparency, choosing instead to keep their information out of the public eye. Middle Eastern governments in particular have not released the vast majority of their datasets, despite possessing the institutional capacity to do so. In fact, international development organizations such as the Open Data Barometer list the Middle East as being above-average in “readiness” to use open data as a tool for development, but as being one of the worst in the world when it comes to actually releasing government information online for public viewing. This thesis asks why this is the case. Why have Middle Eastern governments failed to put their promising open data initiatives into practice? Past empirical studies have provided that legal, technical and organizational culture barriers discourage national and subnational governments from proactively disclosing data, but none of them studied these barriers in the context of the Middle East. I attempt to contribute to the literature on these “implementation barriers” by conducting a qualitative case study of two recent open data initiatives in the region: Jordan’s Third National Action Plan (2016-2018) and Saudi Arabia’s Second e-Government Action Plan (2012-2016). Using institutional reports, publicly-available government documents, newspaper articles, and interviews with government officials and open data instructors, I examine whether legal, technical, and organizational culture barriers contributed to the stagnation in the two countries’ open data efforts. I conclude based on my findings that all three of these barriers played a major role in preventing Jordanian and Saudi Arabian datasets from being published. My results have implications for both international development agencies as addition to local policymakers. I suggest that legal and technical barriers can be addressed gradually, but efforts to change conservative attitudes regarding information control require reminders to senior officials about the benefits of open data as well as incentive and evaluation systems that create political will.