Datafication, development and marginalised urban communities: an applied data justice framework

Abstract

The role of data within international development is rapidly expanding. However, the recency of this phenomenon means analysis has been lagging; particularly, analysis of broader impacts of real-world initiatives. Addressing this gap through a focus on data's increasing presence in urban development, this paper makes two contributions. Firstdrawing from the emerging literature on 'data justice'it presents an explicit, systematic and comprehensive new framework that can be used for analysis of datafication. Second, it applies the framework to four mapping initiatives in cities of the global South. These initiatives capture and visualise new data about marginalised communities: residents living in slums and other informal settlements about whom data has traditionally been lacking. Analysing across procedural, rights, instrumental and structural dimensions, it finds these initiatives deliver real incremental gains for their target communities. But it is external actors and wealthier communities that gain more; thus, increasing relative inequality.

Data Justice through the Prism of Information Politics and Resource Injustice: A Case Study from Hyderabad’s Urban Frontier

“…In fact, the most vociferous opponent of our enumeration admitted his suspicion that we would report his numerous rental premises. This somewhat more strategic, rather than survival, motive for the ambivalence of legibility may serve to nuance Heeks and Shekhar's (2019) analysis.…”

“…While the emerging literature on data justice has largely relied on theories developed or conceived in the global North (Taylor 2017, Heeks & Renken 2018, a promising new strand of work evaluates how issues of data justice play out in the cities of the global South. Work in this vein has introduced a valuable element of empirical engagement with themes that animate wider urban governance modalities at the interface of the formal and the informal in these settings (Donovan 2012, Heeks & Shekhar 2019. Our case study, although located in a larger literature on datafication in informal settlements in cities of the global South, nonetheless departs from it in several respects.…”

“…First, unlike several of the case studies discussed in Heeks and Shekhar (2019), Gachi Basti is a frontier setting which has seen little intervention by community-based organizations or civil society groups. As a result, residents have little experience with instrumentally 'fair' data processes mediated by such groups.…”

“…Or does it thwart it? While recent scholarship has examined data processes in low-income communities in the global South (Heeks & Shekhar 2019), this literature has often focused on issues of justice surrounding data processes in the relationship between the community and external actors. Our aim here is to open up the black box of the community to understand information flows within it, in order to understand attitudes about, and receptivity to, data collection exercises.…”

ICT4D 3.0? Part 1—The components of an emerging “digital‐for‐development” paradigm

“…For the first, digitisation has now progressed so far that we can talk of the “datafication” of development: widespread and growing presence, use and impact of digital data in development processes (Heeks & Shekhar, ). The processes of decision and (trans)action will be fed by growth of the 5Vs of data that arise from digitisation (adapted from IBM, ): Volume: increasing amounts of data being produced.…”