The Emerging Field of Political Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Johanna Mair, Josefa Kindt & Sébastien Mena: “In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a wave of antiracist protests inspired by the US Black Lives Matter movement, the young German nonprofit JoinPolitics prepared its first group of motivated citizens to enter politics. The organization follows a typical social-venture model through which it scouts, selects, and supports political talents with innovative ideas to strengthen democracy across different regions and levels of government. The handpicked cohort undergoes a curated six-month program that includes funding and training in a variety of skills, such as how to run a campaign, as well as access to an extensive network of politicians, entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, and foundations.

In the program, participants can pursue their ideas, such as drafting legislation to empower stateless people, establishing a lobby group to represent the interests of an underrepresented community, or consulting government agencies to recruit staff from minoritized groups. The solutions they develop address a host of sociopolitical problems that have made German democracy vulnerable to deterioration, including increasing polarization, right-wing populism, social injustice and inequality, and stagnant processes and structures. JoinPolitics is explicitly pro-democratic, but nonpartisan. It supports talents that belong to a spectrum of political parties, as well as those with no party affiliation, but it does not engage with non- and anti-democratic parties.

Caroline Weimann founded JoinPolitics in 2019 after working at a German foundation to address societal challenges. Her transition from grant maker to social entrepreneur was sparked by the realization that “the big questions of our time, be they social inequalities, climate change,” she says, “will have to be solved on a political level.”

For Weimann, as well as others, social innovation must enter politics to unlock its full potential. JoinPolitics departs from conventional social-innovation practice, which recognizes the role of policy in creating a favorable environment for the sector but does not prioritize changes in the political system. Traditionally, the practice of social innovation has stopped at the gates of political systems. Instead, JoinPolitics promotes innovation to fix or reconfigure elements in the political system, effectively liberating social innovation from the dominant narrative that has divorced it from the political realm. The focus of the nonprofit and its political talents is on finding solutions to mounting threats against democratic principles of justice, equality, representation, and civic participation in Germany….(More)”

“How Dare They Peep into My Private Life”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Human Rights Watch on “Children’s Rights Violations by Governments that Endorsed Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic”: “The coronavirus pandemic upended the lives and learning of children around the world. Most countries pivoted to some form of online learning, replacing physical classrooms with EdTech websites and apps; this helped fill urgent gaps in delivering some form of education to many children.

But in their rush to connect children to virtual classrooms, few governments checked whether the EdTech they were rapidly endorsing or procuring for schools were safe for children. As a result, children whose families were able to afford access to the internet and connected devices, or who made hard sacrifices in order to do so, were exposed to the privacy practices of the EdTech products they were told or required to use during Covid-19 school closures.

Human Rights Watch conducted its technical analysis of the products between March and August 2021, and subsequently verified its findings as detailed in the methodology section. Each analysis essentially took a snapshot of the prevalence and frequency of tracking technologies embedded in each product on a given date in that window. That prevalence and frequency may fluctuate over time based on multiple factors, meaning that an analysis conducted on later dates might observe variations in the behavior of the products…(More)”

Farmer-Centric Data Governance: Towards A New Paradigm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report, six Deep Dives, and nine Case Studies by The Development Gateway: “..provide user-centric approaches to data governance that places farmers and their communities at the center of data gathering initiatives and aims to reduce the negative effects of centralized power. The findings are based on literature, interviews, and workshops, to gather the experiences of change-makers and aims to:
• Raise awareness around the current political economy of agricultural data and its implications;
• Identify user-centric data governance models and mechanisms, particularly in LMICs;
• Demonstrate the purpose, value, benefits, and challenges of these models for all stakeholders; and
• Identify appropriate and relevant actionable principles, recommendations, and considerations related to user-centric data governance in the agriculture sector for the donor community…(More)”

COVID isn’t going anywhere, neither should our efforts to increase responsible access to data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Andrew J. Zahuranec, Hannah Chafetz and Stefaan Verhulst: “..Moving forward, institutions will need to consider how to embed non-traditional data capacity into their decision-making to better understand the world around them and respond to it.

For example, wastewater surveillance programmes that emerged during the pandemic continue to provide valuable insights about outbreaks before they are reported by clinical testing and have the potential to be used for other emerging diseases.

We need these and other programmes now more than ever. Governments and their partners need to maintain and, in many cases, strengthen the collaborations they established through the pandemic.

To address future crises, we need to institutionalize new data capacities – particularly those involving non-traditional datasets that may capture digital information that traditional health surveys and statistical methods often miss.

The figure above summarizes the types and sources of non-traditional data sources that stood out most during the COVID-19 response.

The types and sources of non-traditional data sources that stood out most during the COVID-19 response. Image: The GovLab

In our report, we suggest four pathways to advance the responsible access to non-traditional data during future health crises…(More)”.

Data solidarity: why sharing is not always caring 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Barbara Prainsack: “To solve these problems, we need to think about data governance in new ways. It is no longer enough to assume that asking people to consent to how their data is used is sufficient to prevent harm. In our example of telehealth, and in virtually all data-related scandals of the last decade, from Cambridge Analytica to Robodebt, informed consent did not, or could not, have avoided the problem. We all regularly agree to data uses that we know are problematic – not because we do not care about privacy. We agree because this is the only way to get access to benefits, a mortgage, or teachers and health professionals. In a world where face-to-face assessments are unavailable or excessively expensive, opting out of digital practices would no longer be an option (Prainsack, 2017, pp. 126-131; see also Oudshoorn, 2011).

Solidarity-based data governance (in short: data solidarity) can help us to distribute the risks and the benefits of digital practices more equitably. The details of the framework are spelled out in full elsewhere (Prainsack et al., 2022a, b). In short, data solidarity seeks to facilitate data uses that create significant public value, and at the same time prevent and mitigate harm (McMahon et al., 2020). One important step towards both goals is to stop ascribing risks to data types, and to distinguish between different types of data use instead. In some situations, harm can be prevented by making sure that data is not used for harmful purposes, such as online tracking. In other contexts, however, harm prevention can require that we do not collect the data in the first place. Not recording something, making it invisible and uncountable to others, can be the most responsible way to act in some contexts.

This means that recording and sharing data should not become a default. More data is not always better. Instead, policymakers need to consider carefully – in a dialogue with the people and communities that have a stake in it – what should be recorded, where it will be stored and who governs the data once it has been collected – if at all (see also Kukutai and Taylor, 2016)…(More)”.

Embracing Innovation in Government: Global trends 2023

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: “Governments worldwide have faced unprecedented challenges in the last few years, and the global mood remains far from optimistic. The world had little time to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic before the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation dealt the global economy a series of shocks. The culminative effect of these catastrophes has been the destruction of lives and livelihoods, and growing humanitarian, economic and governance crises. Millions of people have been displaced, energy and food markets have been severely disrupted, inflation continues to surge, and many countries are on the brink of recession. Governments must cope with and respond to these emerging threats while already grappling with issues such as climate change, digital disruption and low levels of trust. The challenges they face in ensuring positive outcomes for their people seem to be increasing dramatically.

Yet, despite compounding challenges, governments have been able to adapt and innovate to transform their societies and economies, and more specifically to the focus of this work, to transform themselves and how they design policies, deliver services and manage the business of government. If anything, recent and ongoing crises have catalysed public sector innovation and reinstated the critical role of the state. While the overall tone may be pessimistic, public sector innovation has provided bright spots and room for hope.

The search for these bright spots and entry points for change is the driving force behind this report, and the research that underpins it. As part of the MENA-OECD Governance Programme, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have collaborated since 2016 to explore how governments are working to understand, test and embed new ways of doing things. These efforts have culminated in 12 reports on Global Trends in government innovation, including this one, as well as a deep-dive effort on achieving Cross-Border Government Innovation to tackle global challenges.

To take the pulse of public sector innovation this year, OPSI and the MBRCGI have identified and analysed 1 084 innovative initiatives from 94 countries around the world (download CSV)…(More)”

What does policymaking look like?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Paul Cairney: “Wouldn’t it be nice if policy scholars and professionals could have frequent and fruitful discussions about policy and policymaking? Both professions could make valuable contributions to our understanding of policy design in a wider political context.

However, it is notoriously difficult to explain what policy is and how it is made, and academics and practitioners may present very different perspectives on what policymakers or governments do. Without a common reference point, how can they cooperate to discuss how to (say) improve policy or policymaking?

One starting point is to visualize policymaking to identify overlaps in perspectives. To that end, if academics and policymakers were to describe ‘the policy process’, could they agree on what it looks like?  To help answer this question, in this post I’m presenting some commonly-used images in policy research, then inviting you to share images that you would use to sum up policy work…

One obstacle to a shared description is that we need different images for different aims, including:

  1. To describe and explain what policymakers do. Academics describe one part of a complex policy process, accompanied by a technical language to understand each image.
  2. To describe what policymakers need to do. Practitioners visualise a manageable number of aims or requirements (essential steps, stages, or functions), accompanied by a professional in-house language (such as in the Green Book).
  3. To describe what they would like to do. Governments produce images of policymaking to tell stakeholders or citizens what they do, accompanied by an aspirational language related to what is expected of elected governments…(More)”.

The Underestimated Impact of School Participatory Budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by the Participation Factory: “Participatory budgets (PBs) are in use in countless communities around the world, giving residents the chance to decide how to allocate parts of the public budget. They are usually open for the entire community to take part – but there can be real advantages to starting with a smaller-scale school participatory budget.

Not only do they empower pupils to get involved in local government; but they can also play a crucial role in the students’ civic education. Unlike other educational tools like mock elections, the children actually get to see how the work they put in leads to concrete results. They demonstrate the power of political engagement to children at an early age, leaving them well-placed to become active, engaged citizens in later life….

The basic setup of a school PB should allow children to get a grasp of a whole range of what we call participatory skills – including project development, public speaking, voting, running a campaign, and engaging in deliberative democratic discussions. Younger children can start out just voting for their favourite projects – but as they get older, they can begin to get more involved in the entire process, gradually building their confidence, project management skills, and their understanding of how participation works. 

Participatory budgeting improves the children’s participatory skills. We have learned from our experience in Czech and Slovak schools that every year, more children feel comfortable enough to propose a project and run a campaign. They realise that there are techniques and methods to the process that they can easily learn and use, making the whole process less intimidating. They realise that debating and taking initiative doesn’t hurt, but rather leads to real results…(More)”.

Data for emergencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Royal Society: “As evidenced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and decision-makers benefit from rapid access to high quality data in a fast-changing, emergency environment. Enabling this for future pandemics, and other events which threaten serious damage to human welfare or the environment, will require a robust data infrastructure and a continuous process of public engagement.

Creating resilient and trusted data systems (PDF) sets out five high level recommendations for the UK Government to achieve this. This project, chaired by Professor Chris Dye FRS FMedSci, builds on a public dialogue commissioned by the Royal Society and a workshop held in October 2022, the recommendations call for action on public engagement; data protection; stress testing; standardisation; and trusted research environments.

The Royal Society commissioned the public facilitation agency Hopkins Van Mil to deliver a public dialogue to explore the public’s views on data systems during emergencies and non-emergencies. The dialogue format was chosen to facilitate an immersive and informed discussion, where a full range of viewpoints could be shared, exploring nuanced views, trade-offs and ‘least-regret’ options. The public dialogue addressed the following questions:

a) Do the current systems in place support a trusted and effective response to emergencies?

b) Have the systems been established in ways that enable them to be used in a trusted way outside of emergencies?

c) Are we any better placed to put in place a data-led response to other emergencies?

There are seven key findings from the dialogue, covering the complexity of emotions, confidence in data protection enforcement, and expectations for emergency preparedness…(More)”.

UN Guide on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Official Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN Guide: “This document presents methodologies and approaches to mitigating privacy risks when using sensitive or confidential data, which are collectively referred to as privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). National Statistics Offices (NSOs) are entrusted with data that has the potential to drive innovation and improve national services, research, and social benefit. Yet, there has been a rise in sustained cyber threats, complex networks of intermediaries motivated to procure sensitive data, and advances in methods to re-identify and link data to individuals and across multiple data sources. Data breaches erode public trust and can have serious negative consequences for individuals, groups, and communities. This document focuses on PETs that protect data during analysis and dissemination of sensitive information so that the benefits of using data for official statistics can be realized while minimizing privacy risks to those entrusting sensitive data to NSOs…(More)”.