La pubblicazione dei dati sui beneficiari dei fondi strutturali: quali strategie per le regioni europee?

European Cohesion Policy and its Structural Funds, involving all EU Regions and Member States, are a well-suited context to verify the presence of different approaches to the publication of Open Government Data, a crucial tool to foster governmental transparency and accountability. Following the theoretical framework introduced by Dawes (2010), this paper is aimed at exploring how national and regional managing authorities of Structural Funds are making available the data on the use of the funding, in terms of both data stewardship (quality, format, accessibility, detail, etc.) and usefulness (availability of tools to interact with the data). The analysis takes into consideration 15 indicators aggregating 62 characteristics of the data published by each EU 2007-13 Programme in December 2013. Results show that only a fraction of the concerned administrations is investing in advanced tools for data visualization and citizen engagement. These authorities rely on good quality and high detail of the information, thus confirming the interdependence of the stewardship and usefulness principles, as highlighted in the literature