Stefaan Verhulst
Playbook by Jenrose Fitzgerald, Ally Terhaar, and Dan Ferris: “Data for Social Impact (DSI), an initiative of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, has played a key role in cultivating community data capacity in the St. Louis region—particularly at the organizational and collective levels. DSI has done this by building capacity among social sector organizations to work collaboratively with data across government, philanthropy, nonprofits, and impacted communities. This playbook outlines DSI’s approach to building community data capacity in St. Louis and lessons learned along the way…(More)”.
Paper by Joseph Lacey, Samuel Johnston, Leonardo Puleo and Jan Fabian Dollbaum: “Democratic scholarship maintains a consensus that rhetoric targeted at undermining free and fair elections is more threatening to democracy than transgressions of deliberative values. However, whether citizens democratic alarm systems are wired this way remains empirically untested. We explore this question using a preregistered survey experiment with 5,303 respondents across the US, England, Germany, and Italy. Our central finding is that citizens are significantly more disapproving of deliberative norm violations than of threats to electoral democracy’s core institutions. Our findings are consistent across countries and experimental variations in actor-contexts, where we test citizens’ attitudes to norm violations by three distinct actors: candidates, legislators, and journalists. Exploring our findings by the attitudinal profile of respondents, we find that those with more populist attitudes are more likely to be tolerant of electoral democracy violations and intolerant of deliberative violations. These results have significant implications for understanding public resistance to democratic backsliding…(More)”
Article by Zeynep Pamuk: “…What has always been missing in these debates is the idea that the public good of science goes far beyond the material benefits it delivers. Science certainly plays a key role in fueling economic growth, driving innovation, and improving health, but these functions do not exhaust its significance. On the contrary, science is the precondition of democratic government in modern societies. Unlike other public goods like public infrastructure or even art, science claims to provide fundamental truths that shape our most basic and objective understanding of the world, which in turn shape our ability to deliberate about political issues and hold policymakers accountable. Defenses of science that double down on its contribution to GDP or the treatment of disease miss this fundamental political function of scientific knowledge—something the Trump administration seems to understand.
It’s not just that claims to scientific truth are ubiquitous in policymaking, helping societies cope with uncertainty and change. Scientific claims can themselves drive new political agendas and become sources of uncertainty and change. Moreover, the way that scientists define problems and pursue solutions both offers political possibilities and restricts them. Whether the relationship between science and democracy is a productive one depends not only on the quality and reliability of knowledge a society produces but also on decisions about what types of knowledge are pursued and how. The power to fund science and decide on the distribution of funds is thus a fundamentally political power, and making science a truly public good requires giving citizens more say over its direction.
At first glance, the political review mandated by OMB’s recently proposed change to the federal grant system might seem to address these democratic deficits. But replacing the unaccountable judgment of scientific elites with the unaccountable judgment of presidential appointees—empowered to terminate research “for convenience” whenever priorities shift—is no improvement in democratic legitimacy. Neither is Kratsios’s recent report, Science: A New Golden Age, despite its embrace of mission-oriented projects. Heavy reliance on AI, increased emphasis on commercial incentives, and a reallocation of funding to the private sector will only further erode the public interest that publicly funded science should serve…(More)”.
Book by Cory Doctorow: “In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.
AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.
For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around…(More)”.
Essay by Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway: “..To truly reverse the dramatic decline in state capacity, governments need to take radical approaches that can win public trust. In his classic 1967 book, Inside Bureaucracy, the economist Anthony Downs described how institutions that lose their ability to adapt eventually embark on a slow death, becoming hollow shells of rules and procedures. Once they reach this point, he argued, they must be either reborn or destroyed. Today, advanced democracies around the world need to give serious attention to institutional rebirth—rebuilding state agencies into departments of now, unencumbered by people, precepts, and processes of past eras. But they also need to consider which legacy agencies are beyond reinvention and should be shut down altogether.
Not every broken institution has to be rebuilt from scratch. Governments do not have the time, resources, or political bandwidth to turn over the tables in every part of the state at once, nor would doing so be wise. Relentless, incremental improvement of existing agencies remains an important part of statecraft. But if they are going to solve the current crisis, democracies will have to get comfortable with creating new institutions. Curing what ails democracy today will require many things, but no other remedies will stick if governments can’t deliver what they promise.
TEST, LEARN, REPEAT
There is no single correct formula for institutional rebirth. An institution might be considered reborn when it has installed a new operating model that allows it to achieve its stated mission. Some legacy institutions hold valuable assets—authorities, data, know-how—that are not easy to move to a new home, so governments need to figure out how much of the existing system is irretrievably broken and what if anything needs to be preserved. It is critical to get the degree of newness right…(More)”.
Editorial to Special Issue by Annika Agger and Toril Ringholm: “Public participation, and the involvement of citizens and affected stakeholders more broadly, has become a central reference point in contemporary public sector innovation agendas (Nguyen et al., 2024). In the scholarly debate, these trends are examined through the lens of public sector innovation, with scholars typically distinguishing between two main types: democratic innovations aimed at involving more voices and enhancing opportunities for influence (Hendriks, 2023; OECD, 2025), and public service innovations focused on improving public services through co-creation with users and affected stakeholders (Brandsen et al., 2018; Escobar & Elstub, 2019).
While these two strands share an interest in strengthening participation as a response to increasing critiques of traditional participatory arenas, often characterised by low levels of representation and limited influence (Fernández-Martínez et al., 2019), they emerge from distinct strands of scholarship. Some strands are rooted in democratic theory, while others in public management and co-creation research. This not only reflects divergent analytical starting points, but also contributes to a proliferation of partly overlapping concepts and terminologies, such as citizen engagement, citizen involvement, citizen participation, inter-active governance, co-creation, co-production and civic empowerment. What is common in the different scholarly debates about the two types of innovations both in research and practice is a concern with: who participates and whose voices are being heard (Ahola, 2025; Brandsen et al., 2018; Escobar & Elstub, 2019).
In this editorial, we use the term participation in this broad sense to refer to the many ways in which citizens contribute to the shaping of policies, decisions and public services across both formalised arenas and more emergent, collaborative practices. Moreover, we define participatory innovation as:
New institutional arrangements that move beyond traditional formats of engagement by creating alternative channels for citizen involvement in decision-making, policy design, and governance.
This definition draws on the scholarly literature about public sector innovation, democratic innovation and co-creation and co-production (Hartley, 2005; Smith, 2009; Geissel, 2013; Brandsen et al., 2018; Nyseth et al., 2018; Ansell & Torfing, 2021; Aastvedt & Higdem, 2022).
Following from this, we examine ‘participation’ as a driver of public innovation and explore how different participatory formats contribute to innovation processes, outcomes, and institutional change in the public sector. The contributions to this special issue are organised around three interrelated questions, which are explored in different ways across the articles:
How do the different participatory formats affect democratic legitimacy and trust?
How do participatory innovations in the development of public policies or services shape governance logics in the contexts?
What democratic and governance-related implications follow from framing participation as a driver of innovation rather than as consultation or representation alone?
To contextualise these questions, the editorial first outlines the historical evolution of participation, then introduces the analytical lens guiding the analysis, and finally presents the four contributions followed by a discussion of their implications…(More)”.
Book by Deborah Lupton: “…offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how people imagine and make futures as part of their everyday lives. It addresses important questions about who is included in futures thinking and futures making, and who is excluded.
Bringing together historical, anthropological, sociological, geographical and arts-based perspectives, this book provides a pithy yet expansive overview of social theories, research and creative approaches applied to futures thinking. Global practices and traditions of divination, fortune telling and speculation from antiquity to the present day are investigated for how they help people deal with uncertainty and engage with the yet-to-come, while also serving political and economic objectives. The book emphasises the plasticity of temporalities and lived experiences across diverse social groups, together with the role of the creatures, things, landscapes, and ecosystems with which we share our futures. The concluding chapter integrates the insights offered from each of the fields of research discussed in the book, providing ideas to spark vibrant and transformative approaches to creative futuring…(More)”
Report by Stefaan Verhulst, Adam Zable, Andrew Zahuranec, Begoña Glez. Otero, and Sara Marcucci: “…Digital Self-Determination (DSD) provides a governance foundation for earning and maintaining that social license. In practice, this means enabling affected individuals and communities to express their expectations and preferences and to influence the conditions under which data is governed and reused. DSD can therefore help data spaces develop beyond trusted technical infrastructures into trusted social institutions.
While DSD has gained traction as a guiding principle, practical approaches for embedding it into the governance of digital systems and institutions remain limited.
The Roadmap for Digital Self-Determination in Data Spaces, developed with the support of the Swiss Federal Administration, addresses this broader implementation gap through the specific context of data spaces. The roadmap is available HERE.
Four Phases and Six Tools
The roadmap operationalizes Digital Self-Determination through four phases and six tools.
- Establish governance foundations that embed agency
- The Assessment for Data Space Governance helps operators evaluate data governance readiness and identify strengths, gaps, and priorities.
- The Guidance on Costs for DSD Implementation in a Data Space helps identify the organizational, legal, technical, and financial resources needed to sustain participation, enforcement, transparency, redress, and review.
- Enable communities to express expectations, interests, and preferences
- The Guidance on Public Engagement Mechanism Selection helps practitioners choose among informational, consultative, deliberative, and collaborative approaches suited to different contexts.
- Translate expectations and preferences into operational arrangements
- The List of Governance Instruments in Data Spaces maps the legal, organizational, technical, and procedural mechanisms available for this work.
- The Model Swiss Data Sharing Agreement with DSD Clauses shows how DSD commitments can be incorporated into binding provisions concerning purpose, use, transparency, accountability, safeguards, and adaptation .
- Assess whether DSD arrangements continue to work over time
- The Options for Stress Testing Digital Self-Determination provides methods for assessing whether data space governance remains effective, fair, transparent, and supportive of meaningful control as conditions change, including expanded data reuse, security incidents, coordination failures, and disputes over authorization or withdrawal…(More)”.
Paper by Cassandra Sedran-Price et al: “…Indigenous Data Sovereignty has emerged in response to poor data practices concerning Indigenous Peoples worldwide and offers a way of returning control of data ecosystems to Indigenous Peoples. In Australia, the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles were developed and published in 2018 and as a result, there is a growing body of academic and policy relevant literature on Indigenous Data Sovereignty. There are increasing calls from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and their organisations, governments, statistical agencies and universities for practical guidance on how to operationalise Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles through Indigenous Data Governance within data systems controlled outside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations. The aim of this paper is to guide how the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles can be applied within organisations creating or holding Indigenous data. This guide can additionally be used to review organisations’ and institutions’ progress on their Indigenous Data Sovereignty journeys…(More)”.
OECD Report: “In the face of complex societal and technological transformation, governments are turning to incubators and accelerators to help their public institutions experiment safely, act quickly and embed more adaptive, forward-looking ways of working. This paper analyses 128 cases of public sector incubators and accelerators, looking at their capacity to help governments address institutional bottlenecks and better anticipate or respond to transformative change. The cases examined indicate that incubators and accelerators act as public sector innovation enablers that can support efforts to (re)design public institutions to better navigate complex challenges and evolving reforms. The paper examines how incubators and accelerators have been adapted to the public sector, considers common barriers and enablers, and suggests a blueprint for their design that comprises five key dimensions: strategic purpose, ecosystem engagement and co-ordination, organisational context, performance mechanisms, and value creation. Finally, the paper provides a step-by-step approach to help governments tailor these programmes to their own specific contexts…(More)“.