Today’s Problems, Yesterday’s Toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Beth Noveck and Rod Glover: “Governments of all political stripes are being buffeted by technological and societal change. There is a pervasive sense globally that governments are not doing as well as they ought to solve our biggest policy problems. Pressure has intensified to provide better services and experiences, and deliver measurable results that improve people’s lives. The failure to meet our most pressing challenges help to explain why in Australia, trust in government is at an all-time low. New technologies, however, bring with them the opportunity to rethink how the public sector in Australia might solve public problems by building a workforce with diverse and innovative skills, especially how to use data and actively reach out beyond the public sector itself.

Commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), this report builds on a pioneering survey of almost 400 public servants in Australia and New Zealand, dozens of interviews with senior practitioners, and original research into how governments around the world are training public officials in innovative practices.

The survey findings show that public servants are eager to embrace skills for innovation but receive inadequate training in them….(More)”

Politics, Bureaucracy and Successful Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Inaugural lecture by K.J. Meier: “One of the major questions, perhaps the major question, in the field of public administration is how to reconcile the need for bureaucracy with the democratic process. Bureaucracies after all are not seen as democratic institutions and operate based on hierarchy and expertise rather than popular will (see Mosher 1968). I take a distinctly minority view in the field, seeing bureaucracy not so much as a threat to democracy in existing mature democracies but as a necessary precondition for the existence of democracy in modern society (Meier 1997).

Democracy is a system of governance with high transactions costs that seeks democratic ideals of representation, equity, and fairness with only modest, if any, concern for efficiency. Effective bureaucracies are the institutions that produce the outcomes that build public support for democracy and in a sense generate the surplus that allows democratic processes to survive and flourish. Although bureaucracies may have none of the trappings of democracy internally, their role in contributing to democratic governance means that they should also be considered democratic institutions. Scholars, politicians, and citizens need to be concerned about preserving and protecting bureaucracy just as they seek to preserve and protect our official institutions of democracy.

Within the general theme of bureaucracy and democracy, this lecture will address two major concerns – (1) the failure of politics which severs the crucial link between voters and elected officials and poses major challenges to bureaucrats seeking to administer effective programs, and (2) the subsequent need for bureaucracy to also become an institution that represents the public. Within this concern about bureaucratic representation, the lecture will address how bureaucracies can assess the needs of citizens, and more narrowly how representative bureaucracy can be and is instrumental to the bureaucracy, and finally the limits of symbolic representation within bureaucracies….(More)”.

Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Tony Evans and Peter Hupe: “Actors in public situations are in some ways subject to control while also exercising freedom. Discretion in contemporary societies is increasingly characterized by cross-cutting systems of control as well as by conflicting conceptions of knowledge and expertise. There is also the paradox of the autonomous individual empowered by social media while simultaneously being subject to its algorithms and surveillance. Narrow disciplinary conceptions of discretion—whether they come from law, economics, sociology or politics—are of limited value in understanding the contemporary dynamics of discretion. This chapter describes these phenomena and also seeks to capture the operation of discretion in different settings while examining its role and evaluating its use. It is argued that we need to recognize developing debates within disciplines, cross-fertilization between them and innovative developments at the margins of those disciplines. That enables the conceptualization of the natures, operations and evaluations of discretion as a context-sensitive and dynamic idea….(More)”.

Government wants access to personal data while it pushes privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sara Fischer and Scott Rosenberg at Axios: “Over the past two years, the U.S. government has tried to rein in how major tech companies use the personal data they’ve gathered on their customers. At the same time, government agencies are themselves seeking to harness those troves of data.

Why it matters: Tech platforms use personal information to target ads, whereas the government can use it to prevent and solve crimes, deliver benefits to citizens — or (illegally) target political dissent.

Driving the news: A new report from the Wall Street Journal details the ways in which family DNA testing sites like FamilyTreeDNA are pressured by the FBI to hand over customer data to help solve criminal cases using DNA.

  • The trend has privacy experts worried about the potential implications of the government having access to large pools of genetic data, even though many people whose data is included never agreed to its use for that purpose.

The FBI has particular interest in data from genetic and social media sites, because it could help solve crimes and protect the public.

  • For example, the FBI is “soliciting proposals from outside vendors for a contract to pull vast quantities of public data” from Facebook, Twitter Inc. and other social media companies,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.
  • The request is meant to help the agency surveil social behavior to “mitigate multifaceted threats, while ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met.”
  • Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also urged social media platforms to cooperate with the governmentin efforts to flag individual users as potential mass shooters.

Other agencies have their eyes on big data troves as well.

  • Earlier this year, settlement talks between Facebook and the Department of Housing and Urban Development broke down over an advertising discrimination lawsuit when, according to a Facebook spokesperson, HUD “insisted on access to sensitive information — like user data — without adequate safeguards.”
  • HUD presumably wanted access to the data to ensure advertising discrimination wasn’t occurring on the platform, but it’s unclear whether the agency needed user data to be able to support that investigation….(More)”.

Investigators Use New Strategy to Combat Opioid Crisis: Data Analytics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Byron Tau and Aruna Viswanatha in the Wall Street Journal: “When federal investigators got a tip in 2015 that a health center in Houston was distributing millions of doses of opioid painkillers, they tried a new approach: look at the numbers.

State and federal prescription and medical billing data showed a pattern of overprescription, giving authorities enough ammunition to send an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent. She found a crowded waiting room and armed security guards. After a 91-second appointment with the sole doctor, the agent paid $270 at the cash-only clinic and walked out with 100 10mg pills of the powerful opioid hydrocodone.

The subsequent prosecution of the doctor and the clinic owner, who were sentenced last year to 35 years in prison, laid the groundwork for a new data-driven Justice Department strategy to help target one of the worst public-health crises in the country. Prosecutors expanded the pilot program from Houston to the hard-hit Appalachian region in early 2019. Within months, the effort resulted in the indictments of dozens of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others. Two-thirds of them had been identified through analyzing the data, a Justice Department official said. A quarter of defendants were expected to plead guilty, according to the Justice Department, and additional indictments through the program are expected in the coming weeks.

“These are doctors behaving like drug dealers,” said Brian Benczkowski, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division who oversaw the expansion.

“They’ve been operating as though nobody could see them for a long period of time. Now we have the data,” Mr. Benczkowski said.

The Justice Department’s fraud section has been using data analytics in health-care prosecutions for several years—combing through Medicare and Medicaid billing data for evidence of fraud, and deploying the strategy in cities around the country that saw outlier billings. In 2018, the health-care fraud unit charged more than 300 people with fraud totaling more than $2 billion, according to the Justice Department.

But using the data to combat the opioid crisis, which is ravaging communities across the country, is a new development for the department, which has made tackling the epidemic a key priority in the Trump administration….(More)”.

Political innovation, digitalisation and public participation in party politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa Schmidthuber, Dennis Hilgers,  and Maximilian Rapp: “Citizen engagement is seen as a way to address a range of societal challenges, fiscal constraints, as well as wicked problems, and increasing public participation in political decisions could help to address low levels of trust in politicians and decreasing satisfaction with political parties. This paper examines the perceived impacts of an experiment by the Austrian People’s Party which, in response to reaching a historic low in the polls, opened up its manifesto process to public participation via digital technology. Analysis of survey data from participants found that self-efficacy is positively associated with participation intensity but negatively related to satisfaction. In contrast, collective efficacy is related to positive perceptions of public participation in party politics but does not influence levels of individual participation. Future research is needed to explore the outcomes of political innovations that use digital technologies to enable public participation on voting behaviour, party membership and attitudes to representative democracy….(More)”.

Datafication and accountability in public health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a special issue of Social Studies of Science by Klaus Hoeyer, Susanne Bauer, and Martyn Pickersgill: “In recent years and across many nations, public health has become subject to forms of governance that are said to be aimed at establishing accountability. In this introduction to a special issue, From Person to Population and Back: Exploring Accountability in Public Health, we suggest opening up accountability assemblages by asking a series of ostensibly simple questions that inevitably yield complicated answers: What is counted? What counts? And to whom, how and why does it count? Addressing such questions involves staying attentive to the technologies and infrastructures through which data come into being and are made available for multiple political agendas. Through a discussion of public health, accountability and datafication we present three key themes that unite the various papers as well as illustrate their diversity….(More)”.

Governance sinkholes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Geoff Mulgan: “Governance sinkholes appear when shifts in technology, society and the economy throw up the need for new arrangements. Each industrial revolution has created many governance sinkholes – and prompted furious innovation to fill them. The fourth industrial revolution will be no different. But most governments are too distracted to think about what to do to fill these holes, let alone to act. This blog sets out my diagnosis – and where I think the most work is needed to design new institutions….

It’s not too hard to get a map of the fissures and gaps – and to see where governance is needed but is missing. There are all too many of these now.

Here are a few examples. One is long-term care, currently missing adequate financing, regulation, information and navigation tools, despite its huge and growing significance. The obvious contrast is with acute healthcare, which, for all its problems, is rich in institutions and governance.

A second example is lifelong learning and training. Again, there is a striking absence of effective institutions to provide funding, navigation, policy and problem solving, and again, the contrast with the institution-rich fields of primary, secondary and tertiary education is striking. The position on welfare is not so different, as is the absence of institutions fit for purpose in supporting people in precarious work.

I’m particularly interested in another kind of sinkhole: the absence of the right institutions to handle data and knowledge – at global, national and local levels – now that these dominate the economy, and much of daily life. In field after field, there are huge potential benefits to linking data sets and connecting artificial and human intelligence to spot patterns or prevent problems. But we lack any institutions with either the skills or the authority to do this well, and in particular to think through the trade-offs between the potential benefits and the potential risks….(More)”.

Governing Complexity: Analyzing and Applying Polycentricity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Andreas Thiel, William A. Blomquist, and Dustin E. Garrick: “There has been a rapid expansion of academic interest and publications on polycentricity. In the contemporary world, nearly all governance situations are polycentric, but people are not necessarily used to thinking this way. Governing Complexity provides an updated explanation of the concept of polycentric governance. The editors provide examples of it in contemporary settings involving complex natural resource systems, as well as a critical evaluation of the utility of the concept. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this book makes the case that polycentric governance arrangements exist and it is possible for polycentric arrangements to perform well, persist for long periods, and adapt. Whether they actually function well, persist, or adapt depends on multiple factors that are reviewed and discussed, both theoretically and with examples from actual cases….(More)”.

How does Finland use health and social data for the public benefit?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karolina Mackiewicz at ICT & Health: “…Better innovation opportunities, quicker access to comprehensive ready-combined data, smoother permit procedures needed for research – those are some of the benefits for society, academia or business announced by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health of Finland when the Act on the Secondary Use of Health and Social Data was introduced.

It came into force on 1st of May 2019. According to the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA, which was involved in the development of the legislation and carried out the pilot projects, it’s a ‘groundbreaking’ piece of legislation. It’ not only effectively introduces a one-stop-shop for data but it’s also one of the first, if not the first, implementations of the GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) for the secondary use of data in Europe. 

The aim of the Act is “to facilitate the effective and safe processing and access to the personal social and health data for steering, supervision, research, statistics and development in the health and social sector”. A second objective is to guarantee an individual’s legitimate expectations as well as their rights and freedoms when processing personal data. In other words, the Ministry of Health promises that the Act will help eliminate the administrative burden in access to the data by the researchers and innovative businesses while respecting the privacy of individuals and providing conditions for the ethically sustainable way of using data….(More)”.