Paper by Gerhard Hammerschmid, Enora Palaric, Maike Rackwitz, and Kai Wegrich: “Despite claims of a paradigmatic shift toward the increased role of networks and partnerships as a form of governance—driven and enabled by digital technologies—the relation of “Networked Governance” with the pre-existing paradigms of “Traditional Weberian Public Administration” and “New Public Management” remains relatively unexplored. This research aims at collecting systematic evidence on the dominant paradigms in digitalization reforms in Europe by comparing the doctrines employed in the initial and most recent digitalization strategies across eight European countries: Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We challenge the claim that Networked Governance is emerging as the dominant paradigm in the context of the digitalization of the public sector. The findings confirm earlier studies indicating that information and communication technologies tend to reinforce some traditional features of administration and the recentralization of power. Furthermore, we find evidence of the continued importance of key features of “New Public Management” in the digital era…(More)”.
Professional expertise in Policy Advisory Systems: How administrators and consultants built Behavioral Insights in Danish public agencies
Paper by Jakob Laage-Thomsen: “Recent work on consultants and academics in public policy has highlighted their transformational role. The paper traces how, in the absence of an explicit government strategy, external advisors establish different organizational arrangements to build Behavioral Insights in public agencies as a new form of administrative expertise. This variation shows the importance of the politico-administrative context within which external advisors exert influence. The focus on professional expertise adds to existing understandings of ideational compatibility in contemporary Policy Advisory Systems. Inspired by the Sociology of Professions, expertise is conceptualized as professionally constructed sets of diagnosis, inference, and treatment. The paper compares four Danish governmental agencies since 2010, revealing the central roles external advisors play in facilitating new policy ideas and diffusing new forms of expertise. This has implications for how we think of administrative expertise in contemporary bureaucracies, and the role of external advisors in fostering new forms of expertise….(More)”.
Mapping Diversity
About: “Mapping Diversity is a platform for discovering key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe, and to spark a debate about who is missing from our urban spaces.
We looked at the names of 145,933 streets across 30 major European cities, located in 17 different countries. More than 90% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to white men. Where did all the other inhabitants of Europe end up? The lack of diversity in toponymy speaks volumes about our past and contributes to shaping Europe’s present and future…(More)”.
Decidim: why digital tools for democracy need to be developed democratically
Blog by Adrian Smith and Pedro Prieto Martín: “On Wednesday 18 January 2023, a pan-European citizen jury voted Barcelona the first European Capital of Democracy. Barcelona has a rich history of official and citizen initiatives in political and economic democracy. One received a special mention from the jurors. That initiative is Decidim.
Decidim is a digital platform for citizen participation. Through it, citizens can propose, comment, debate, and vote on urban developments, decide how to spend city budgets, and design and contribute to local strategies and plans.
Launched in 2016, more than 400 organisations around the world have since used the platform. What makes Decidim stand out, according to our research, is developer commitment to democratising technology development itself and embedding it within struggles for democracy offline and online. Decidim holds important lessons at a time when the monopolisation of social media by corporate power presents democrats with so many challenges…(More)”.
Whole of government innovation
Report by Geoff Mulgan: ‘Whole of government’ approaches – that aim to mobilise and align many ministries and agencies around a common challenge – have a long history. There have been notable examples during major wars, and around attempts to digitize societies, to cut energy use and to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This paper has been prepared as part of a European Commission programme which I’m chairing looking at ‘whole of government innovation’ and working with national governments to help them better align their actions.
My paper – linked below – looks at the lessons of history. It outlines the many tools governments can use to achieve cross-cutting goals, linking R&D to law, regulation and procurement, and collaborating with business, universities and civil society. It argues that it is unwise to rely only on committees and boards. It shows how these choices link to innovation strategy and funding, including the relevance of half a century of experiment with moon-shots and missions.
The paper describes how the organisational challenges vary depending on the nature of the task; why governments need to avoid common technology or ‘STI trap’, of focusing only on hardware and not on social arrangements or business models; why constellations and flotillas of coordination are usually more realistic than true ‘whole of government approaches; the importance of mobilising hearts and minds as well as money and command.
Finally, it addresses the relevance of different approaches to current tasks such as the achievement of a net zero economy and society. The paper is shared as a working document – I’m keen to find new examples and approaches…(More)”.
The big idea: should governments run more experiments?
Article by Stian Westlake: “…Conceived in haste in the early days of the pandemic, Recovery (which stands for Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy) sought to find drugs to help treat people seriously ill with the novel disease. It brought together epidemiologists, statisticians and health workers to test a range of promising existing drugs at massive scale across the NHS.
The secret of Recovery’s success is that it was a series of large, fast, randomised experiments, designed to be as easy as possible for doctors and nurses to administer in the midst of a medical emergency. And it worked wonders: within three months, it had demonstrated that dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid, reduced Covid deaths by a fifth to a third. In the months that followed, Recovery identified four more effective drugs, and along the way showed that various popular treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, President Trump’s tonic of choice, were useless. All in all, it is thought that Recovery saved a million lives around the world, and it’s still going.
But Recovery’s incredible success should prompt us to ask a more challenging question: why don’t we do this more often? The question of which drugs to use was far from the only unknown we had to navigate in the early days of the pandemic. Consider the decision to delay second doses of the vaccine, when to close schools, or the right regime for Covid testing. In each case, the UK took a calculated risk and hoped for the best. But as the Royal Statistical Society pointed out at the time, it would have been cheap and quick to undertake trials so we could know for sure what the right choice was, and then double down on it.
There is a growing movement to apply randomised trials not just in healthcare but in other things government does. ..(More)”.
Citizen Z: Strengthening the participation of young citizens in democratic and civic life
Blog of the European Commission: “Contemporary political attitudes are characterized by significant political indifference, disengagement from public life, and a decline in political participation, especially among young people, whose level of interest in politics is steadily declining in almost all EU countries. The ‘Citizen Z’ project, which started in November 2022, applies deliberative methods, to both stimulate interest in civic and political life among young people aged 15 to 25 and to involve them in the decision-making process. Special attention is devoted to the intersectionality principle and those groups that are often affected by low levels of participation: migrants, disadvantaged communities, girls and women.
The ‘Citizen Z’ project aims to respond to the European Commission priorities outlined in the European Democracy Action Plan and the EU Citizenship Report 2020 by enhancing civic engagement and democratic participation of EU citizens, particularly youth aged 15 to 25.
The project is also in line with the position supported by the European Committee of the Regions, which in 2019 encouraged a ‘cultural change’ towards experimenting with deliberative democracy tools as developed at the local level (European Committee of the Regions, Putting citizens at the Centre of the EU agenda), as the most authentic democratic participation originates in the context closest to the citizen…(More)”.
The Future of Compute
Independent Review by a UK Expert Panel: “…Compute is a material part of modern life. It is among the critical technologies lying behind innovation, economic growth and scientific discoveries. Compute improves our everyday lives. It underpins all the tools, services and information we hold on our handheld devices – from search engines and social media, to streaming services and accurate weather forecasts. This technology may be invisible to the public, but life today would be very different without it.
Sectors across the UK economy, both new and old, are increasingly reliant upon compute. By leveraging the capability that compute provides, businesses of all sizes can extract value from the enormous quantity of data created every day; reduce the cost and time required for research and development (R&D); improve product design; accelerate decision making processes; and increase overall efficiency. Compute also enables advancements in transformative technologies, such as AI, which themselves lead to the creation of value and innovation across the economy. This all translates into higher productivity and profitability for businesses and robust economic growth for the UK as a whole.
Compute powers modelling, simulations, data analysis and scenario planning, and thereby enables researchers to develop new drugs; find new energy sources; discover new materials; mitigate the effects of climate change; and model the spread of pandemics. Compute is required to tackle many of today’s global challenges and brings invaluable benefits to our society.
Compute’s effects on society and the economy have already been and, crucially, will continue to be transformative. The scale of compute capabilities keeps accelerating at pace. The performance of the world’s fastest compute has grown by a factor of 626 since 2010. The compute requirements of the largest machine learning models has grown 10 billion times over the last 10 years. We expect compute demand to significantly grow as compute capability continues to increase. Technology today operates very differently to 10 years ago and, in a decade’s time, it will have changed once again.
Yet, despite compute’s value to the economy and society, the UK lacks a long-term vision for compute…(More)”.
Access to Data for Environmental Purposes: Setting the Scene and Evaluating Recent Changes in EU Data Law
Paper by Michèle Finck, and Marie-Sophie Mueller: “Few policy issues will be as defining to the EU’s future as its reaction to environmental decline, on the one hand, and digitalisation, on the other. Whereas the former will shape the (quality of) life and health of humans, animals and plants, the latter will define the future competitiveness of the internal market and relatedly, also societal justice and cohesion. Yet, to date, the interconnections between these issues are rarely made explicit, as evidenced by the European Commission’s current policy agendas on both matters. With this article, we hope to contribute to, ideally, a soon growing conversation about how to effectively bridge environmental protection and digitalisation. Specifically, we examine how EU law shapes the options of using data—the lifeblood of the digital economy—for environmental sustainability purposes, and ponder the impact of on-going legislative reform…(More)”.
Suspicion Machines
Lighthouse Reports: “Governments all over the world are experimenting with predictive algorithms in ways that are largely invisible to the public. What limited reporting there has been on this topic has largely focused on predictive policing and risk assessments in criminal justice systems. But there is an area where even more far-reaching experiments are underway on vulnerable populations with almost no scrutiny.
Fraud detection systems are widely deployed in welfare states ranging from complex machine learning models to crude spreadsheets. The scores they generate have potentially life-changing consequences for millions of people. Until now, public authorities have typically resisted calls for transparency, either by claiming that disclosure would increase the risk of fraud or to protect proprietary technology.
The sales pitch for these systems promises that they will recover millions of euros defrauded from the public purse. And the caricature of the benefit cheat is a modern take on the classic trope of the undeserving poor and much of the public debate in Europe — which has the most generous welfare states — is intensely politically charged.
The true extent of welfare fraud is routinely exaggerated by consulting firms, who are often the algorithm vendors, talking it up to near 5 percent of benefits spending while some national auditors’ offices estimate it at between 0.2 and 0.4 of spending. Distinguishing between honest mistakes and deliberate fraud in complex public systems is messy and hard.
When opaque technologies are deployed in search of political scapegoats the potential for harm among some of the poorest and most marginalised communities is significant.
Hundreds of thousands of people are being scored by these systems based on data mining operations where there has been scant public consultation. The consequences of being flagged by the “suspicion machine” can be drastic, with fraud controllers empowered to turn the lives of suspects inside out…(More)”.