CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Politics of Technology
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1670152
The Data Republic: Fostering a Sustainable, Inclusive and Resilient Digital Transformation for the European Union
Provisionally accepted
Stefano Calzati1
Bastiaan van Loenen2*- 1European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Brussels, Belgium
- 2Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands
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Abstract. In various official documents, the European Union has declared its goal to pursue a "people-centric" digital transformation. While fuzzy in its formulation, this generally entails the defense of individual rights alongside principles such as economic competitiveness, social inclusiveness, digital sovereignty, and environmental sustainability. Hence – we claim – "people-centric" embeds and demands a "collectual" (collective+individual) equilibrium between individual and collective rights and principles. Concretely, we draw on literature to operationalize such an equilibrium in terms of socio-economic sustainability, inclusiveness, and resilience (SIR). From here, we show that the EU's current human rights-based approach (HRBA) and its emerging digital single market (DSM) maintain an individualistic focus and economic rationale which fail to be collectual and SIR. We identify data commons as a promising collectual and SIR regime for governing the digital transformation. By addressing current barriers and limitations of data common initiatives, we conceptualize the Data Republic as a theoretical setup that can systemically tackle these limitations and barriers to provide a new way for pursuing a "people-centric" digital transformation in the EU.
Keywords: data commons, Republic, sustainability, inclusiveness, resilience, Data governance, EU, transdisciplinarity
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Calzati and van Loenen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bastiaan van Loenen, Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands
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