Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Eyal Benvenisti at the The European Journal of International Law: “The law on global governance that emerged after the Second World War was grounded in irrefutable trust in international organizations and an assumption that their subjection to legal discipline and judicial review would be unnecessary and, in fact, detrimental to their success. The law that evolved systematically insulated international organizations from internal and external scrutiny and absolved them of any inherent legal obligations – and, to a degree, continues to do so.
Indeed, it was only well after the end of the Cold War that mistrust in global governance began to trickle through into the legal discourse and the realization gradually took hold that the operation of international organizations needed to be subject to the disciplining power of the law. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have sought to identify the conditions under which trust in global bodies can be regained, mainly by borrowing and adapting domestic public law precepts that emphasize accountability through communications with those affected.
Today, although a ‘culture of accountability’ may have taken root, its legal tools are still shaping up and are often contested. More importantly, these communicative tools are ill-equipped to address the new modalities of governance that are based on decision-making by machines using raw data (rather than two-way exchange with stakeholders) as their input.
The new information and communication technologies challenge the foundational premise of the accountability school – that ‘the more communication, the better’ – as voters-turned-users obtain their information from increasingly fragmented and privatized marketplaces of ideas that are manipulated for economic and political gain.
In this article, I describe and analyse how the law has evolved to acknowledge the need for accountability, how it has designed norms for this purpose and continues in this endeavour – yet how the challenges it faces today are leaving its most fundamental assumptions open to question. I argue that, given the growing influence of public and private global governance bodies on our daily lives and the shape of our political communities, the task of the law of global governance is no longer limited to ensuring the accountability of global bodies, but is also to protect human dignity and the very viability of the democratic state….(More)”.
Report from the Commission on the Future of Localism (UK): “…When we think about power we tend to look upwards – towards Westminster-based institutions and elected politicians. Those who wish to see greater localism often ask politicians to give it away and push power downwards. But this is looking at things the wrong way round. Instead, we need to start with the power of community. The task of our political system should be to support this, harness it, and reflect it in our national debate.
Our Commission has heard evidence about what makes a powerful community. While different communities build and experience power in different ways, there are common sources. We heard how the power of any community lies with its people, their collective ideas, innovation, creativity and local knowledge, as well as their sense of belonging, connectedness and shared identity. We need to bring this into political life much more effectively via a renewed effort to foster localism in future.
However, our Commission has also heard about a fundamental imbalance of power that is preventing this power of community from coming to life and restricting collective agency: top-down decisions leaving community groups and local councils unable to make the change they know their neighbourhood needs; a lack of trust and risk aversion from public bodies, dampening community energy; a lack of control and access to local resources, limiting the scope of local action….(More)”.
Kirk Bansak, et al in Science Magazine: “Developed democracies are settling an increased number of refugees, many of whom face challenges integrating into host societies. We developed a flexible data-driven algorithm that assigns refugees across resettlement locations to improve integration outcomes. The algorithm uses a combination of supervised machine learning and optimal matching to discover and leverage synergies between refugee characteristics and resettlement sites.
The algorithm was tested on historical registry data from two countries with different assignment regimes and refugee populations, the United States and Switzerland. Our approach led to gains of roughly 40 to 70%, on average, in refugees’ employment outcomes relative to current assignment practices. This approach can provide governments with a practical and cost-efficient policy tool that can be immediately implemented within existing institutional structures….(More)”.
Kyle Duggan at iPolitics: “The national statistics agency is launching a crowdsourcing project to find out how much weed Canadians are consuming and how much it costs them.
Statistics Canada is searching for the best picture of consumption it can find ahead of legalization, and is turning to average Canadians to improve its rough estimates about a product that’s largely been accessed illegally by the population.
Thursday it released a suite of “experimental” data that make up its current best guesses on Canadian consumption habits, along with a crowdsourcing website and app to get its own estimates – a project officials said is an experiment itself.
Statscan is also rolling out a quarterly cannabis survey this year.
The agency has been combing through historical research on legal and illegal cannabis prices, scraping price data from illegal vendors online and, for some data, is relying largely on the self-reporting website priceofweed.com to assemble as much pot information as possible, even if it’s not perfect data.
The agency has been quietly preparing for the July legalization deadline by compiling health, justice and economic datasets and scouring to fill in the blanks where it can. Come July, legal cannabis will suddenly also need to be rolled into other important data products, like the GDP accounts….(More)”.
Cass R. Sunstein in Special Issue on Evaluating Nudging of the Missouri Law Journal: “It can be paternalistic to force people to choose. Often people do not wish to choose, but both private and public institutions ask or force them to do so, thus overriding their wishes. As a result, people’s autonomy may be badly compromised and their welfare may be greatly reduced. These points have implications for a range of issues in law and policy, suggesting that those who favor active choosing, and insist on it, may well be overriding people’s preferences and values, and thus running afoul of John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle (for better or for worse). People have limited mental bandwidth, and forcing choices can impose a hedonic or cognitive tax. Sometimes that tax is high….(More)”.
Paper by Vanessa Herringshaw: “Narratives in the field of information and communications technology (ICT) for governance are full of claims, of either enormous success or almost none. But understanding ‘success’ and ‘failure’ depends on how these are framed. Research supported by Making All Voices Count suggests that different actors can seek very different goals from the same ICT-enabled interventions – some stated, some not.
This programme learning report proposes two important dimensions for framing variations in visions of success for ICT-enabled governance interventions: (1) the kind of change in governance systems sought (‘functional’, ‘instrumental’, ‘transformative’ and ‘no change’); and (2) the vision of the ideal citizen–state relationship. It applies this framing to three areas where ICTs are being used, at least on paper, to encourage and channel citizen voice into governance processes, and to improve government responsiveness in return: participatory policy- and strategymaking; participatory budgeting; and citizen feedback to improve service delivery.
In terms of the kind of change in governance systems sought, much of the rhetoric touts the use of ICTs as inherently ‘transformative’. However, findings suggest that it has mostly been deployed in ‘functional’, ‘instrumental’ and ‘no change’ ways. That said, the possibility of ICT-enabled ‘transformative’ change appears somewhat higher when citizens have more direct control over outcomes, and more online and offline processes are mixed and used in ways that foster collective, rather than individualised, inputs, deliberation and answerability.
In terms of the vision of the state–citizen relationship, the findings show great variation in outcomes sought regarding the kinds and levels of participatory democracy, who this should benefit, the ideal size of the state, and the desired stability of actor groups and decision-making structures.
The evidence suggests that the use of ICTs may have the potential to support change, including transformative change, but only when the political goals of key actors are pre-structured to support this. The choice of ICTs does matter to the effectiveness of this support, as does the way in which they are used. But overall, ICTs do not appear to be inherently ‘generative’ of change. They are, rather, ‘reflective’, ‘enabling’ or ‘amplifying’ of existing political agendas and levels of commitment.
The recommendations of this report focus on the need to understand deeply and face the realities of these varying agendas and visions of success at the start of intervention planning, and throughout implementation as they evolve over time. This imperative should remain undiminished, regardless of any rhetoric of the inherently transformative or ‘democratising’ nature of ICTs, and of interventions to strengthen citizen voice and government responsiveness more broadly….(More).
Mitesh S. Patel et al in The New England Journal of Medicine: “The final common pathway for the application of nearly every advance in medicine is human behavior. No matter how effective a drug, how protective a vaccine, or how targeted a therapy may be, a clinician usually has to prescribe it, and a patient accept and use it as directed, for it to improve health. Clinicians’ and patients’ environments influence their decisions about taking these actions, and the seemingly subtle design of information and choices can have outsize effects on our behavior. When the “choice architecture” is designed to influence behavior in a predictable way but without restricting choice, it is often called a “nudge.”…
In 2016, we launched the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit to systematically develop and test approaches using nudges to improve health care delivery. The goals are to improve health care value and outcomes, advance knowledge about how to best implement nudges for impact, evaluate our efforts, and disseminate our findings. Ideas are generated by health system leadership, frontline clinicians and staff, and members of the unit itself. Our early successes and failures reveal some lessons about the role that nudge units can play in improving health care (see table).
First, these units can help health systems understand when it makes sense to use a nudge and when it doesn’t. Nudges can be designed to remind, guide, or motivate behavior. Promising opportunities are those in which suboptimal care can be addressed by targeting a specific decision that drives a less-than-optimal behavior. For example, when prescribing medications, physicians must decide between brand-name and generic formulations. Systems can set generics as the default choice, so that ordering them becomes the path of least resistance even as the ability to opt out and order a brand-name drug is preserved. When we implemented this change in our EHR, prescribing rates for generics increased from 75% to 98%. Clinical settings also play an important role. We found that reducing the default duration of opioid prescriptions may make sense for acute conditions often seen by clinicians in the emergency department but may be inappropriate for clinicians caring for patients with chronic pain.
Second, although nudges have typically been deployed for simple one-off decisions, we’ve found that they can also support more complex decision paths. For example, only 15% of our eligible patients were being referred for cardiac rehabilitation after myocardial infarction. When we asked the cardiologists why, we discovered that the process remained manual, so they had to take action to initiate the referrals — in other words, it was an opt-in system. The process was redesigned as an opt-out system in which referral for rehab was the default; patient identification was automated using the EHR; staff were notified using secure text messaging; and processes were restructured so that cardiologists signed orders in a template for referral on rounds and staff met with patients to set up rehab placement before discharge. The referral rate increased to more than 80%.
Third, stakeholder alignment is critical to nudges’ success. ….
Fourth, nudges can lead to unintended behavior that’s invisible without proper evaluation….(More)”.
Paper by Koen Leurs & Sandra Ponzanesi at Special Issue on Connected Migrants of Popular Communications: “Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. The pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes Europe’s colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present.
Of special interest is an essay by the late Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of Europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan Europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on Eurocentrism and universal values.
In this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting Europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies….(More)”.
Beth Noveck in Forbes: “The way Congress makes law is simply no longer viable. In David Schoenbrod’s recent book DC Confidential, he outlines “five tricks” politicians use to take credit in front of television cameras in order to further political party agendas while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for bad legislation. Although Congress makes the laws that govern all Americans, people also feel disenfranchised. One study concludes that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” But technology offers the promise of improving both the quality and accountability of lawmaking by opening up the process to more and more diverse expertise and input from the public at every stage of the legislative process. We call such open and participatory lawmaking: “CrowdLaw.”
Moving Beyond the Ballot Box
Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the internet to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the laws they make; we need to do the same here if we are to begin to fix congressional dysfunction.
For example, Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act at the national level, like Madrid’s Decide initiative at the local level, allows any member of the public with the requisite signatures to propose new legislation, meaning that not only interest groups and politicians get to set the agenda for lawmaking.
In France, the Parlement & Citoyens platform allows the public to respond to a problem posed by a representative by contributing information about both causes and solutions. Relevant citizen input is then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation. This brings greater empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise….(More)”.
Report by Richard Barkham, Sheharyar Bokhari and Albert Saiz: “In this report, we discuss recent trends in the application of urban big data and their impact on real estate markets. We expect such technologies to improve quality of life and the productivity of cities over the long run.
We forecast that smart city technologies will reinforce the primacy of the most successful global metropolises at least for a decade or more. A few select metropolises in emerging countries may also leverage these technologies to leapfrog on the provision of local public services.
In the long run, all cities throughout the urban system will end up adopting successful and cost-effective smart city initiatives. Nevertheless, smaller-scale interventions are likely to crop up everywhere, even in the short run. Such targeted programs are more likely to improve conditions in blighted or relatively deprived neighborhoods, which could generate gentrification and higher valuations there. It is unclear whether urban information systems will have a centralizing or suburbanizing impact. They are likely to make denser urban centers more attractive, but they are also bound to make suburban or exurban locations more accessible…(More)”.