Signal From Voice to Leverage in Data Governance. Building Enforceable Social License for Data ReUse

Summary

The paper argues that contemporary participatory data governance mechanisms rest on the unexamined assumption that giving communities voice alone changes what data holders do. Drawing on labor bargaining theory, the sociology of disputes, and James C. Scott's account of legibility, the authors define 'leverage' as an analytic category with three properties: counterfactual, enforceable, and durable. They contend leverage presupposes epistemic legibility, since affected publics can rarely impose costs on systems they cannot see, document, or contest, and that most existing transparency instruments serve regulators and procurers rather than the governed. The paper maps six sources of leverage and examines the intermediary structures that aggregate and sustain them. It proposes a six-dimension evaluative framework for auditing whether a social license process actually redistributes power, concluding that a social license worth the name must share the properties of a legal license: conditions, a licensor, and enforceable remedies for breach.