Over the past 10 years, we have observed a significant growth in open data adoption in governments across the globe. Potential barriers and enablers of open government data have been well-documented in the literature. However, nearly all of this research has been conducted in Western, democratic and developed societies, with very little known about open government data implementation in less developed countries. This article investigates how institutional dimensions affect open data implementation in six understudied countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. This research presents rich data based on an analysis of 31 documents and focus group discussions with a total of 89 participants. In general, we find that in these countries the same institutional dimensions influence OGD implementation as in their Western counterparts. A striking difference, however, is that we find open data implementation in transition countries to be much more fragile and highly dependent on foreign aid initiatives. This paper also strengthens the argument that institutional dimensions explain the performance of open data implementation.
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