Increasingly, fulfilling the ecosystem’s value proposition relies on data embedded in information systems for coordination, monitoring, and evaluation. Orchestrators (ecosystem leaders) play a significant role in coordinating and aligning activities to realize the ecosystem’s value proposition. However, integrating data management and enforcing data governance at the ecosystem level complicates coordination. Furthermore, both data governance and ecosystem literature provide a fragmented understanding of how they intersect to deliver the ecosystem’s value proposition. Drawing on the business ecosystem and data governance literature, we conducted a case study of a waste management ecosystem in Africa to explore how the ecosystem leaders aligned data governance with their orchestration activities to support the ecosystem’s value proposition. Our findings reveal that, as part of their orchestrating role, ecosystem leaders employed relational data governance mechanisms to foster trust and encourage participant engagement. This, in turn, led to the emergence of structural governance, characterized by the creation of new data governance roles: Data Stakeholders and Trustees. Together, these relational and structural governance mechanisms enabled collective procedural data governance, supporting the ecosystem’s ability to achieve its value proposition. We also theorize the relationships among relational, procedural, and structural data governance mechanisms in an ecosystem context.
