Stefaan Verhulst
Stefaan G. Verhulst at The GovLab: “We live in challenging times. From climate change to economic inequality and forced migration, the difficulties confronting decision-makers are unprecedented in their variety, as well as in their complexity and urgency. Our standard policy toolkit seems stale and ineffective while existing governance institutions are increasingly outdated and distrusted.
To tackle today’s challenges, we need not only new solutions but new ways of arriving at solutions. In particular, we need fresh research methodologies that can provide actionable insights on 21st century conditions. Such methodologies would allow us to redesign how decisions are made, how public services are offered, and how complex problems are solved around the world.
Rethinking research is a vast project, with multiple components. This new essay focuses on one particular area of research: action research. In the essay, I first explain what we mean by action research, and also explore some of its potential. I subsequently argue that, despite that potential, action research is often limited as a method because it remains embedded in past methodologies; I attempt to update both its theory and practice for the 21st century.
Although this article represents only a beginning, my broader goal is to re-imagine the role of action research for social innovation, and to develop an agenda that could provide for what Amar Bhide calls “practical knowledge” at all levels of decision making in a systematic, sustainable, and responsible manner. (Full Essay Here).”
Beth Noveck at NextGov: “In November 2019, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton boasted that draft regulations requiring proxy advisors to run their recommendations past the companies they are evaluating before giving that advice to their clients received dozens of letters of support from ordinary Americans. But the letters he cited turned out to be fakes, sent by corporate advocacy groups and signed with the names of people who never saw the comments or who do not exist at all.
When interest groups manufacture the appearance that comments come from the “ordinary public,” it’s known as astroturfing. The practice is the subject of today’s House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing, entitled “Fake It till They Make It: How Bad Actors Use Astroturfing to Manipulate Regulators, Disenfranchise Consumers, and Subvert the Rulemaking Process.”
Of course, commissioners who cherry-pick from among the public comments looking for the information to prove themselves right should be called out and it is tempting to use the occasion to embarrass those who do, especially when they are from the other party. But focusing on astroturfing distracts attention away from the more salient and urgent problem: the failure to obtain the best possible evidence by creating effective public participation opportunities in federal rulemaking.
Thousands of federal regulations are enacted every year that touch every aspect of our lives, and under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, the public has a right to participate.
Participation in rulemaking advances both the legitimacy and the quality of regulations by enabling agencies—and the congressional committees that oversee them—to obtain information from a wider audience of stakeholders, interest groups, businesses, nonprofits, academics and interested individuals. Participation also provides a check on the rulemaking process, helping to ensure public scrutiny.
But the shift over the last two decades to a digital process, where people submit comments via regulations.gov has made commenting easier yet also inadvertently opened the floodgates to voluminous, duplicative and, yes, even “fake” comments, making it harder for agencies to extract the information needed to inform the rulemaking process.
Although many agencies receive only a handful of comments, some receive voluminous responses, thanks to this ease of digital commenting. In 2017, when the Federal Communications Commission sought to repeal an earlier Obama-era rule requiring internet service providers to observe net neutrality, the agency received 22 million comments in response.
There is a remedy. Tools have evolved to make quick work of large data stores….(More)”. See also https://congress.crowd.law/
Chapter by Andrej Zwitter: “Modern technology and innovations constantly transform the world. This also applies to humanitarian action and development aid, for example: humanitarian drones, crowd sourcing of information, or the utility of Big Data in crisis analytics and humanitarian intelligence. The acceleration of modernization in these adjacent fields can in part be attributed to new partnerships between aid agencies and new private stakeholders that increasingly become active, such as individual crisis mappers, mobile telecommunication companies, or technological SMEs.
These partnerships, however, must be described as simultaneously beneficial as well as problematic. Many private actors do not subscribe to the humanitarian principles (humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality), which govern UN and NGO operations, or are not even aware of them. Their interests are not solely humanitarian, but may include entrepreneurial agendas. The unregulated use of data in humanitarian intelligence has already caused negative consequences such as the exposure of sensitive data about aid agencies and of victims of disasters.
This chapter investigates the emergent governance trends around data innovation in the humanitarian and development field. It takes a look at the ways in which the field tries to regulate itself and the utility of the humanitarian principles for Big Data analytics and data-driven innovation. It will argue that it is crucially necessary to formulate principles for data governance in the humanitarian context in order to ensure the safeguarding of beneficiaries that are particularly vulnerable. In order to do that, the chapter proposes to reinterpret the humanitarian principles to accommodate the new reality of datafication of different aspects of society…(More)”.
Book by Robert H. Frank: “Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street—our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet—mainly because that’s what friends and neighbors do.
In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. Robert Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate-friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone….(More)”.
Book by Jessa Lingel: “Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn’t profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love—and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web.
Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site’s history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist’s legal history, describing the company’s courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet….(More)”.
Paper by Megumi Kubota and Albert Zeufack: “This paper investigates the potential benefits for a country from investing in data transparency. The paper shows that increased data transparency can bring substantive returns in lower costs of external borrowing.
This result is obtained by estimating the impact of public data transparency on sovereign spreads conditional on the country’s level of institutional quality and public and external debt. While improving data transparency alone reduces the external borrowing costs for a country, the return is much higher when combined with stronger institutional quality and lower public and external debt. Similarly, the returns on investing in data transparency are higher when a country’s integration to the global economy deepens, as captured by trade and financial openness.
Estimation of an instrumental variable regression shows that Sub-Saharan African countries could have saved up to 14.5 basis points in sovereign bond spreads and decreased their external debt burden by US$405.4 million (0.02 percent of gross domestic product) in 2018, if their average level of data transparency was that of a country in the top quartile of the upper-middle-income country category. At the country level, Angola could have reduced its external debt burden by around US$73.6 million….(More)”.
Paper by Sofia Ranchordás and Catalina Goanta: “Cities are increasingly influenced by novel and cosmopolitan values advanced by transnational technology providers and digital platforms. These values which are often visible in the advancement of the sharing economy and smart cities, may differ from the traditional public values protected by national and local laws and policies. This article contrasts the public values created by digital platforms in cities with the democratic and social national values that the platform society is leaving behind.
It innovates by showing how co-regulation can balance public values with platform values. In this article, we argue that despite the value-creation benefits produced by the digital platforms under analysis, public authorities should be aware of the risks of technocratic discourses and potential conflicts between platform and local values. In this context, we suggest a normative framework which enhances the need for a new kind of knowledge-service creation in the form of local public-interest technology. Moreover, our framework proposes a negotiated contractual system that seeks to balance platform values with public values in an attempt to address the digital enforcement problem driven by the functional sovereignty role of platforms….(More)”.
Chapter by Alberto Alemanno: “Europe has largely been absent from the US-dominated debate surrounding the introduction of nudge-type interventions in policy-making. Yet the European Union and some of its Member States are exploring the possibility of informing their policy action with behavioural insights. While a great deal of academic attention is currently been paid to the philosophical, ethical and other abstract implications of behavioural-informed regulation, such as those concerning autonomy, dignity and moral development, this chapter charts and systematizes the incipient European Nudge discourse.
Besides a few isolated initiatives displaying some behavioural considerations (e.g. consumer rights, revised tobacco products directive, sporadic behavioural remedies in competition law), the EU – similarly to its own Member States – has not yet shown a general commitment to systematically integrate behavioural insights into policy-making. Given the potential of this innovative regulatory approach to attain effective, low-cost and choice-preserving policies, such a stance seems surprising, especially when measured against growing citizen mistrust towards EU policy action. At a time in which some EU countries are calling for a repatriation of powers and the European Commission promises to redefine – in the framework of its Better Regulation agenda – the relationships between the Union and its citizens, nudging might provide a promising way forward. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, this promise has not only been shared by the 27 remaining Member State but also represents one of their major priorities . Yet with promises come challenges too.
The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 sets the scene by discussing the growing appeal of nudging among policymakers within and across Europe. Section 3 introduces the notion of behavioural policymaking and contrasts it with that of nudging. Section 4 describes the early and rather timid attempts at integrating behavioural insights into EU policymaking and identifies some domestic experiences. Section 5 discusses the institutional and methodological efforts undertaken by the EU and some of its member states to embrace behavioural policymaking. In turn, section 6 discusses the major difficulties of integrating behavioural insights into EU policymaking and offers some concluding remarks….(More)”
Paper by Erin Carroll: “As inhabitants of the Information Age, we are increasingly aware of the amount and kind of data that technology platforms collect on us. Far less publicized, however, is how much data news organizations collect on us as we read the news online and how they allow third parties to collect that personal data as well. A handful of studies by computer scientists reveal that, as a group, news websites are among the Internet’s worst offenders when it comes to tracking their visitors.
On the one hand, this surveillance is unsurprising. It is capitalism at work. The press’s business model has long been advertising-based. Yet, today this business model raises particular First Amendment concerns. The press, a named beneficiary of the First Amendment and a First Amendment institution, is gathering user reading history. This is a violation of what legal scholars call “intellectual privacy”—a right foundational to our First Amendment free speech rights.
And because of the perpetrator, this surveillance has the potential to cause far-reaching harms. Not only does it injure the individual reader or citizen, it injures society. News consumption helps each of us engage in the democratic process. It is, in fact, practically a prerequisite to our participation. Moreover, for an institution whose success is dependent on its readers’ trust, one that checks abuses of power, this surveillance seems like a special brand of betrayal.
Rather than an attack on journalists or journalism, this Essay is an attack on a particular press business model. It is also a call to grapple with it before the press faces greater public backlash. Originally given as the keynote for the Washburn Law Journal’s symposium, The Future of Cyber Speech, Media, and Privacy, this Essay argues for transforming and diversifying press business models and offers up other suggestions for minimizing the use of news as surveillance…(More)”.
Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “What will democratic systems in the European Union (EU) look like in the next decade and beyond? Will tech-savvy policy-makers respond to the demands of citizens in an effective and timely manner? Or will the much-celebrated ‘co-creation’ of public policies via digital tools continue to remain an empty slogan?
In this Chapter, we move from a broad reflection on the impact that technology is having on all levels of society, and particularly on human relations, to an analysis of the role of technology in the policy cycle. We claim that technology has dramatically changed both the number of ‘connections’ between citizens and public regulators, and their quality. We also argue that the outcomes of this enhanced interconnectivity have been uneven, and the results not always positive.
Overall, citizens (and corporations) have benefited from the enhanced ‘access’ they have gained vis-à-vis public authorities through new communication channels. These benefits, however, have not been mirrored by equally significant progresses in design and implementation of public policy. Public authorities have struggled with the impact of new technologies on policy-making.
Communities and citizens now expect public regulators to respond both immediately and effectively to their demands. However, for the most part public regulators have been unable or unwilling to effectively harness new technologies to foster participatory and inclusive governance. As a result, the legitimacy of public regulators has been politically and legally challenged by dissatisfied communities and stakeholders.
The chapter focuses on the EU, which is often accused of not being inclusive or democratic. As EU institutional responsibilities have expanded over time, calls for greater openness have increased. Conventional narratives of the EU’s democratic deficit paint a picture of a dysfunctional decision-making system run by elites located in Brussels. In reality, we claim in this chapter, EU institutions continually seek to enhance and increase interactions with stakeholders, with experimental efforts having intensified over the last decade….(More)”.