Local governance in the new information ecology: The challenge of building interpretative communities

The localism agenda in England, to the extent that it has been followed through, relies on the increasingly free availability of government data for its success. The availability of this open government data, however, solves nothing: as many writers have pointed out, such data needs to be interpreted and interpretation is always a function of a collective-what has been called an 'interpretative' or 'epistemic' community. The authors question the possibility of such local epistemic or interpretative communities emerging in the English context.