Learning Policy, Doing Policy: Interactions Between Public Policy Theory, Practice and Teaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by: Trish Mercer, Russell Ayres, Brian Head, and John Wanna: “When it comes to policymaking, public servants have traditionally learned ‘on the job’, with practical experience and tacit knowledge valued over theory-based learning and academic analysis. Yet increasing numbers of public servants are undertaking policy training through postgraduate qualifications and/or through short courses in policy training.

Learning Policy, Doing Policy explores how policy theory is understood by practitioners and how it influences their practice. The book brings together insights from research, teaching and practice on an issue that has so far been understudied. Contributors include Australian and international policy scholars, and current and former practitioners from government agencies. The first part of the book focuses on theorising, teaching and learning about the policymaking process; the second part outlines how current and former practitioners have employed policy process theory in the form of models or frameworks to guide and analyse policymaking in practice; and the final part examines how policy theory insights can assist policy practitioners.

In exploring how policy process theory is developed, taught and taken into policymaking practice, Learning Policy, Doing Policy draws on the expertise of academics and practitioners, and also ‘pracademics’ who often serve as a bridge between the academy and government. It draws on a range of both conceptual and applied examples. Its themes are highly relevant for both individuals and institutions, and reflect trends towards a stronger professional ethos in the Australian Public Service. This book is a timely resource for policy scholars, teaching academics, students and policy practitioners….(More)”

The Case for Open Land-Data Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Hanstad at Project Syndicate: “Last month, a former Zimbabwean cabinet minister was arrested for illegally selling parcels of state land. A few days earlier, a Malaysian court convicted the ex-chairman of a state-owned land development agency of corruption. And in January, the Estonian government collapsed amid allegations of corrupt property dealings. These recent events all turned the spotlight on the growing but neglected threat of land-related corruption.

Such corruption can flourish in countries that are unprepared to manage the heightened demand for land that accompanies economic and population growth. Land governance in these countries – institutions, policies, rules, and records for managing land rights and use – is underdeveloped, which undermines the security of citizens’ land rights and enables covert land grabs by the well connected.

In Ghana, for example, the government keeps land records for only about 2% of currently operating farms; the ownership of the remainder is largely undocumented. In India, these records were, until recently, often kept in disorganized stacks in government offices.

Under such circumstances, corruption becomes relatively easy and lucrative. After all, when recordkeeping is nonexistent or chaotic, who can confidently identify the rightful owner of a parcel of land? As the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and Transparency International put it in a report a decade ago, “where land governance is deficient, high levels of corruption often flourish.” This corruption “is pervasive and without effective means of control.”

Globally, one in five people report having paid a bribe to access land services. In Africa, two out of three people believe the rich are likely to pay bribes or use their connections to grab land. Uncertainty about land rights can also affect housing security – around a billion people worldwide say they expect to be forced from their homes over the next five years.

Inevitably, the marginalized and vulnerable are the worst affected, whether they are widows driven from their homes by speculators or entire communities subjected to forced eviction by developers. Weak land rights and corruption also fuel conflict within communities, such as in Kenya, where political parties promise already-occupied land to supporters in an attempt to win votes.

But there is reason for hope. The ongoing revolution in information and communications technology provides unprecedented opportunities to digitize and open land records. Doing so would clarify the land rights of hundreds of millions of people globally and limit the scope for corrupt practices….(More)”.

Citizen assembly takes on Germany’s climate pledges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Kuebler at Deutsche Welle: “A group of 160 German citizens chosen at random from across the country will launch an experiment in participatory democracy this week, aiming to inspire public debate and get the government to follow through with its pledge to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050.

The Bürgerrat Klima, or Citizen Assembly, will follow the example set in the last few years by countries like Ireland, the United Kingdom and France. The concept, intended to directly involve citizens in the climate decisions that will shape their lives in the coming decades, is seen as a way for people to push for stronger climate policies and political action — though the previous experiments abroad have met with varying degrees of success.

Inspired by a 99-person Citizens’ Assembly, the Irish government adopted a series of reforms in its 2019 climate bill aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 51% before the end of this decade. These included recommendations “to ensure climate change is at the centre of policy-making,” and covered everything from clean tech and power generation to electric vehicles and plans to retrofit older buildings.

But in France, where 150 participants submitted bold proposals that included a ban on domestic flights and making ecocide a crime, lawmakers have been less enthusiastic about taking the measures on board. A new climate and resilience bill, which aims to cut France’s CO2 emissions by 40% over the next decade and is due to be adopted later this year, has incorporated less than half of the group’s ideas. Greenpeace has said the proposed bill would have been “ambitious 15 or 20 years ago.”…(More)”.

Infrastructure Isn’t Really About Roads. It’s About the Society We Want.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times: “…Consider civic infrastructure. Many of the critical systems the United States needs to build and sustain a good society are degraded. Discriminatory voting laws, like Georgia’s new legislation, threaten the integrity of the political process. Social media companies like Facebook, by using algorithms that reward political extremism and promote political polarization, distort the discourse in our public sphere. Community organizations that help feed, house and educate low-income Americans are essential for preserving peace and improving living standards, but they have struggled to remain solvent during the pandemic. Mr. Biden’s plan leaves these failings in the civic infrastructure practically untouched.

The neglect of social infrastructure in Mr. Biden’s plan is even more striking, given how critical social infrastructure was to the success of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the last “once in a generation” investment in America. The New Deal was not just about roads and bridges, after all. It also funded the construction or renovation of thousands of gathering places across the country, in suburbs and cities, rural areas and small towns.

What came from these investments? Libraries. Parks. Playgrounds. Piers. Post offices. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Theaters. Museums. Gardens. Forests. Beaches. Lodges. Walkways. Armories. Courthouses. County fairgrounds. Today too many of us take these projects for granted, even as we continue to use them on a huge scale.

Paradoxically, the success of this social infrastructure is also the source of its degradation. Our gathering places are overrun and dilapidated. Parks and playgrounds need updating. Athletic fields need new surfaces. Public libraries have an estimated $26 billion in capital needs, according to the American Library Association, and the costs of safely operating them at full capacity are likely to exceed what states and local governments can afford. None of this, sadly, is explicitly addressed in Mr. Biden’s proposal….(More)”.

Resetting Data Governance: Authorized Public Purpose Access and Society Criteria for Implementation of APPA Principles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the WEF Japan: “In January 2020, our first publication presented Authorized Public Purpose Access (APPA), a new data governance model that aims to strike a balance between individual rights and the interests of data holders and the public interest. It is proposed that the use of personal data for public-health purposes, including fighting pandemics, be subject to appropriate and balanced governance mechanisms such as those set out the APPA approach. The same approach could be extended to the use of data for non-medical public-interest purposes, such as achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This publication proposes a systematic approach to implementing APPA and to pursuing public-interest goals through data use. The approach values practicality, broad social agreement on appropriate goals and methods, and the valid interests of all stakeholders….(More)”.

Predicting social tipping and norm change in controlled experiments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by James Andreoni, Nikos Nikiforakis, and Simon Siegenthaler: “Social tipping—instances of sudden change that upend social order—is rarely anticipated and usually understood only in hindsight. The ability to predict when societies will reach a tipping point has significant implications for welfare, especially when social norms are detrimental. In a large-scale laboratory experiment, we identify a model that accurately predicts social tipping and use it to address a long-standing puzzle: Why do norms sometimes persist when they are detrimental to social welfare? We show that beneficial norm change is often hindered by a desire to avoid the costs associated with transitioning to a new norm. We find that policies that help societies develop a common understanding of the benefits from change foster the abandonment of detrimental norms….(More)”.

You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner: “Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.

Phillips and Milner describe how our poisoned media landscape came into being, beginning with the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s—which, they say, exemplify “network climate change”—and proceeding through the emergence of trolling culture and the rise of the reactionary far right (as well as its amplification by journalists) during and after the 2016 election. They explore the history of conspiracy theories in the United States, focusing on those concerning the Deep State; explain why old media literacy solutions fail to solve new media literacy problems; and suggest how we can navigate the network crisis more thoughtfully, effectively, and ethically. We need a network ethics that looks beyond the messages and the messengers to investigate toxic information’s downstream effects….(More)”.

Bridging the data-policy gap in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by PARIS21 and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation (MIF): “National statistics are an essential component of policymaking: they provide the evidence required to design policies that address the needs of citizens, to monitor results and hold governments to account. Data and policy are closely linked. As Mo Ibrahim puts it: “without data, governments drive blind”. However, there is evidence that the capacity of African governments for data-driven policymaking remains limited by a wide data-policy gap.

What is the data-policy gap?
On the data side, statistical capacity across the continent has improved in recent decades. However, it remains low compared to other world regions and is hindered by several challenges. African national statistical offices (NSOs) often lack adequate financial and human resources as well as the capacity to provide accessible and available data. On the policy side, data literacy as well as a culture of placing data first in policy design and monitoring are still not widespread. Thus, investing in the basic building blocks of national statistics, such as civil registration, is often not a key priority.

At the same time, international development frameworks, such as the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union Agenda 2063, require that every signatory country produce and use high-quality, timely and disaggregated data in order to shape development policies that leave no one behind and to fulfil reporting commitments.

Also, the new data ecosystem linked to digital technologies is providing an explosion of data sourced from non-state providers. Within this changing data landscape, African NSOs, like those in many other parts of the world, are confronted with a new data stewardship role. This will add further pressure on the capacity of NSOs, and presents additional challenges in terms of navigating issues of governance and use…

Recommendations as part of a six-point roadmap for bridging the data-policy map include:

  1. Creating a statistical capacity strategy to raise funds
  2. Connecting to knowledge banks to hire and retain talent
  3. Building good narratives for better data use
  4. Recognising the power of foundational data
  5. Strengthening statistical laws to harness the data revolution
  6. Encouraging data use in policy design and implementation…(More)”

The Ease of Tracking Mobile Phones of U.S. Soldiers in Hot Spots

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Byron Tau at the Wall Street Journal: “In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor named PlanetRisk Inc. was working on a software prototype when its employees discovered they could track U.S. military operations through the data generated by the apps on the mobile phones of American soldiers.

At the time, the company was using location data drawn from apps such as weather, games and dating services to build a surveillance tool that could monitor the travel of refugees from Syria to Europe and the U.S., according to interviews with former employees. The company’s goal was to sell the tool to U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials.

But buried in the data was evidence of sensitive U.S. military operations by American special-operations forces in Syria. The company’s analysts could see phones that had come from military facilities in the U.S., traveled through countries like Canada or Turkey and were clustered at the abandoned Lafarge Cement Factory in northern Syria, a staging area at the time for U.S. special-operations and allied forces.

The discovery was an early look at what today has become a significant challenge for the U.S. armed forces: how to protect service members, intelligence officers and security personnel in an age where highly revealing commercial data being generated by mobile phones and other digital services is bought and sold in bulk, and available for purchase by America’s adversaries….(More)“.

Why bad times call for good data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Harford in the Financial Times: “Watching the Ever Given wedge itself across the Suez Canal, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh. But it was yet another unpleasant reminder that the unseen gears in our global economy can all too easily grind or stick.

From the shutdown of Texas’s plastic polymer manufacturing to a threat, to vaccine production from a shortage of giant plastic bags, we keep finding out the hard way that modern life relies on weak links in surprising places.

So where else is infrastructure fragile and taken for granted? I worry about statistical infrastructure — the standards and systems we rely on to collect, store and analyse our data.

Statistical infrastructure sounds less important than a bridge or a power line, but it can mean the difference between life and death for millions. Consider Recovery (Randomised Evaluations of Covid-19 Therapy). Set up in a matter of days by two Oxford academics, Martin Landray and Peter Horby, over the past year Recovery has enlisted hospitals across the UK to run randomised trials of treatments such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the cheap steroid dexamethasone.

With minimal expense and paperwork, it turned the guesses of physicians into simple but rigorous clinical trials. The project quickly found that dexamethasone was highly effective as a treatment for severe Covid-19, thereby saving a million lives.

Recovery relied on data accumulated as hospitals treated patients and updated their records. It wasn’t always easy to reconcile the different sources — some patients were dead according to one database and alive on another. But such data problems are solvable and were solved. A modest amount of forethought about collecting the right data in the right way has produced enormous benefits….

But it isn’t just poor countries that have suffered. In the US, data about Covid-19 testing was collected haphazardly by states. This left the federal government flying blind, unable to see where and how quickly the virus was spreading. Eventually volunteers, led by the journalists Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal of the Covid Tracking Project, put together a serviceable data dashboard. “We have come to see the government’s initial failure here as the fault on which the entire catastrophe pivots,” wrote Meyer and Madrigal in The Atlantic. They are right.

What is more striking is that the weakness was there in plain sight. Madrigal recently told me that the government’s plan for dealing with a pandemic assumed that good data would be available — but did not build the systems to create them. It is hard to imagine a starker example of taking good statistical infrastructure for granted….(More)”.