The Missing Evidence Layer of the UN 2030 Agenda: How Decision Basis Records could make institutional accountability portable

Abstract

The Missing Evidence Layer of the UN 2030 Agenda examines a gap in the infrastructure used when consequential institutional decisions cross organizational, national, or machine boundaries. Institutions have increasingly shared ways to establish identity, move money, and exchange data, but no generally adopted, sector-neutral way to carry what an authoritative decision stood on: who decided, under what authority and rule, on what evidence, whether the decision remains valid, and, where artificial intelligence was involved, which model was used and what a person did with its output. The paper proposes a decision-evidence layer that would sit alongside existing systems rather than replace them. It would carry two portable records: a Decision Basis Record (DBR), created by the deciding institution, and a Reliance Record, created by the receiving institution to record whether it could verify the decision basis and whether it relied on it, for what purpose and under which rule. The proposal is not a software platform, shared database, blockchain, or replacement for existing institutional systems. It is an underlying interoperability layer intended to allow decision evidence to move across existing and future systems while the underlying data remains with the institutions that hold it. The paper connects this proposed infrastructure to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, particularly the goals of effective, accountable and transparent institutions, and examines its implications for artificial intelligence governance, digital public infrastructure, institutional reliance, public accountability, and the risk of a growing decision evidence divide between institutions that can prove how they decided and those that cannot. The broader claim remains a hypothesis. The research is based on more than eighty practitioner interviews weighted toward insurance, and the paper proposes a six-month field study involving development-bank co-financing decisions to test whether decision evidence can travel in a form another institution can check and rely on without reopening the original file.