Africa

New Book on 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting

Curated on June 11, 2014November 27, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tiago Peixoto at Democracy Spot: “A little while ago I mentioned the launch of the Portuguese version of the book organized by Nelson Dias, “Hope for Democracy: 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide”.

The good news is that the English version is finally out. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

This book represents the effort of more than forty authors and many other direct and indirect contributions that spread across different continents seek to provide an overview on the Participatory Budgeting (PB) in the World. They do so from different backgrounds. Some are researchers, others are consultants, and others are activists connected to several groups and social movements. The texts reflect this diversity of approaches and perspectives well, and we do not try to influence that.
(….)
The pages that follow are an invitation to a fascinating journey on the path of democratic innovation in very diverse cultural, political, social and administrative settings. From North America to Asia, Oceania to Europe, from Latin America to Africa, the reader will find many reasons to closely follow the proposals of the different authors.

The book can be downloaded here [PDF]. I had the pleasure of being one of the book’s contributors, co-authoring an article with Rafael Sampaio on the use of ICT in PB processes: “Electronic Participatory Budgeting: False Dilemmas and True Complexities” [PDF]...”

Who Influences Whom? Reflections on U.S. Government Outreach to Think Tanks

Curated on June 6, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Shapiro at Brookings: “The U.S. government makes a big effort to reach out to important think tanks, often through the little noticed or understood mechanism of small, private and confidential roundtables. Indeed, for the ambitious Washington think-tanker nothing quite gets the pulse racing like the idea of attending one of these roundtables with the most important government officials. The very occasion is full of intrigue and ritual.

When the Government Calls for Advice

First, an understated e-mail arrives from some polite underling inviting you in to a “confidential, off-the-record” briefing with some official with an impressive title—a deputy secretary or a special assistant to the president, maybe even (heaven forfend) the secretary of state or the national security advisor. The thinker’s heart leaps, “they read my article; they finally see the light of my wisdom, I will probably be the next national security advisor.”
He clears his schedule of any conflicting brown bags on separatism in South Ossetia and, after a suitable interval to keep the government guessing as to his availability, replies that he might be able to squeeze it in to his schedule. Citizenship data and social security numbers are provided for security purposes, times are confirmed and ground rules are established in a multitude of emails with a seemingly never-ending array of staffers, all of whose titles include the word “special.” The thinker says nothing directly to his colleagues, but searches desperately for opportunities to obliquely allude to the meeting: “I’d love to come to your roundtable on uncovered interest rate parity, but I unfortunately have a meeting with the secretary of defense.”
On the appointed day, the thinker arrives early as instructed at an impressively massive and well-guarded government building, clears his ways through multiple layers of redundant security, and is ushered into a wood-paneled room that reeks of power and pine-sol. (Sometimes it is a futuristic conference room filled with television monitors and clocks that give the time wherever the President happens to be.) Nameless peons in sensible suits clutch government-issue notepads around the outer rim of the room as the thinker takes his seat at the center table, only somewhat disappointed to see so many other familiar thinkers in the room—including some to whom he had been obliquely hinting about the meeting the day before.
At the appointed hour, an officious staffer arrives to announce that “He” (the lead government official goes only by personal pronoun—names are unnecessary at this level) is unfortunately delayed at another meeting on the urgent international crisis of the day, but will arrive just as soon as he can get break away from the president in the Situation Room. He is, in fact, just reading email, but his long career has taught him the advantage of making people wait.
After 15 minutes of stilted chit-chat with colleagues that the thinker has the misfortune to see at virtually every event he attends in Washington, the senior government official strides calmly into the room, plops down at the head of the table and declares solemnly what a honor it is to have such distinguished experts to help with this critical area of policy. He very briefly details how very hard the U.S. government is working on this highest priority issue and declares that “we are in listening mode and are anxious to hear your sage advice.” A brave thinker raises his hand and speaks truth to power by reciting the thesis of his latest article. From there, the group is off to races as the thinkers each struggle to get in the conversation and rehearse their well-worn positions.
Forty-three minutes later, the thinkers’ “hour” is up because, the officious staffer interjects, “He” must attend a Principals Committee meeting. The senior government official thanks the experts for coming, compliments them on their fruitful ideas and their full and frank debate, instructs a nameless peon at random to assemble “what was learned here” for distribution in “the building” and strides purposefully out of the room.
The pantomime then ends and the thinker retreats back to his office to continue his thoughts. But what precisely has happened behind the rituals? Have we witnessed the vaunted academic-government exchange that Washington is so famous for? Is this how fresh ideas re-invigorate stale government groupthink?..”

Open government: getting beyond impenetrable online data

Curated on May 28, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jed Miller in The Guardian: “Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously closed a long letter by apologising that he hadn’t had time to make it shorter. Unfortunately, his pithy point about “download time” is regularly attributed to Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, probably because the public loves writers more than it loves statisticians. Scientists may make things provable, but writers make them memorable.
The World Bank confronted a similar reality of data journalism earlier this month when it revealed that, of the 1,600 bank reports posted online on from 2008 to 2012, 32% had never been downloaded at all and another 40% were downloaded under 100 times each.
Taken together, these cobwebbed documents represent millions of dollars in World Bank funds and hundreds of thousands of person-hours, spent by professionals who themselves represent millions of dollars in university degrees. It’s difficult to see the return on investment in producing expert research and organising it into searchable web libraries when almost three quarters of the output goes largely unseen.
The World Bank works at a scale unheard of by most organisations, but expert groups everywhere face the same challenges. Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
Even those who brave the progress bar find too often that urgent, incisive findings about poverty, health, discrimination, conflict or social change are presented in prose written by and for high-level experts, rendering it impenetrable to almost everyone else. Information isn’t just trapped in pdfs; it’s trapped in PhDs.
Governments and NGOs are beginning to realise that digital strategy means more than posting a document online, but what will it take for these groups to change not just their tools, but their thinking? It won’t be enough to partner with WhatsApp or hire GrumpyCat.
I asked strategists from the development, communications and social media fields to offer simple, “Tweetable” suggestions for how the policy community can become better communicators.

For nonprofits and governments that still publish 100-page pdfs on their websites and do not optimise the content to share in other channels such as social: it is a huge waste of time and ineffective. Stop it now.

– Beth Kanter, author and speaker. Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Treat text as #opendata so infomediaries can mash it up and make it more accessible (see, for example federalregister.gov) and don’t just post and blast: distribute information in a targeted way to those most likely to be interested.

– Beth Noveck, director at the Governance Lab and former director at White House Open Government Initiative

Don’t be boring. Sounds easy, actually quite hard, super-important.

– Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy

Surprise me. Uncover the key finding that inspired you, rather than trying to tell it all at once and show me how the world could change because of it.

– Jay Golden, co-founder of Wakingstar Storyworks

For the Bank or anyone who is generating policy information they actually want people to use, they must actually write it for the user, not for themselves. As Steve Jobs said, ‘Simple can be harder than complex’.

– Kristen Grimm, founder and president at Spitfire Strategies

The way to reach the widest audience is to think beyond content format and focus on content strategy.

– Laura Silber, director of public affairs at Open Society Foundations

Open the door to policy work with short, accessible pieces – a blog post, a video take, infographics – that deliver the ‘so what’ succinctly.

– Robert McMahon, editor at Council on Foreign Relations

Policy information is more usable if it’s linked to corresponding actions one can take, or if it helps stir debate. Also, whichever way you slice it, there will always be a narrow market for raw policy reports … that’s why explainer sites, listicles and talking heads exist.

– Ory Okolloh, director of investments at Omidyar Network and former public policy and government relations manager at Google Africa
Ms Okolloh, who helped found the citizen reporting platform Ushahidi, also offered a simple reminder about policy reports: “‘Never gets downloaded’ doesn’t mean ‘never gets read’.” Just as we shouldn’t mistake posting for dissemination, we shouldn’t confuse popularity with influence….”

Innovation And Inequality

Curated on May 27, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Edited book on “Emerging Technologies in an Unequal World”: “Susan Cozzens, Dhanaraj Thakur, and the other co-authors ask how the benefits and costs of emerging technologies are distributed amongst different countries – some rich and some poor. Examining the case studies of five technologies across eight countries in Africa, Europe and the Americas, the book finds that the distributional dynamics around a given technology are influenced by the way entrepreneurs and others package the technology, how governments promote it and the existing local skills and capacity to use it. These factors create social and economic boundaries where the technology stops diffusing between and within countries. The book presents a series of recommendations for policy-makers and private sector actors to move emerging technologies beyond these boundaries and improve their distributional outcomes.
Offering a broad range of mature and relatively new emerging technologies from a diverse set of countries, the study will strongly appeal to policy-makers in science, technology and innovation policy. It will also benefit students and academics interested in innovation, science, technology and innovation policy, the economics of innovation, as well as the history and sociology of technology.
Full table of contents“

Citizen participation and technology

Curated on May 27, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

ICTlogy: “The recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology is changing relationships between citizens, organizations and public institutions, and expanding political participation. But while technology has the potential to amplify citizens’ voices, it must be accompanied by clear political goals and other factors to increase their clout.
Those are among the conclusions of a new NDI study, “Citizen Participation and Technology,” that examines the role digital technologies – such as social media, interactive websites and SMS systems – play in increasing citizen participation and fostering accountability in government. The study was driven by the recognition that better insights are needed into the relationship between new technologies, citizen participation programs and the outcomes they aim to achieve.
Using case studies from countries such as Burma, Mexico and Uganda, the study explores whether the use of technology in citizen participation programs amplifies citizen voices and increases government responsiveness and accountability, and whether the use of digital technology increases the political clout of citizens.
The research shows that while more people are using technology—such as social media for mobile organizing, and interactive websites and text messaging systems that enable direct communication between constituents and elected officials or crowdsourcing election day experiences— the type and quality of their political participation, and therefore its impact on democratization, varies. It also suggests that, in order to leverage technology’s potential, there is a need to focus on non-technological areas such as political organizing, leadership skills and political analysis.
For example, the “2% and More Women in Politics” coalition led by Mexico’s National Institute for Women (INMUJERES) used a social media campaign and an online petition to call successfully for reforms that would allocate two percent of political party funding for women’s leadership training. Technology helped the activists reach a wider audience, but women from the different political parties who made up the coalition might not have come together without NDI’s role as a neutral convener.
The study, which was conducted with support from the National Endowment for Democracy, provides an overview of NDI’s approach to citizen participation, and examines how the integration of technologies affects its programs in order to inform the work of NDI, other democracy assistance practitioners, donors, and civic groups.

Observations:

Key findings:

Technology can be used to readily create spaces and opportunities for citizens to express their voices, but making these voices politically stronger and the spaces more meaningful is a harder challenge that is political and not technological in nature.
Technology that was used to purposefully connect citizens’ groups and amplify their voices had more political impact.
There is a scarcity of data on specific demographic groups’ use of, and barriers to technology for political participation. Programs seeking to close the digital divide as an instrument of narrowing the political divide should be informed by more research into barriers to access to both politics and technology.
There is a blurring of the meaning between the technologies of open government data and the politics of open government that clouds program strategies and implementation.
Attempts to simply crowdsource public inputs will not result in users self-organizing into politically influential groups, since citizens lack the opportunities to develop leadership, unity, and commitment around a shared vision necessary for meaningful collective action.
Political will and the technical capacity to engage citizens in policy making, or providing accurate data on government performance are lacking in many emerging democracies. Technology may have changed institutions’ ability to respond to citizen demands but its mere presence has not fundamentally changed actual government responsiveness.”

Politics or technology – which will save the world?

Curated on May 26, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Runciman in the Guardian: (Politics by David Runciman is due from Profile ..It is the first in a series of “Ideas in Profile”) “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution. Its transformative effects are everywhere. In many places, rapid technological change stands in stark contrast to the lack of political change. Take the United States. Its political system has hardly changed at all in the past 25 years. Even the moments of apparent transformation – such as the election of Obama in 2008 – have only reinforced how entrenched the established order is: once the excitement died away, Obama was left facing the same constrained political choices. American politics is stuck in a rut. But the lives of American citizens have been revolutionised over the same period. The birth of the web and the development of cheap and efficient devices through which to access it have completely altered the way people connect with each other. Networks of people with shared interests, tastes, concerns, fetishes, prejudices and fears have sprung up in limitless varieties. The information technology revolution has changed the way human beings befriend each other, how they meet, date, communicate, medicate, investigate, negotiate and decide who they want to be and what they want to do. Many aspects of our online world would be unrecognisable to someone who was transplanted here from any point in the 20th century. But the infighting and gridlock in Washington would be all too familiar.
This isn’t just an American story. China hasn’t changed much politically since 4 June 1989, when the massacre in Tiananmen Square snuffed out a would-be revolution and secured the current regime’s hold on power. But China itself has been totally altered since then. Economic growth is a large part of the difference. But so is the revolution in technology. A country of more than a billion people, nearly half of whom still live in the countryside, has been transformed by the mobile phone. There are currently over a billion phones in use in China. Ten years ago, fewer than one in 10 Chinese had access to one; today there is nearly one per person. Individuals whose horizons were until very recently constrained by physical geography – to live and die within a radius of a few miles from your birthplace was not unusual for Chinese peasants even into this century – now have access to the wider world. For the present, though maybe not for much longer, the spread of new technology has helped to stifle the call for greater political change. Who needs a political revolution when you’ve got a technological one?

Technology has the power to make politics seem obsolete. The speed of change leaves government looking slow, cumbersome, unwieldy and often irrelevant. It can also make political thinking look tame by comparison with the big ideas coming out of the tech industry. This doesn’t just apply to far‑out ideas about what will soon be technologically possible: intelligent robots, computer implants in the human brain, virtual reality that is indistinguishable from “real” reality (all things that Ray Kurzweil, co-founder of the Google-sponsored Singularity University, thinks are coming by 2030). In this post-ideological age some of the most exotic political visions are the ones that emerge from discussions about tech. You’ll find more radical libertarians and outright communists among computer scientists than among political scientists. Advances in computing have thrown up fresh ways to think about what it means to own something, what it means to share something and what it means to have a private life at all. These are among the basic questions of modern politics. However, the new answers rarely get expressed in political terms (with the exception of occasional debates about civil rights for robots). More often they are expressions of frustration with politics and sometimes of outright contempt for it. Technology isn’t seen as a way of doing politics better. It’s seen as a way of bypassing politics altogether.
In some circumstances, technology can and should bypass politics. The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world’s poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange. In Africa, a grassroots, phone-based banking system has sprung up that for the first time permits money transfers without the physical exchange of cash. This makes it possible for the inhabitants of desperately poor and isolated rural areas to do business outside of their local communities. Technology caused this to happen; government didn’t. For many Africans, phones are an escape route from the constrained existence that bad politics has for so long mired them in.
But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won’t rescue anyone from civil war. Africans can use their phones to tell the wider world of the horrors that are still taking place in some parts of the continent – in South Sudan, in Eritrea, in the Niger Delta, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia. Unfortunately the world does not often listen, and nor do the soldiers who are doing the killing. Phones have not changed the basic equation of political security: the people with the guns need a compelling reason not to use them. Technology by itself doesn’t give them that reason. Equally, technology by itself won’t provide the basic infrastructure whose lack it has provided a way around. If there are no functioning roads to get you to market, a phone is a godsend when you have something to sell. But in the long run, you still need the roads. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics…”

Democracy and open data: are the two linked?

Curated on May 24, 2014July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.

There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:

While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.

Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:

Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”

The Weird, Wild World of Citizen Science Is Already Here

Curated on May 23, 2014October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lang in Wired: “Up and down the west coast of North America, countless numbers of starfish are dying. The affliction, known as Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, is already being called the biggest die-off of sea stars in recorded history, and we’re still in the dark as to what’s causing it or what it means. It remains an unsolved scientific mystery. The situation is also shaping up as a case study of an unsung scientific opportunity: the rise of citizen science and exploration.
The sea star condition was first noticed by Laura James, a diver and underwater videographer based in Seattle. As they began washing up on the shore near her home with lesions and missing limbs, she became concerned and notified scientists. Similar sightings started cropping up all along the West Coast, with gruesome descriptions of sea stars that were disintegrating in a matter of days, and populations that had been decimated. As scientists race to understand what’s happening, they’ve enlisted the help of amateurs like James, to move faster. Pete Raimondi’s lab at UC Santa Cruz has created the Sea Star Wasting Map, the baseline for monitoring the issue, to capture the diverse set of contributors and collaborators.
The map is one of many new models of citizen-powered science–a blend of amateurs and professionals, looking and learning together–that are beginning to emerge. Just this week, NASA endorsed a group of amateur astronomers to attempt to rescue a vintage U.S. spacecraft. NASA doesn’t have the money to do it, and this passionate group of citizen scientists can handle it.
Unfortunately, the term “citizen science” is terrible. It’s vague enough to be confusing, yet specific enough to seem exclusive. It’s too bad, too, because the idea of citizen science is thrilling. I love the notion that I can participate in the expanding pool of human knowledge and understanding, even though the extent of my formal science education is a high school biology class. To me, it seemed a genuine invitation to be curious. A safe haven for beginners. A license to explore.
Not everyone shares my romantic perspective, though. If you ask a university researcher, they’re likely to explain citizen science as a way for the public to contribute data points to larger, professionally run studies, like participating in the galaxy-spotting website Zooniverse or taking part in the annual Christmas Bird Count with the Audubon Society. It’s a model on the scientific fringes; using broad participation to fill the gaps in necessary data.
There’s power in this diffuse definition, though, as long as new interpretations are welcomed and encouraged. By inviting and inspiring people to ask their own questions, citizen science can become much more than a way of measuring bird populations. From the drone-wielding conservationists in South Africa to the makeshift biolabs in Brooklyn, a widening circle of participants are wearing the amateur badge with honor. And all of these groups–the makers, the scientists, the hobbyists–are converging to create a new model for discovery. In other words, the maker movement and the traditional science world are on a collision course.
To understand the intersection, it helps to know where each of those groups is coming from….”

After Sustainable Cities?

Curated on May 20, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Mike Hodson, and Simon Marvin: “A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet, the most common understanding is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Central to this vision are two ideas: cities should meet social needs, especially of the poor, and not exceed the ability of the global environment to meet needs.
After Sustainable Cities critically reviews what has happened to these priorities and asks whether these social commitments have been abandoned in a period of austerity governance and climate change and replaced by a darker and unfair city. This book provides the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the new eco-logics reshaping conventional sustainable cities discourse and environmental priorities of cities in both the global north and south. The dominant discourse on sustainable cities, with a commitment to intergenerational equity, social justice and global responsibility, has come under increasing pressure. Under conditions of global ecological change, international financial and economic crisis and austerity governance new eco-logics are entering the urban sustainability lexicon – climate change, green growth, smart growth, resilience and vulnerability, ecological security. This book explores how these new eco-logics reshape our understanding of equity, justice and global responsibility, and how these more technologically and economically driven themes resonate and dissonate with conventional sustainable cities discourse. This book provides a warning that a more technologically driven and narrowly constructed economic agenda is driving ecological policy and weakening previous commitment to social justice and equity.
After Sustainable Cities brings together leading researchers to provide a critical examination of these new logics and identity what sort of city is now emerging, as well as consider the longer-term implication on sustainable cities research and policy.”