Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Francine Berman: “Technology powers our world. But we often give it the upper hand, treating tech solutions as right by default and accepting online risk as the price we have to pay. Rampant security breaches, unwanted surveillance, predators, and misinformation are just a normal part of cyberspace. But what if tech was designed and managed to empower and protect the people who use it? In Better Tech, Francine Berman explores this question and argues that for society to advance and humanity to thrive, technology must put people first.
Berman focuses on the riskiest and most essential technologies—social media, AI chatbots, search engines—all of which serve as digital critical infrastructure. She argues that the risk-mitigation strategies for critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, food systems, and the electrical grid can also be used for cyberspace because we should be able to expect that our technology is similarly safe, dependable, and trustworthy. Better Tech goes beyond identifying the problems of technology and provides an actionable playbook of responsible design, development, use, and regulatory strategies that can be used by everyone from policymakers to students and general readers to reduce technology’s risks and advance the public good…(More)”.
Report by David Caswell and Shuwei Fang: “AI will likely grow the marketplace for information more than it has grown in 500 years, and could radically expand the role of information in human life. This opens the possibility of a society in which many more people can make sense of more situations, navigate change, and act with greater confidence and understanding.
Realizing that potential requires an information ecosystem that produces reliable knowledge and connects it with the circumstances where it is useful. This report examines what that would involve: how AI-mediated information might be gathered, verified, combined with context, and turned into relevant experiences, better decisions and practical action.
It draws on four Signals at Scale summits, held between December 2025 and May 2026, involving approximately 140 participants from technology, investment, governance, academia and media. Discussions began with the needs of people and societies, then worked toward the capabilities and investment required to meet them.
The resulting analysis identifies 14 areas of value creation and 70 potential investment categories. These span original information gathering, persistent knowledge, verification and integrity, personal and community context, decision support, and the infrastructure connecting them. Together, they describe opportunities for using AI to make useful knowledge radically more accessible, responsive and relevant—and to support forms of individual and collective understanding that are difficult to achieve today.
This is an exploratory map, with provisional categories and many questions that remain unresolved. Its purpose is to give builders and funders a considered starting point for practical work: identifying, developing and testing the systems through which AI-mediated information could bring substantial and lasting benefits to all of us…(More)”.
Report by International IDEA: “The findings of the 2026 Global State of Democracy (GSoD) report reflect what the Institute for Economics and Peace has called a “Great Fragmentation” (IEP 2026: 2) of historical alliances and partnerships, compounding a long-standing climate of radical uncertainty (Casas-Zamora 2024). As historical political alliances are questioned, new blocs emerge, and safety and security wane around the world, democracies are struggling to lead the way ahead in a decisive and authoritative manner.
Notably, one of the clearest trends in the Global State of Democracy Indices dataset is stagnation: in 81 percent of cases in which shifts at the factor1 level were possible, there was no change in countries’ performance. Since current levels of performance are largely middling, with most countries continuing to be clustered in the mid- and low-performance ranges across all categories, this stagnation is concerning. The relative dominance of mid-range performance is particularly worrying because it suggests that many countries remain in politically fragile “in-between” conditions. As discussed in Part 2, such contexts, especially those at the lower end of the mid-range band, are associated with heightened risks of instability and conflict (Gleditsch et al. 2009).
When change in the quality of democracy did occur, it was more often negative than positive. In 2025, 98 countries—representing 57 percent of all countries assessed—suffered a decline in at least one factor of democratic performance compared with their own performance five years earlier. In contrast, only 55 countries (32 percent) advanced in at least one factor over that period.2 This represents a substantial shift compared with a decade earlier: in 2015, 31 percent of all countries experienced at least one decline, and 27 percent saw at least one improvement. In 2025, deterioration was concentrated across many of the fundamental building blocks of democratic systems—credible elections, effective legislatures, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and access to a fair legal system in the pursuit of justice.
The most extensive global decline occurred in Freedom of Expression, which impacted 42 countries (24 percent of all countries in the dataset). This was followed closely by Freedom of the Press, whose scores fell in 23 percent of countries, and Access to Justice, which declined in 18 percent of countries. Much of the deterioration is rooted in coups, conflict, and the centralization of power, and the ongoing challenges affecting some of the most fundamental aspects of democratic governance raise questions about the extent to which the mechanisms relied upon to channel public priorities into policy remain fit for purpose…(More)”.
Article by Juliane Schmeling: “This article focuses on government collaboration in sovereign data spaces. As data sovereignty becomes increasingly crucial in a data-driven era, the need for controlled data-sharing environments, exemplified by initiatives such as Gaia-X, gains prominence. The article explores research-practice gaps, drawing on a focus group with key pioneers in the development of public-sector data spaces in Germany, who assessed the core focus areas of digital government research in this field. Findings highlight the roles of organisational capabilities, innovation, and participation, underpinned by trust and transparency, as well as the importance of standardisation and governance in fostering sovereign data spaces. The article concludes by emphasising actionable recommendations for enhancing data collaboration while addressing legal and institutional barriers. In doing so, the article contributes to the understanding of data sovereignty and its implications for public bureaucracies, ultimately aiming to reflect the digital government literature from a practical implementation perspective…(More)”.
Paper by Lorenzo Manuali: “An increasingly large number of projects seek to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance or support democracy. I argue that many of the ways in which computer scientists, deliberative democratic practitioners, and others are using LLMs to do this threatens the non-instrumental value of a collective’s ability to determine its own future. In particular, I present a novel worry that projects aimed at algorithmically facilitating deliberation and representing people’s interests in political processes threaten what has been called democratic autonomy. I begin with some conceptual groundwork concerning collective self-determination (and specifically democratic autonomy) to motivate its non-instrumental value. Next, I offer a few necessary conditions for democratic autonomy from the literature, such as the possession of a joint intention and said joint intention being realized in policy at least some significant portion of the time. I then show when two kinds of projects that use LLMs to enhance democracy – facilitative and representative LLMs – threaten these necessary conditions and thus democratic autonomy. I conclude by outlining some practical upshots and recommendations for projects that aim to use LLMs to enhance or support democracy…(More)”.
Paper by Fergus Green and Michele Zadra: “Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change demands rapid and systemic economic transformation. Yet, contemporary democracies seem tragically ill-suited to this task. Proposals to insulate climate policy making from democratic control—for instance, through delegation to expert bodies—seem likely to fuel the rise of authoritarian populists, which is already eroding democratic norms and institutions. Deepening democratic engagement with the process of decarbonization may provide an escape route from this apparent “democracy–decarbonization dilemma.” In this vein, there has recently been much enthusiasm for climate assemblies. Such processes can have profound effects on their participants. But can they influence attitudes to democracy and support for ambitious climate policy among the wider public? We conduct a narrative review of the theoretical and empirical literature on democratic mini-publics (DMPs) to answer this question and critically reflect on our findings. We find that DMPs can influence the wider public’s attitudes toward democratic institutions and public policy to some extent. Yet, DMPs alone—even if well publicized—seem unlikely to be sufficient to stimulate the widespread shifts in knowledge, capacities, attitudes and behavior necessary to escape the democracy–decarbonization dilemma. We propose expanding the use, institutionalization, and orientation of DMPs—so that they become a widely recognized and routinized feature of deliberative systems, interacting with both governments and the wider citizenry—while advancing complementary democratic reform initiatives…(More)”.
Report by the Tony Blair Institute: “Strong political leadership has always played a decisive role in determining which states succeed and which do not. This is especially true during times of disruption. Decisions made during these periods are often urgent and based on limited information, and their outcomes can have long-lasting effects on a country’s future trajectory.
Today, every leader is facing this scenario. Artificial intelligence will reshape every aspect of our world, from how wars are fought and labour markets operate to how science and research are conducted. Capabilities at the frontier are advancing almost weekly. Leaders are therefore confronting a technology whose consequences will extend across almost every area of government.
Yet while AI’s potential is widely understood, how it will evolve is not. Leaders know they need to act, but what to do and how much to do are often less clear. They must decide how much energy and compute to make available, how to prepare their economies and workforces, how to secure increasingly digital states, and how far to intervene in the development and deployment of the technology. In the West, they must make these choices amid a growing “techlash” against AI – but while doing less might help politically in the short term, it may carry significant long-term impacts on a country’s stability and security.
Political leaders cannot navigate this alone and are highly dependent on the institutions that support them, both to provide the evidence and expertise needed to understand the issues and potential decisions, and to implement those decisions. Yet the challenges that leaders face today often require multiple institutions, departments or regulators to work together, drawing on different strands of evidence and operating under different regulations. This increases the complexity of coordination and delivery. Leaders’ ability to navigate the age of AI will therefore depend on both the quality of the choices they make and on the capacity of the institutions around them to inform and implement those choices.
Technology, and especially AI, will be key to transforming how a state’s institutions work and improving their capacity to deliver. AI can help by enabling government to synthesise information across institutional boundaries, retrieve and apply institutional knowledge, and sustain coordination around shared outcomes. But technology alone is not enough. A new operating model is also needed that can combine political decision-making and authority with institutional expertise and is supported by abundant machine intelligence. Done well, this would give leaders greater capacity to understand the choices before them – and their potential consequences – while giving institutions greater capacity to translate those decisions into action…(More)”.
Article by Zeynep Engin, Jon Crowcroft and Stefaan Verhulst: “Academic peer review is in crisis—it is a structural reality that every editor, reviewer, and conscientious author now navigates daily. The symptoms are familiar: reviewer fatigue, inconsistent decisions, declining response rates, and a growing sense that the machinery of scholarly quality assurance is straining under a load it was never designed to bear. For a journal like Data & Policy—operating at the intersection of multiple disciplinary traditions and sectorial experiences, serving a field still in the process of constituting itself—these pressures are not abstract. They shape every editorial decision we make…(More)”.
Paper by Elena Murray, Moiz Raja Shaikh, Stefaan Verhulst, Hinali Doshi, Romeo Leapciuc, Perizat Mamutalieva and Mahadia Tunga: “As data-driven service delivery expands, data reuse holds significant potential to improve access to and quality of essential services for young people. However, limited youth involvement in decisions about how their data is reused risks perpetuating mistrust and deepening the inequalities that these services seek to address, particularly if young people choose to avoid seeking services or withhold critical information out of fear of misuse. Grounded in a social license approach, responsible data reuse aimed at enhancing service delivery therefore requires methodologies that meaningfully engage youth and reflect their preferences and expectations. This article presents findings from the NextGenData project, which developed and piloted a scalable methodology for engaging young people aged 19–24 in co-designing responsible data reuse strategies. Conducted as a year-long participatory action research initiative across India, Tanzania, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan, the approach implemented youth assemblies, deliberative methods, and localised facilitation by national partners to engage young people. Through a cross-contextual analysis, this study emphasises the importance of context-sensitive, multi-phase engagement in supporting the development of a social license for data reuse and presents a publicly available toolkit designed to support the replication and adaptation of this engagement strategy in diverse contexts. Drawing on the findings, recommendations are presented for policymakers and practitioners to guide future initiatives…(More)”.
Article by BKReader: “New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams released a new report titled “Artificially Inevitable,” examining the role of artificial intelligence local, state and federal government, and outlining guidelines for responsible use of the rapidly developing technology.
According to the report, power consumption by data centers in the United States are estimated to drive almost half the growth in electrical demand within the next 5 years. The nation’s largest data centers require up to 5 million gallons of water a day, the same water use for a town with between 10,000 to 50,000 residents.
“Our government has a responsibility to help New Yorkers better understand this technology that is rapidly changing the world we live in, and to ensure that when this technology is used, it is to the benefit of New Yorkers,” said Williams upon the report’s release…(More)”.