National digital data governance in developing countries: An institutional capability framework and its illustrative relevance to Vietnam

National digital transformation increasingly depends on governments’ ability to govern data as a strategic public resource across agencies, sectors, and administrative levels. This challenge is especially important in developing countries, where digital platforms, national databases, and online public services may expand faster than the institutional capability required to govern data coherently. Existing studies have examined open data, interoperability, metadata, stewardship, and public sector data governance, but these strands remain only partially connected in explaining how national digital data governance becomes workable under uneven institutional conditions. To address this gap, national digital data governance is conceptualized here as an institutional capability problem. The framework developed in the paper identifies five interrelated dimensions: strategic orientation and public value, implementation foundations, governance architecture, a national coordinating mechanism, and institutional conditions. Vietnam is used as an illustrative policy context, not as a formal empirical case study, because its recent digital reform agenda includes national digital transformation strategies, national databases, electronic identification, data sharing regulations, the National Data Center scheme, and the Law on Data 2024. The framework is used to examine how governance fragmentation may arise from weak alignment among strategic purpose, operational foundations, governance arrangements, coordinating mechanisms, and institutional conditions.