Article by Leslie Anne and Duvic Paoli: “The article is interested in the relationship between citizens’ assemblies on climate change (‘climate assemblies’) and the law. It offers a research roadmap on the legal dimensions of climate assemblies with the view to advancing our knowledge of deliberative climate governance. The article explores six fundamental areas of inquiry on which legal scholarship can offer relevant insights. They relate to: i) understanding the outcomes of climate assemblies; ii) clarifying their role in the public law relationship between individuals and government; iii) gaining insights into the making of climate legislation and other rules; iv) exploring the societal authority of norms; v) illustrating the transnational governance of climate change, including the diffusion of its norms and vi) offering a testing ground for the design of legal systems that are more ecologically and socially just. The aim is to nudge legal scholars into exploring the richness of the questions raised by the emergence of climate assemblies and, in turn, to encourage other social science scholars to reflect on how the legal perspective might contribute to better understanding their object of study…(More)”.
Nudges and Nudging: A User’s Manual
Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Many policies take the form of nudges, defined as liberty-preserving approaches that steer people in particular directions, but that also allow them to go their own way Some nudges attempt to correct self-control problems. Some nudges attempt to counteract unrealistic optimism. Some nudges attempt to correct present bias. Some nudges attempt to correct market failures, as when people are nudged not to emit air pollution. For every conventional market failure, there is a potential nudge. For every behavioral bias (optimistic bias, present bias, availability bias, limited attention), there is a responsive nudge. There are many misconceptions about nudges and nudging, and they are a diversion…(More)”.
Can Real-Time Metrics Fill China’s Data Gap?
Case-study by Danielle Goldfarb: “After Chinese authorities abruptly reversed the country’s zero-COVID policy in 2022, global policymakers needed a clear and timely picture of the economic and health fallout.
China’s economy is the world’s second largest and the country has deep global links, so an accurate picture of its trajectory mattered for global health, growth and inflation. Getting a solid read was a challenge, however, since official health and economic data not only were not timely, but were widely viewed as unreliable.
There are now vast amounts and varied types of digital data available, from satellite images to social media text to online payments; these, along with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), make it possible to collect and analyze digital data in ways previously impossible.
Could these new tools help governments and global institutions refute or confirm China’s official picture and gather more timely intelligence?..(More)”.
Generative AI in Transportation Planning: A Survey
Paper by Longchao Da: “The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning…(More)”.
How data can transform government in Latin America and the Caribbean
Article by William Maloney, Daniel Rogger, and Christian Schuster: ” Governments across Latin America and the Caribbean are grappling with deep governance challenges that threaten progress and stability, including the need to improve efficiency, accountability and transparency.
Amid these obstacles, however, the region possesses a powerful, often underutilized asset: the administrative data it collects as a part of its everyday operations.
When harnessed effectively using data analytics, this data has the potential to drive transformative change, unlock new opportunities for growth and help address some of the most pressing issues facing the region. It’s time to tap into this potential and use data to chart a path forward. To help governments make the most of the opportunities that this data presents, the World Bank has embarked on a decade-long project to synthesize the latest knowledge on how to measure and improve government performance. We have found that governments already have a lot of the data they need to dramatically improve public services while conserving scarce resources.
But it’s not enough to collect data. It must also be put to good use to improve decision making, design better public policy and strengthen public sector functioning. We call these tools and practices for repurposing government data government analytics…(More)”.
Launch: A Blueprint to Unlock New Data Commons for Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Blueprint by Hannah Chafetz, Andrew J. Zahuranec, and Stefaan Verhulst: “In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, it is critical to broaden access to diverse and high-quality data to ensure that AI applications can serve all communities equitably. Yet, we are on the brink of a potential “data winter,” where valuable data assets that could drive public good are increasingly locked away or inaccessible.
Data commons — collaboratively governed ecosystems that enable responsible sharing of diverse datasets across sectors — offer a promising solution. By pooling data under clear standards and shared governance, data commons can unlock the potential of AI for public benefit while ensuring that its development reflects the diversity of experiences and needs across society.
To accelerate the creation of data commons, The Open Data Policy, today, releases “A Blueprint to Unlock New Data Commons for AI” — a guide on how to steward data to create data commons that enable public-interest AI use cases…the document is aimed at supporting libraries, universities, research centers, and other data holders (e.g. governments and nonprofits) through four modules:
- Mapping the Demand and Supply: Understanding why AI systems need data, what data can be made available to train, adapt, or augment AI, and what a viable data commons prototype might look like that incorporates stakeholder needs and values;
- Unlocking Participatory Governance: Co-designing key aspects of the data commons with key stakeholders and documenting these aspects within a formal agreement;
- Building the Commons: Establishing the data commons from a practical perspective and ensure all stakeholders are incentivized to implement it; and
- Assessing and Iterating: Evaluating how the commons is working and iterating as needed.
These modules are further supported by two supplementary taxonomies. “The Taxonomy of Data Types” provides a list of data types that can be valuable for public-interest generative AI use cases. The “Taxonomy of Use Cases” outlines public-interest generative AI applications that can be developed using a data commons approach, along with possible outcomes and stakeholders involved.
A separate set of worksheets can be used to further guide organizations in deploying these tools…(More)”.
A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies
Democracy Funders Network: “For too many Americans, the prospect of engaging with lawmakers about the important issues in their lives is either logistically inaccessible, or unsatisfactory in result. Exploring An Innovative Approach to Democratic Governance: A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies, produced by Democracy Funders Network and New America, explores the potential for citizens’ assemblies to transform and strengthen democratic processes in the U.S. The guide offers philanthropists and in-depth look at the potential opportunities and challenges citizens’ assemblies present for building civic power at the local level and fomenting authentic civic engagement within communities.
Citizens’ assemblies belong in the broader field of collaborative governance, an umbrella term for public engagement that shifts governing power and builds trust by bringing together government officials and community members to collaborate on policy outcomes through shared decision-making…(More)”.
AI-Facilitated Collective Judgements
Article by Manon Revel and Théophile Pénigaud: “This article unpacks the design choices behind longstanding and newly proposed computational frameworks aimed at finding common grounds across collective preferences and examines their potential future impacts, both technically and normatively. It begins by situating AI-assisted preference elicitation within the historical role of opinion polls, emphasizing that preferences are shaped by the decision-making context and are seldom objectively captured. With that caveat in mind, we explore AI-facilitated collective judgment as a discovery tool for fostering reasonable representations of a collective will, sense-making, and agreement-seeking. At the same time, we caution against dangerously misguided uses, such as enabling binding decisions, fostering gradual disempowerment or post-rationalizing political outcomes…(More)”.
These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration
Article by Karen Yourish et al: “As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
The list is most likely incomplete. More agency memos may exist than those seen by New York Times reporters, and some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it.
All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies. It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration…(More)”
How to Win a War Against Reality
Review by Abby Smith Rumsey: “How does a democracy work if its citizens do not have a shared sense of reality? Not very well. A country whose people cannot agree on where they stand now will not agree on where they are going. This is where Americans find themselves in 2025, and they did not arrive at this juncture yesterday. The deep divisions that exist have grown over the decades, dating at least to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and are now metastasizing at an alarming rate. These divisions have many causes, from climate change to COVID-19, unchecked migration to growing wealth inequality, and other factors. People who live with chronic division and uncertainty are vulnerable. It may not take much to get them to sign on to a politics of certainty…
Take the United States. By this fractured logic, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means that America once was great, is no longer, but can be restored to its prelapsarian state, when whites sat firmly at the top of the ethnic hierarchy that constitutes the United States. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy and self-identified liberal, is deeply troubled that many liberal democracies across the globe are morphing into illiberal democracies before our very eyes. In “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” he argues that all authoritarian regimes know the value of a unified, if largely mythologized, view of past, present, and future. He wrote his book to warn us that we in the United States are on the cusp of becoming an authoritarian nation or, in Stanley’s account, fascist. By explaining “the mechanisms by which democracy is attacked, the ways myths and lies are used to justify actions such as wars, and scapegoating of groups, we can defend against these attacks, and even reverse the tide.”…
The fabrication of the past is also the subject of Steve Benen’s book “Ministry of Truth. Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.” Benen, a producer on the Rachel Maddow Show, keeps his eye tightly focused on the past decade, still fresh in the minds of readers. His account tracks closely how the Republican Party conducted “a war on the recent past.” He attempts an anatomy of a very unsettling phenomenon: the success of a gaslighting campaign Trump and his supporters perpetrated against the American public and even against fellow Republicans who are not MAGA enough for Trump…(More)”