There is a growing realisation among public authorities in the Netherlands that their work should be data-driven. Local and regional governments, such as municipalities and provinces, wish to make substantial progress in data-driven and evidence-based governance to optimise the execution of their responsibilities and address societal challenges. Public authorities have the desire to move away from a situation where policy and decision-making are mainly based on gut feelings towards a situation that is based on facts.
The data available nowadays give the opportunity to provide insights about society within a region, in a more timely manner and on a more localised scale. Local and regional authorities are faced with ever more complex issues which need in-depth insights to devise proper solutions. In recent years, a substantial number of public responsibilities have been decentralised from the national government to municipalities and provinces in the Netherlands. Becoming data-driven and evidence-based is an important challenge for public authorities. Working with large data sets is not their core business, and is creating a multitude of issues they need to deal with. These issues are related to the lack of access to national data, lack of knowledge, experience, skills, infrastructure and methodology to process, filter and utilise the generated data. Safeguarding the quality and comparability on all levels of the data, as well as privacy, are other complex issues. Hence, collaboration is essential for these authorities to achieve evidence-based and data-driven policy.
As a reaction to a growing demand from municipalities to be supported by Statistics Netherlands in realising their data-driven needs and ambitions, Statistics Netherlands started establishing collaborations with public authorities through the creation of regional data centres (RDCs).
The RDCs are intensive tailor-made collaborations between Statistics Netherlands and a municipality, region or province. The general objective of an RDC is to broaden, deepen and improve data that is available on a city or regional level through the knowledge, data and expertise of Statistics Netherlands. This brings region and Statistics Netherlands closer together with the result of a data-driven and evidence-based foundation for governance and policymaking, showing the factual state of a region and its society.
The collaboration with Statistics Netherlands provides authorities with an in-depth understanding of their current situation on a variety of (integrated) topics. In addition, it creates data-driven input for policymaking and investment decisions. When organised in a smart way it can even lead to less taxpayers’ money being spent to solve societal challenges, creating a society with better living conditions for citizens. Also, it enables authorities to monitor their progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and benchmark it to other public authorities on all geographical scales, from local and regional to national and international.