THE ALLOCATION OF POWERS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN GOVERNMENT DATA SHARING AMID DIGITAL GOVERNMENT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Government data sharing is not merely a matter of data transmission or technical connectivity; it entails a reconfiguration of the boundaries of administrative authority, interdepartmental coordination, and the structure of data-related risks in the development of digital government. Traditional bureaucratic organization rests on departmental division of functions, whereas digital government requires data to move across organizational boundaries, generating a structural tension between department-based allocation of authority and the demands of holistic governance. Existing scholarship discusses government data sharing from the perspectives of digital government, data governance, interagency collaboration, sharing security, and administrative rule of law, yet still lacks a unified account of the correspondence among data-management authority, sharing duties, use permissions, and legal responsibility. The allocation of powers and responsibilities in government data sharing should neither continue the logic of departmental possession of data nor attribute responsibility simply according to who supplies or ultimately uses the data. Instead, statutory tasks should define the boundaries of authority, actual control capacity should determine conduct-based duties, and causation and degree of fault should guide the internal allocation of responsibility. On this basis, it is necessary to distinguish the coordinating responsibility of the competent sharing authority, the data-quality responsibility of source departments, the sharing-service responsibility of providing departments, the administrative-use responsibility of requesting departments, and the technical safeguarding responsibility of platform operators, while establishing a structure in which external responsibility is relatively unified and internal responsibility is allocated in layers. Future reform should reconstruct data-management authority, refine layered standards of responsibility, improve whole-process matrices of powers and responsibilities and mechanisms of traceability, and develop an accountability regime that addresses both failures to share and unlawful use, thereby reconciling efficiency, security, and responsibility in government data sharing.