Governing Cross-Border Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Issues facing governments are increasingly complex and transboundary in nature, making existing governance mechanisms unsuitable for managing them. Governments are leveraging new governance structures and mechanisms to connect and collaborate in order to tackle issues that cut across borders. Governance arrangements with innovative elements can act as enablers of cross-border government collaboration and assist in making it more systemic.

This work has led to the identification of three leading governance approaches and associated case studies, as discussed below….

Theme 1: Building cross-border governance bodies…

Theme 2: Innovative networks tackling cross-border collaboration…

Theme 3: Exploring emerging governance system dynamics…(More)”.

Launch of UN Biodiversity Lab 2.0: Spatial data and the future of our planet

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Press Release: “…The UNBL 2.0 is a free, open-source platform that enables governments and others to access state-of-the-art maps and data on nature, climate change, and human development in new ways to generate insight for nature and sustainable development. It is freely available online to governments and other stakeholders as a digital public good…

The UNBL 2.0 release responds to a known global gap in the types of spatial data and tools, providing an invaluable resource to nations around the world to take transformative action. Users can now access over 400 of the world’s best available global spatial data layers; create secure workspaces to incorporate national data alongside global data; use curated data collections to generate insight for action; and more. Without specialized tools or training, decision-makers can leverage the power of spatial data to support priority-setting and the implementation of nature-based solutions. Dynamic metrics and indicators on the state of our planet are also available….(More)”.

The AI gambit: leveraging artificial intelligence to combat climate change—opportunities, challenges, and recommendations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Josh Cowls, Andreas Tsamados, Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi: “In this article, we analyse the role that artificial intelligence (AI) could play, and is playing, to combat global climate change. We identify two crucial opportunities that AI offers in this domain: it can help improve and expand current understanding of climate change, and it can contribute to combatting the climate crisis effectively. However, the development of AI also raises two sets of problems when considering climate change: the possible exacerbation of social and ethical challenges already associated with AI, and the contribution to climate change of the greenhouse gases emitted by training data and computation-intensive AI systems. We assess the carbon footprint of AI research, and the factors that influence AI’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in this domain. We find that the carbon footprint of AI research may be significant and highlight the need for more evidence concerning the trade-off between the GHG emissions generated by AI research and the energy and resource efficiency gains that AI can offer. In light of our analysis, we argue that leveraging the opportunities offered by AI for global climate change whilst limiting its risks is a gambit which requires responsive, evidence-based, and effective governance to become a winning strategy. We conclude by identifying the European Union as being especially well-placed to play a leading role in this policy response and provide 13 recommendations that are designed to identify and harness the opportunities of AI for combatting climate change, while reducing its impact on the environment….(More)”.

Data Stewardship Re-Imagined — Capacities and Competencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog and presentation by Stefaan Verhulst: “In ways both large and small, COVID-OVID-19 has forced us to re-examine every aspect of our political, social, and economic systems. Among the many lessons, policymakers have learned is that existing methods for using data are often insufficient for our most pressing challenges. In particular, we need to find new, innovative ways of tapping into the potential of privately held and siloed datasets that nonetheless contain tremendous public good potential, including complementing and extending official statistics. Data collaboratives are an emerging set of methods for accessing and reusing data that offer tremendous opportunities in this regard. In the last five years, we have studied and initiated numerous data collaboratives, in the process assembling a collection of over 200 example case studies to better understand their possibilities.

Among our key findings is the vital importance and essential role that needs to be played by Data Stewards.

Data stewards do not represent an entirely new profession; rather, their role could be understood as an extension and re-definition of existing organizational positions that manage and interact with data. Traditionally, the role of a data officer was limited either to data integrity or the narrow context of internal data governance and management, with a strong emphasis on technical competencies. This narrow conception is no longer sufficient, especially given the proliferation of data and the increasing potential of data sharing and collaboration. As such, we call for a re-imagination of data stewardship to encompass a wider range of functions and responsibilities, directed at leveraging data assets toward addressing societal challenges and improving people’s lives.

DATA STEWARDSHIP: functions and competencies to enable access to and re-use of data for public benefit in a systematic, sustainable, and responsible way.

In our vision, data stewards are professionals empowered to create public value (including official statistics) by re-using data and data expertise, identifying opportunities for productive cross-sectoral collaboration, and proactively requesting or enabling functional access to data, insights, and expertise. Data stewards are active in both the public and private sectors, promoting trust within and outside their organizations. They are essential to data collaboratives by providing functional access to unlock the potential of siloed data sets. In short, data stewards form a new — and essential — link in the data value chain….(More)”.

Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Johan S. G. Chu and James A. Evans: “The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas…(More)”.

Solutions to Plastic Pollution: A Conceptual Framework to Tackle a Wicked Problem

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Chapter by Martin Wagner: “There is a broad willingness to act on global plastic pollution as well as a plethora of available technological, governance, and societal solutions. However, this solution space has not been organized in a larger conceptual framework yet. In this essay, I propose such a framework, place the available solutions in it, and use it to explore the value-laden issues that motivate the diverse problem formulations and the preferences for certain solutions by certain actors. To set the scene, I argue that plastic pollution shares the key features of wicked problems, namely, scientific, political, and societal complexity and uncertainty as well as a diversity in the views of actors. To explore the latter, plastic pollution can be framed as a waste, resource, economic, societal, or systemic problem.

Doing so results in different and sometimes conflicting sets of preferred solutions, including improving waste management; recycling and reuse; implementing levies, taxes, and bans as well as ethical consumerism; raising awareness; and a transition to a circular economy. Deciding which of these solutions is desirable is, again, not a purely rational choice. Accordingly, the social deliberations on these solution sets can be organized across four scales of change. At the geographic and time scales, we need to clarify where and when we want to solve the plastic problem. On the scale of responsibility, we need to clarify who is accountable, has the means to make change, and carries the costs. At the magnitude scale, we need to discuss which level of change we desire on a spectrum of status quo to revolution. All these issues are inherently linked to value judgments and worldviews that must, therefore, be part of an open and inclusive debate to facilitate solving the wicked problem of plastic pollution…(More)”.

Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making

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Open access book by Fabrizio Gilardi: “The rise of digital technology has been the best of times, and also the worst, a roller coaster of hopes and fears: “social media have gone—in the popular imagination at least—from being a way for pro-democratic forces to fight autocrats to being a tool of outside actors who want to attack democracies” (Tucker et al., 2017, 47). The 2016 US presidential election raised fundamental questions regarding the compatibility of the internet with democracy (Persily, 2017). The divergent assessments of the promises and risks of digital technology has to do, in part, with the fact that it has become such a pervasive phenomenon. Whether digital technology is, on balance, a net benefit or harm for democratic processes and institutions depends on which specific aspects we focus on. Moreover, the assessment is not value neutral, because digital technology has become inextricably linked with our politics. As Farrell (2012, 47) argued a few years ago, “[a]s the Internet becomes politically normalized, it will be ever less appropriate to study it in isolation but ever more important to think clearly, and carefully, about its relationship to politics.” Reflecting on this issue requires going beyond the headlines, which tend to focus on the most dramatic concerns and may have a negativity bias common in news reporting in general. The shortage of hard facts in this area, linked to the singular challenges of studying the connection between digital technology and politics, exacerbates the problem.
Since it affects virtually every aspect of politic and policy-making, the nature and effects of digital technology have been studied from many different angles in increasingly fragmented literatures. For example, studies of disinformation and social media usually do not acknowledge research on the usage of artificial intelligence in public administration—for good reasons, because such is the nature of specialized academic research. Similarly, media attention tends to concentrate on the most newsworthy aspects, such as the role of Facebook in elections, without connecting them to other related phenomena. The compartmentalization of academic and public attention in this area is understandable, but it obscures the relationships that exist among the different parts. Moreover, the fact that scholarly and media attention are sometimes out of sync might lead policy-makers to focus on solutions before there is a scientific consensus on the nature and scale of the problems. For example, policy-makers may emphasize curbing “fake news” while there is still no agreement in the research community about its effects on political outcomes…(More)”.

What is the Power Footprint of International Organizations?

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Blog at WeRobotics: “It’s undeniable that international nonprofit organizations headquartered in the West hold a vast amount of power compared to local organizations in the “Majority World”. Systemic factors, such as colonialism and racism, have enabled international nonprofit organizations (INGOs) to increase their authority, control, and influence in multiple industries like humanitarian aid and global development. You might say that these NGOs have a large “power footprint.” Power itself is of course not inherently bad. All organizations need some level of power to drive change. But power can become menacing when centralized and rooted in a singular worldview. The result, as we’ve seen in the INGO space, is a Western-centric system that drives change in a foreign-led, top-down, and techno-centric manner…

How do we measure our own power footprints to create more visibility and transparency? Can we co-create practical metrics to measure the power footprint of INGOs? Can we make the consequences or byproducts of said footprints more visible? Can we gain inspiration from other fields? How is the carbon footprint measured, for example?…

We realize full well that measuring power footprints is a wholly different undertaking to measuring carbon footprints. Analogies can capture the imagination and serve as powerful metaphors, however. Heavy industries have significant positive impact by creating countless jobs and higher standards of living. Over time, however, the cumulative impact of large carbon footprints triggers a global climate emergency. In a similar vein, the massive power footprints of INGOs may be contributing to another global emergency: the pandemic of inequality. There’s lots to unpack here, so we’re working on a longer peer-reviewed piece that expands on these ideas and several other points that we don’t have the space to get into here.

In sum, we know that power is relational, complicated, and polarizing. We also know we’ve got to start somewhere. We need to co-create a transparent mechanism to make the invisible visible and ensure that the reduction of power footprints is real and not just symbolic. The alternative is to continue having the same conversations over and over without ever doing something to affect change. So we’ve developed 5 very preliminary metrics for illustrative purposes, and applied them to our own INGO, WeRobotics.

Each proposed metric is rooted in a question to ourselves and fellow INGOs:

  1. Are our country offices (or equivalent) independent?
  2. Are they locally-led?
  3. Can they exit at any time?
  4. Are we ceding market share?
  5. Do we have a clear Endgame or exit strategy?…(More)”

Data governance: Enhancing access to and sharing of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Recommendation: “Access to and sharing of data are increasingly critical for fostering data-driven scientific discovery and innovations across the private and public sectors globally and will play a role in solving societal challenges, including fighting COVID-19 and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But restrictions to data access, sometimes compounded by a reluctance to share, and a growing awareness of the risks that come with data access and sharing, means economies and societies are not harnessing the full potential of data.


Adopted in October 2021, the OECD Recommendation on Enhancing Access to and Sharing of Data (EASD) is the first internationally agreed upon set of principles and policy guidance on how governments can maximise the cross-sectoral benefits of all types of data – personal, non-personal, open, proprietary, public and private – while protecting the rights of individuals and organisations.


The Recommendation intends to help governments develop coherent data governance policies and frameworks to unlock the potential benefits of data across and within sectors, countries, organisations, and communities. It aims to reinforce trust across the data ecosystem, stimulate investment in data and incentivise data access and sharing, and foster effective and responsible data access, sharing, and use across sectors and jurisdictions.


The Recommendation is a key deliverable of phase 3 of the OECD’s Going Digital project, focused on data governance for frowth and well-being. It was developed by three OECD Committees (Digital Economy Policy, Scientific and Technological Policy, and Public Governance) and acts as a common reference for existing and new OECD legal instruments related to data in areas such as research, health and digital government. It will provide a foundation stone for ongoing OECD work to help countries unlock the potential of data in the digital era….(More)”.

Mobile Big Data in the fight against COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial to Special Collection of Data&Policy by Richard Benjamins, Jeanine Vos, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, parts of the world feel like they may slowly be getting back to (a new) normal. Nevertheless, we know that the damage is still unfolding, and that much of the developing world Southeast Asia and Africa in particular — remain in a state of crisis. Given the global nature of this disease and the potential for mutant versions to develop and spread, a crisis anywhere is cause for concern everywhere. The world remains very much in the grip of this public health crisis.

From the beginning, there has been hope that data and technology could offer solutions to help inform governments’ response strategy and decision-making. Many of the expectations have been focused on mobile data analytics, and in particular the possibility of mobile network operators creating mobility insights and decision-making tools generated from anonymized and aggregated telco data. This hoped-for capability results from a growing group of mobile network operators investing in systems and capabilities to develop such decision-support products and services for public and private sector customers. The value of having such tools has been demonstrated in addressing different global challenges, ranging from the possibilities offered by models to better understand the spread of Zika in Brazil to interactive dashboards that aided emergency services during earthquakes and floods in Japan. Yet despite these experiences, many governments across the world still have limited awareness, capabilities, budgets and resources to leverage such tools in their efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 using non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI).

This special collection of papers we launched in Data & Policy examines both the potential of mobile data, as well as the challenges faced in delivering these tools to inform government decision-making. To date, the collection

Consisting of 11 papers from 71 researchers and experts from academia, industry, and government, the articles cover a wide range of geographies, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, Estonia, Europe (as a whole), France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Malawi, Nigeria, Nordics, and Spain. Responding to our call for case studies to illustrate the opportunities (and challenges) offered by mobile big data in the fight against COVID-19, the authors of these papers describe a number of examples of how mobile and mobile-related data have been used to address the medical, economic, socio-cultural and political aspects of the pandemic….(More)”.