--- title: "Barriers to European Data Spaces: Introducing a new DSSC series" canonical: "https://archive.dssc.eu/space/News/blog/1937375235/Barriers%20to%20European%20Data%20Spaces%3A%20Introducing%20a%20new%20DSSC%20series" format: markdown --- ![News.png](media://6c078f28-7ddf-4e22-8d63-c1ae722f45c4) ***by Satu Salminen & Matteo Frigeri*** Over the past decade, the European Union has increasingly framed data as a strategic resource for economic growth, technological innovation, and public sector transformation. This vision has shaped a growing body of policy initiatives and regulatory instruments aimed at establishing a European single market for data, enabling data to circulate across sectors and borders while supporting innovation and safeguarding European values. This ambition has been articulated most clearly in the [European Strategy for Data](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52020DC0066), which set out a roadmap for creating a common European data space capable of strengthening the EU’s digital sovereignty and global competitiveness. To operationalise this vision, the EU has progressively developed a comprehensive regulatory framework for the data economy, including instruments such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, the Open Data Directive, the Data Governance Act, and the Data Act. Together, these measures aim to address structural barriers that have historically limited the sharing and reuse of data across the internal market. Central to this policy agenda is the development of common European data spaces across strategic sectors such as health, mobility, energy, manufacturing, and agriculture. These initiatives seek to provide the infrastructures, governance mechanisms, and interoperability standards necessary to enable organisations to exchange and reuse data in a secure, trusted, and interoperable manner. European data spaces are therefore increasingly moving from concept to operational reality. Across sectors, work on technical infrastructure, interoperability, and governance is moving from pilots to deployment, signaling the EU’s ambition to enable a trusted and competitive data economy. Current initiatives remain largely sectoral, and while common architectural patterns, standards, and governance frameworks are being developed, they are still evolving, with differing levels of maturity and adoption across sectors. Yet despite these advances, large-scale adoption of data spaces continues to lag behind expectations. The challenge is no longer merely technical. While robust infrastructures and common standards are essential, the true economic and societal potential of European data spaces depends on the ecosystem’s ability to scale, interoperate, and foster meaningful collaboration across diverse stakeholders. Achieving this requires navigating a complex landscape marked by overlapping legal frameworks, fragmented governance structures, high entry costs, and unclear incentives — all of which affect participation and real-world deployment. This gap between policy ambition and practical implementation has been increasingly recognised in both policy and academic literature on the European data economy (e.g., [Commission study](https://publications.europa.eu/resource/cellar/08e03d91-4835-11e8-be1d-01aa75ed71a1.0002.01/DOC_1)). Many of the obstacles identified in earlier EU initiatives — including legal uncertainty surrounding data access and liability, limited interoperability between systems, insufficient incentives for data sharing, and persistent market and regulatory fragmentation — continue to affect the development of data‑sharing ecosystems today. Building on the work of the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC), the report “Barriers to the Adoption of Data Spaces” treats these challenges not as isolated issues but as interconnected families of barriers that collectively shape the opportunities and limitations of European data spaces. Rather than proposing neat, mutually exclusive categories, the typology developed here is intended as a heuristic to organise and stimulate discussion on barriers that often cut across legal frameworks, economic incentives, governance arrangements, and technical infrastructures. These barrier families overlap and interact: they frequently reinforce one another and complicate efforts to move from experimentation to sustainable, scalable data‑sharing ecosystems, and should therefore be read as analytical lenses rather than fixed, self‑standing classifications. > Macro (ui-button) Key barriers identified across the literature and ongoing initiatives include: - **Fragmentation** across legal, technical, governance, and business domains, creating silos and undermining interoperability. Differences in national legislation, inconsistent technical standards, and fragmented governance models complicate cross-sector and cross-border collaboration, eroding trust and slowing adoption. - **Inflexible and immature infrastructures**, which result in high entry and integration costs. Many data spaces rely on legacy systems, early-stage technologies, or rigid organizational models, making onboarding and adaptation difficult, particularly for SMEs and smaller public actors. - **Unclear incentives for participation**, which limit stakeholder engagement. Without tangible, immediate benefits — or aligned long-term value propositions — actors may hesitate to contribute or share data, stalling the creation of critical mass necessary for effective collaboration. - **Trust and data sovereignty concerns**, which affect willingness to share and reuse data. Legal uncertainty, complex licensing, and unclear liability allocation amplify perceptions of risk, while gaps in governance and technical safeguards may further inhibit confidence in data-sharing arrangements. - **Uncertain evolution pathways**, where unclear strategies for scaling, sustaining, and adapting data spaces increase operational and investment risks. Initiatives often depend on public subsidies or pilot funding, and ambiguity around future technical, governance, and regulatory developments makes long-term planning difficult. - **Market barriers**, including structural challenges that limit the entry, growth, or sustainability of new or smaller actors. These challenges encompass not only economic factors but also legal, technical, and cultural dimensions that can discourage diverse participation and reduce ecosystem inclusivity. These barriers are interdependent: fragmentation can reinforce infrastructure inflexibility, unclear incentives can exacerbate trust issues, and evolving technical and regulatory landscapes can amplify both uncertainty and market risks. Together, they create a systemic challenge: how to build data-sharing infrastructures that are not only technically interoperable but also inclusive, resilient, and economically sustainable. Addressing these barriers requires both incremental improvements — such as connecting high-impact areas first — and broader structural strategies that account for sector-specific needs and long-term ecosystem growth. **Exploring the Barriers in more Depth** To support the development of European data spaces, DSSC is publishing a series of articles that takes out specific aspect of the systemic barriers identified in our research to discuss them more in depth and advance discussion in the literature. Each contribution therefore focuses on a specific legal, economic, or governance challenge, explaining why it persists in practice and highlighting opportunities to address it within existing EU policy and regulatory frameworks. By unpacking these barriers in detail, the series provides practical insights for stakeholders and informs ongoing efforts to create interoperable, trustworthy, and sustainable data-sharing infrastructures. This first analysis examines how key EU regulations, namely the NIS2, GDPR, and DGA, shape responsibilities and liability for data breaches in data‑sharing environments. Despite its importance, this topic has so far remained underexplored in the context of emerging data spaces. As Europe accelerates the development of data spaces across critical sectors, such as healthcare, the lack of harmonised rules for cybersecurity accountability is becoming a structural risk. By analysing practical examples, the analysis will highlight both regulatory and operational gaps that continue to impede trust, clarity, and broader participation in European data spaces.