Data production and governance in the 21^st century is different from ever before; it involves more actors, more rules, more regulations, more expertise, and more capacity. The only legitimate actors to set the rules of this new game and shepherd all of the actors into an effective ecosystem are national governments. And within governments, it is national statistical offices who are best placed to coordinate the transformations required. However, worldwide NSOs are underfunded and under-capacitated, and many are subject to restrictive government laws and policies that prevent them from coordinating government data production and use or forging external partnerships.

This needs to change urgently. The sustainable development challenge requires evidence-based solutions, interventions based upon good-quality and timely data that tell us what is going on now and can help us look ahead to predict and prepare for the future. To devise such solutions, governments need strong national data ecosystems that capitalize on rapid innovation across both the public and private sectors, harnessing new technologies, new infrastructure, and experimental approaches. The NSO must situate itself at the epicenter of this ecosystem, coordinating actors and processes and ensuring quality and rigor. This will require capacity-building across NSOs, including partnership management and technological upskilling, to help turn raw data into useful insights. It will also require significant, supportive policy development to drive open data efforts, govern new partnerships, and ensure citizens’ rights to privacy.

This transformation will be tricky; in many countries, donors have dictated national data agendas and this relationship needs to be redefined. Some new partnerships will inevitably fail. Some legal frameworks will be found lacking. But the scale of 21^st-century sustainable development challenges necessitates that we try new ways of doing business.

This report highlights a few of the potential solutions at hand and some of the steps that governments can take to institutionalize them, bringing about the sea change we need. It has also considered the roles of Member State-led bodies like the UN Statistical Commission, UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment, and others, all of which will have pivotal roles in coordinating activity globally, ensuring standards, providing comparability of methods, and similar. These entities are coordinated at an operational level by global secretariats in New York and Paris, but it is country-level stakeholders that determine their agendas. Member States should use their seats in these bodies to ensure that the innovation they are cultivating at national levels is reflected in and supported by the international data system.

Table 3 summarizes the recommendations laid out in this report, identifying a lead agency for each and providing a recommended timeline for its fulfillment. As with the inaugural Counting on the World report, SDSN TReNDS commits to monitor progress on these recommendations over the long term and provide independent analysis on the state of the global data ecosystem. Only with decisive action now will we achieve the data revolution for sustainable development, and put in place the data building blocks essential for achieving the SDGs.