Sherlock Holmes would have loved living in the twenty-first century. We are drenched in data, and so many of our problems (including a murder mystery) can be solved using large amounts of data existing at personal and societal levels.

These days it is fair to assume that most people are familiar with the term “data.” We see it everywhere. And if you have a cellphone, then chances are this is something you have encountered frequently. Assuming you are a “connected” person who has a smartphone, you probably have a data plan from your phone service provider.

The chapter explains why the EU explicitly decided not to intervene in private fair trade governance on two separate occasions, in 1999 and in 2009. The chapter starts by comparing private fair trade governance schemes, including Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance, and UTZ Certified. It then discusses why EU policymakers in the 1990s focused on Fairtrade only and declined to intervene because of the specific North–South trade dynamics of this issue area; the lack of concrete productive opportunities in the EU; and institutional constraints of the international trade regime. The Fair Trade movement’s successful harmonization of complementary private governance schemes also contributed to the EU’s non-interventionist approach. The broadening of the policy domain beyond Fairtrade in the early 2000s did not lead to fragmentation concerns, since differences among the schemes were framed as commercial and economic-ideological in nature and not problematized as a fragmentation issue. Active lobbying by and on behalf of private governance schemes ensured this outcome, resulting in a market for private governance that remains free of public intervention.

We started this book with a glimpse into data and data science. Then we spent the rest of the book, especially Parts II and III, learning various tools and techniques to solve data problems of different kinds. Our approach to all of this has been hands-on. And now we have come full circle. As we wrap up, it is important to take a look at where that data comes from, and how we should broadly think about analyzing it. This final chapter, therefore, is dedicated to those two goals, as you will see in the next two sections. One section is an overview of some of the most common methods for collecting/soliciting data, and the other provides information and ideas about how to approach a data analysis problem with broad methods. Then the final section provides a commentary on evaluation and experimentation.

How and why is nationalization central to the politics of resource-rich countries? This chapter opens with a review of current theories on natural resource wealth and nationalization in political science, economics, and public policy, and then describes why existing theories are unable to answer the questions this book seeks to answer. With these questions in mind, this chapter presents the book’s central theory of why leaders nationalize and how leader survival shapes and is shaped by the choice of nationalization. After describing empirical implications of the argument, the chapter offers initial evidence to support these claims in the form of exploratory case studies of Iran and Iraq. In Iran, the shocking collapse of the Shah in 1979 defied the West’s notion of the “island of stability” in the tumultuous Middle East. In Iraq, the fall of the Hashemite monarchy in 1958 ushered in a decade of instability until the unexpected Ba’athist consolidation in 1968, when Hassan al-Bakr established a 35-year single-party dictatorship. These are precisely the types of outcomes in which the book’s theory predicts nationalization should affect the rise and fall of dictatorships.

The final chapter of the book compares the findings from the four issue areas and links them with the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 2. The chapter then asks: Given the EU’s interventions, what have been the impacts on the functioning of private governance and the larger policy field? The chapter argues that the regulatory impacts are twofold: The interventions have both restructured the field of private governance and largely retained private actors’ governing authority and private governance space. The interventions impose baselines that cannot be undercut and that arguably have resulted in some sustainability improvements. At the same time, the interventions are relatively limited since the standards and procedural regulations are minimum baselines with several evident gaps. This situation allows for policy exports and spillovers from private to public governance, both within the EU and beyond, which can potentially strengthen public policy. The chapter then discusses the generalizability of the theory by discussing examples of public interventions at both the international and the domestic level beyond the EU. The book concludes with avenues for further research.

“Just as trees are the raw material from which paper is produced, so too, can data be viewed as the raw material from which information is obtained.” To present and interpret information, one must start with a process of gathering and sorting data. And for any kind of data analysis, one must first identify the right kinds of information sources.

previous chapter, we discussed different forms of data. The height–weight data we saw was numerical and structured. When you post a picture using your smartphone, that is an example of multimedia data. The datasets mentioned in the section on public policy are government or open data collections.

The chapter explains why the EU has so far failed to intervene in private fisheries governance. The chapter starts with comparing private governance schemes since the 1990s. It then analyses EU policy discussions until late 2017, showing that until very recently all involved stakeholders agreed that the fragmentation of the private governance market needed to be addressed. Differences of opinion on the desirability of publicly supporting product differentiation, however, have continued to exist. While most stakeholders consider the costs such differentiation would impose on European producers too high and therefore support procedural regulation, the European Parliament has consistently favored both standards and procedural regulations in the form of an EU-level certification and eco-labeling scheme. Attempts to create a policy failed in 2008–2009 when a legislative proposal for procedural regulation was abandoned, and in 2013 when the discussion was integrated in the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. A 2016 report on feasible policy options, moreover, questioned the fragmentation of the private governance market, casting further doubt on the likelihood of public intervention.