Why Europe must embrace participatory policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alberto Alemanno, Claire Davenport, and Laura Batalla: “Today, Europe faces many threats – from economic uncertainty and war on its eastern borders to the rise of illiberal democracies and popular reactionary politicians.

As Europe recovers from the pandemic and grapples with economic and social unrest, it is at an inflection point; it can either create new spaces to build trust and a sense of shared purpose between citizens and governments, or it can continue to let its democratic institutions erode and distrust grow. 

The scale of such problems requires novel problem-solving and new perspectives, including those from civil society and citizens. Increased opportunities for citizens to engage with policymakers can lend legitimacy and accountability to traditionally ‘opaque’ policymaking processes. The future of the bloc hinges on its ability to not only sustain democratic institutions but to do so with buy-in from constituents.

Yet policymaking in the EU is often understood as a technocratic process that the public finds difficult, if not impossible, to navigate. The Spring 2022 Eurobarometer found that just 53% of respondents believed their voice counts in the EU. The issue is compounded by a lack of political literacy coupled with a dearth of channels for participation or co-creation. 

In parallel, there is a strong desire from citizens to make their voices heard. A January 2022 Special Eurobarometer on the Future of Europe found that 90% of respondents agreed that EU citizens’ voices should be taken more into account during decision-making. The Russian war in Ukraine has strengthened public support for the EU as a whole. According to the Spring 2022 Eurobarometer, 65% of Europeans view EU membership as a good thing. 

This is not to say that the EU has no existing models for citizen engagement. The European Citizens Initiative – a mechanism for petitioning the Commission to propose new laws – is one example of existing infrastructure. There is also an opportunity to build on the success of The Conference on the Future of Europe, a gathering held this past spring that gave citizens the opportunity to contribute policy recommendations and justifications alongside traditional EU policymakers…(More)”

The Autocrat in Your iPhone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ronald J. Deibert: “In the summer of 2020, a Rwandan plot to capture exiled opposition leader Paul Rusesabagina drew international headlines. Rusesabagina is best known as the human rights defender and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who sheltered more than 1,200 Hutus and Tutsis in a hotel during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But in the decades after the genocide, he also became a prominent U.S.-based critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. In August 2020, during a layover in Dubai, Rusesabagina was lured under false pretenses into boarding a plane bound for Kigali, the Rwandan capital, where government authorities immediately arrested him for his affiliation with an opposition group. The following year, a Rwandan court sentenced him to 25 years in prison, drawing the condemnation of international human rights groups, the European Parliament, and the U.S. Congress. 

Less noted at the time, however, was that this brazen cross-border operation may also have employed highly sophisticated digital surveillance. After Rusesabagina’s sentencing, Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a digital security research group I founded and direct, discovered that smartphones belonging to several of Rusesabagina’s family members who also lived abroad had been hacked by an advanced spyware program called Pegasus. Produced by the Israel-based NSO Group, Pegasus gives an operator near-total access to a target’s personal data. Forensic analysis revealed that the phone belonging to Rusesabagina’s daughter Carine Kanimba had been infected by the spyware around the time her father was kidnapped and again when she was trying to secure his release and was meeting with high-level officials in Europe and the U.S. State Department, including the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs. NSO Group does not publicly identify its government clients and the Rwandan government has denied using Pegasus, but strong circumstantial evidence points to the Kagame regime.

In fact, the incident is only one of dozens of cases in which Pegasus or other similar spyware technology has been found on the digital devices of prominent political opposition figures, journalists, and human rights activists in many countries. Providing the ability to clandestinely infiltrate even the most up-to-date smartphones—the latest “zero click” version of the spyware can penetrate a device without any action by the user—Pegasus has become the digital surveillance tool of choice for repressive regimes around the world. It has been used against government critics in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and pro-democracy protesters in Thailand. It has been deployed by Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary…(More)”.

Recentring the demos in the measurement of democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Seema Shah: “Rethinking how we measure and evaluate democratic performance is vital to reversing a longstanding negative trend in global democracy. We must confront the past, including democracy’s counter-intuitively intrinsic inequality. This is key to revitalising institutions in a way that allows democratic practice to live up to its potential…

In the global democracy assessment space, teams like the one I lead at International IDEA compete to provide the most rigorous, far-reaching and understandable set of democracy measurements in the world. Alexander Hudson explains how critical these indicators are, providing important benchmarks for democratic growth and decline to policymakers, governments, international organisations, and journalists.

Yet in so many ways, the core of what these datasets measure and help assess are largely the same. This redundancy is no doubt at least partially a product of wealthy donors’ prioritisation of liberal democracy as an ideal. It is compounded by how the measures are calculated. As Adam Przeworksi recently stated, reliance on expert coders runs the risk of measuring little other than those experts’ biases.

But if that is the case, and quantitative measurements continue to be necessary for democracy assessment, shouldn’t we rethink exactly what we are measuring and how we are measuring it?..

Democracy assessment indices do not typically measure ordinary people’s evaluations of the state of democracy. Instead, other specialised ‘barometers’ often take on this task. See, for example, Afrobarometer, Eurobarometer, Asian Barometer, and Latinobarometro. Surveys of public perceptions on a range of issues also exist, including, but not limited to democracy. The problem is, however, that these do not systematically make it into overall democracy assessments or onto policymakers’ desks. This means that policymakers and others do not consistently prioritise or consider lived experiences as they make decisions about democracy and human rights-related funding and interventions…(More)”.

Here’s how the agricultural sector can solve its data problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Satyanarayana Jeedigunta and Arushi Goel: “Food and nutrition security, skewed distribution of farmer incomes, natural disasters and climate change are severely impacting the sustainability of agricultural systems across the globe. Policy reforms are needed to correct these distortions, but innovative emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed ledger technologies, sensors and drones, can make a significant difference.

Emerging technologies need data, and it must be the right data, for the right purpose at the right time. This is how it can deliver maximum impact. Agricultural value chains comprise a complex system of stakeholders and activities. The enormity of the size and complexity of agricultural data, coupled with its fragmented nature, pose significant challenges to unlocking its potential economic value, estimated at $65 billion in India alone….

As such, there is a need to promote standards-based interoperability, which enables multiple digital systems to exchange agricultural data in an automated manner with limited human intervention. The ease and speed of such an exchange of data, across domains and technologies, would spur the development of innovative solutions and lead to evidence-driven, prediction-based decision-making on the farm and in the market.

Most agricultural data is dynamic

Most current efforts to develop standards of agriculture data are isolated and localized. The AGROVOC initiative of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization addresses a part of the data problem by creating an exhaustive vocabulary of agricultural terms. There is also a need to develop an open data format for the automated interchange of agriculture data. A coordinated initiative of the industry is an attractive approach to develop such a format…(More)”.

Open Government and Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the World Bank: “The world needs more urgent and ambitious action to address climate change. Seventy-one countries have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Nevertheless, achieving decarbonization and adapting to climate change will require fundamental changes in the production of goods and services by firms and the consumption patterns and behavior of citizens. Climate change poses difficult challenges for policy makers, and three particular challenges make the open government principles of transparency, participation, and accountability especially important. First, countries often face the political challenge of credibly committing to climate action over the long term, in that they must commit to action over multiple electoral cycles if the private sector, households, communities, and public entities are to adopt new technologies and change behavior. Second, climate change requires coordination between government and nongovernment actors, as there will be winners and losers along the way and governments will need to work toward consensus to balance the outcomes. Third, governments have to translate promises into climate action. The principles of open government can be especially useful in tackling all three challenges by harnessing and ensuring citizen trust in government and in the legitimacy of climate-directed policy decisions. This note will show how the use of open government principles and mechanisms can make a notable contribution to climate change action. It provides examples of such measures as well as an inventory of existing good practices and tools, which can serve as a source of inspiration for policy makers and citizens alike…(More)”.

Kid-edited journal pushes scientists for clear writing on complex topics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mark Johnson: “The reviewer was not impressed with the paper written by Israeli brain researcher Idan Segev and a colleague from Switzerland.

“Professor Idan,” she wrote to Segev. “I didn’t understand anything that you said.”

Segev and co-author Felix Schürmann revised their paper on the Human Brain project, a massive effort seeking to channel all that we know about the mind into a vast computer model. But once again the reviewer sent it back. Still not clear enough. It took a third version to satisfy the reviewer.

“Okay,” said the reviewer, an 11-year-old girl from New York named Abby. “Now I understand.”

Such is the stringent editing process at the online science journal Frontiers for Young Minds, where top scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, submit papers on gene-editing, gravitational waves and other topics — to demanding reviewers ages 8 through 15.

Launched in 2013, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based publication is coming of age at a moment when skeptical members of the public look to scientists for clear guidance on the coronavirus and on potentially catastrophic climate change, among other issues. At Frontiers for Young Minds, the goal is not just to publish science papers but also to make them accessible to young readers like the reviewers. In doing so, it takes direct aim at a long-standing problem in science — poor communication between professionals and the public.

“Scientists tend to default to their own jargon and don’t think carefully about whether this is a word that the public actually knows,” said Jon Lorsch, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “Sometimes to actually explain something you need a sentence as opposed to the one word scientists are using.”

Dense language sends a message “that science is for scientists; that you have to be an ‘intellectual’ to read and understand scientific literature; and that science is not relevant or important for everyday life,” according to a paper published last year in Advances in Physiology Education.

Frontiers for Young Minds, which has drawn nearly 30 million online page views in its nine years, offers a different message on its homepage: “Science for kids, edited by kids.”..(More)”.

Addressing the Global Data Divide through Digital Trade Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Binit Agrawal and Neha Mishra: “The global data divide has emerged as a major policy challenge threatening equitable development, poverty alleviation, and access to information. Further, it has polarised countries on either side of the data schism, who have often reacted by implementing conflicting and sub-optimal measures. This paper surveys such policy measures, the politics behind them, and the footprints they have left on the digital trade or electronic commerce rules contained in free trade agreements (FTAs). First, this paper details an understanding of what constitutes the global data divide, focusing on three components, namely access, regulation, and use. Second, the paper surveys electronic commerce or digital trade rules in FTAs to understand whether existing rules deal with the widening data divide in a comprehensive manner and, if so, how. Our primary argument is that the existing FTA disciplines are deficient in addressing the global data divide. Key problems include insufficient participation by developing countries in framing digital trade rules, non-recognition of the data divide affecting developing countries, and lack of robust and implementable mechanisms to bridge the data divide. Finally, we present a proposal to reform digital trade rules in line with best practices emerging in FTA practice and the main areas where gaps must be bridged. Our proposals include enhancing technical assistance and capacity-building support, developing a tailored special and differential treatment (SDT) mechanism, incentivising the removal of data-related barriers by designing appropriate bargains in negotiations, and boosting international regulatory cooperation through innovative and creative mechanisms….(More)”.

AI in the Common Interest

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gabriela Ramos & Mariana Mazzucato: “In short, it was a year in which already serious concerns about how technologies are being designed and used deepened into even more urgent misgivings. Who is in charge here? Who should be in charge? Public policies and institutions should be designed to ensure that innovations are improving the world, yet many technologies are currently being deployed in a vacuum. We need inclusive mission-oriented governance structures that are centered around a true common good. Capable governments can shape this technological revolution to serve the public interest.

Consider AI, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines broadly as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” AI can make our lives better in many ways. It can enhance food production and management, by making farming more efficient and improving food safety. It can help us bolster resilience against natural disasters, design energy-efficient buildings, improve power storage, and optimize renewable energy deployment. And it can enhance the accuracy of medical diagnostics when combined with doctors’ own assessments.

These applications would make our lives better in many ways. But with no effective rules in place, AI is likely to create new inequalities and amplify pre-existing ones. One need not look far to find examples of AI-powered systems reproducing unfair social biases. In one recent experiment, robots powered by a machine-learning algorithm became overtly racist and sexist. Without better oversight, algorithms that are supposed to help the public sector manage welfare benefits may discriminate against families that are in real need. Equally worrying, public authorities in some countries are already using AI-powered facial-recognition technology to monitor political dissent and subject citizens to mass-surveillance regimes.

Market concentration is also a major concern. AI development – and control of the underlying data – is dominated by just a few powerful players in just a few locales. Between 2013 and 2021, China and the United States accounted for 80% of private AI investment globally. There is now a massive power imbalance between the private owners of these technologies and the rest of us…(More)”.

A Comparative Study of Citizen Crowdsourcing Platforms and the Use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Effective Participatory Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carina Antonia Hallin: ‘The use of crowdsourcing platforms to harness citizen insights for policymaking has gained increasing importance in regional and national policy planning. Participatory democracy using crowdsourcing platforms includes various initiatives, such as generating ideas for new law reforms (Aitamurto and Landemore 2015], economic development, and solving challenges related to how to create inclusive social actions and interventions for better, healthier, and more prosperous local communities (Bentley and Pugalis, 2014). Such case observations, coupled with the increasing prevalence of internet-based communication, point to the real benefits of implementing participatory democracies on a mass scale in which citizens are invited to contribute their ideas, opinions, and deliberations (Salganik and Levy 2015). By adopting collective intelligence platforms, public authorities can harness local knowledge from citizens to find the right ‘policy mix’ and collaborate with citizens and relevant actors in the policymaking processes. This comparative study aims to validate the adoption of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence/natural language processing (NLP) on crowdsourcing platforms for effective participatory democracy and policymaking in local governments. The study compares 15 citizen crowdsourcing platforms, including Natural language Processing (NLP), for policymaking across Europe and the United States. The study offers a framework for working with citizen crowdsourcing platforms and exploring the usefulness of NLP on the platforms for effective participatory democracy…(More)”.

Digital Transition Framework: An action plan for public-private collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WEF Report: “The accelerated digital transition is unlocking economic and technology innovation, boosting growth, and enabling new forms of social engagement across the globe. Yet, the benefits from digital transformation have not been fully realized; compounded with macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds that are forcing public-private leaders to make digital technology investment trade-offs. The Digital Transition Framework: An Action Plan for Public-Private Collaboration sets out concrete actions and leading examples to support governments achieve their digital transition goals in the face of uncertainty…(More)”.