Participatory data stewardship: A framework for involving people in the use of data

Participatory data stewardship: A framework for involving people in the use of data is a report published by the Ada Lovelace Institute in September 2021 and lead-authored by Reema Patel, then the Institute's Associate Director for Engagement and the colleague who established its work on public engagement and participation. The report proposes a framework for what the Institute calls participatory data stewardship — defined as "the responsible use, collection and management of data in a participatory and rights-preserving way, informed by values and engaging with questions of fairness" — that rejects opaque or manipulative data practices in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and, in some instances, govern their own data.

The framework adapts Sherry Arnstein's 1969 "ladder of citizen participation" and the IAP2 spectrum of public participation into the data-governance context, organising mechanisms along five tiers of escalating public influence — inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower. The report's empirical base is an analysis of over 100 case studies of existing participatory mechanisms — including data cooperatives in Barcelona and Liverpool, mental-health data banks, citizen data-impact assessments and audits, co-design initiatives, and the algorithmic registers operated by Helsinki and Amsterdam — drawn out from a wider review and worked through in a smaller set of detailed case studies. The framework is positioned both as a diagnostic — a way of locating any given data-stewardship arrangement on a spectrum of public influence — and as a prescriptive call to move governance arrangements up the ladder, on the argument that the legitimacy and trustworthiness of data and AI uses depend on the degree to which the publics affected can shape them.

Within the corpus, Participatory data stewardship is the first Ada Lovelace Institute-anchored Publication and the foundational artefact for the Institute's Public Participation & Research programme: the deliberative councils, citizen juries, and peer-led inquiries the Institute has run before and since — the Citizens' Biometrics Council, the NHS fair-data-sharing juries, Public Voices in AI — sit inside the conceptual frame this report set out. The framework's external pickup is its second movement-relevant feature: the UK Statistics Authority's Centre for Applied Data Ethics drew on it to shape engagement guidance for researchers and statisticians working with public data, and the report has since been used by funders, public bodies and civil-society organisations as a working reference. The Institute's 2024–25 Participatory and inclusive data stewardship landscape review, produced jointly with the ESRC Digital Good Network and the Liverpool City Region Civic Data Cooperative, explicitly builds on this 2021 report — the artefact has therefore continued to function as the reference point against which subsequent work in the participatory-data-stewardship space is positioned.