Information, Communications and Media Technologies for Sustainability: Constructing Data-Driven Policy Narratives

This paper introduces the idea of data-driven narratives to examine how the use of information, communications, and media technologies (ICMTs) impacts the sustainable growth of economies. While ICMTs have regularly been advocated as a policy tool for growth and development, there is a research gap in empirical studies validating how such policies may be effective. This analysis is based on historical panel data from 39 economies across the developed North (19) and developing South (20). The industry-standard Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) methodology was applied to construct narratives that weave extant theories with empirical data. The art of developing data-driven narratives is rarely addressed in previous research articles. In the narrative approach, prior research on how ICMTs and sustainable growth are quantitatively scored and measured is reviewed. Panel data from authoritative sources such as the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and Sustainable Society Index were collected, cleansed, and conglomerated for data analytics. This was followed by evidence-based reasoning to examine any possible relationships between ICMT development and the sustainable growth of economies across the “North” and “South”. The findings reveal that there are differentiated outcomes in sustainable growth in high- and low-income economies. This poses legitimate questions as to whether low-income economies will be able to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 through the intermediation of ICMTs. It is the intended contribution of this paper to exemplify how data-driven narratives using CRISP may construct rich stories about ICMT for sustainability for the purposes of sharing good practice as well as lessons learned.