A user perspective on accessibility of INSPIRE datasets : An accessibility ranking of the average dataset in 2025 by country

There has been a push to open up data held by public authorities for the purposes of transparency and openness. In 1998, the EU and its Member States signed onto the Aarhus convention comitting to more open and transparent governance, resulting in the enshrinement of environmental democracy principles. The benefits provided by open data align well with environmental democracy principles. Nine years later, the EU pens the INSPIRE directive. INSPIRE aims to provide easy access to high quality datasets that serve as the basis for environmental policymaking. As dataset reuse has been highlighted as an important determinant of open data benefit realization, the importance of examining how INSPIRE may support an ordinary citizen’s right to know became clear. Dataset reuse is affected by quality control – a facet of which is accessibility. However, in 2016 a report stated that INSPIRE was behind schedule. Almost a decade later, there has been no studies on the accessibility of INSPIRE datasets, hindering the evaluation of INSPIRE as a promoter of environmental democracy. The goal of this study is to evaluate the accessibility of the average dataset in 10 EU/EFTA countries and determine if the accessibility is sufficient to support environmental democracy ambitions for ordinary citizens. To do this, we used a two-round approach, where we developed a formula for quantifying accessibility and a protocol to find INSPIRE datasets. These were improved upon in the second round and their effect on accessibility ratings were established. The main findings of this study are that the accessibility of chosen countries’ datasets is sufficient for smaller scale applications of environmental democracy. However, as the scale increases so do requirements for either software or multilingualism. Alongside these requirements, we identified that various barriers to access are present and should be remediated, most notably account and purchase requirements.