Data Innovation for Policymaking in Indonesia

Abstract

Digital services and the big data they generate are changing the research and policy landscape in profound ways. In Indonesia, the near ubiquity of mobile phones, improvements in connectivity and coverage and the availability of new and cheaper technologies are providing policy researchers and policy makers with access to new sources of real-time information and new tools to understand social and economic trends. These developments have the potential to change the way policy makers source and use evidence to inform policymaking. This chapter examines the implications of these new technologies for policymaking, especially data innovation, which is defined as the use of new or nontraditional data sources and methods. Drawing on examples from ongoing pilot initiatives on how data innovation is being used – and could be used – in policy research and policymaking in Indonesia, the authors explore factors that shape the policy uptake of data tools by government stakeholders. The chapter argues that although advanced data analytics (defined as the systematic computational analysis of data) and data visualisation help to make sense of new data sources and to attract policy makers to some of these initiatives, actual uptake and adoption is more likely to depend on political factors. These factors include the relevance of insights to a current policy issue, the availability of resources and capacity to adopt the data tools, access to the data sources required to feed the analytics and the presence of political imperatives.