Paper by Marij Swinkels, Olivier de Vette & Victor Toom: “Long-term public issues face the intergenerational problem: current policy decisions place a disproportionate burden on future generations while primarily benefitting those in the present. The interests of present generations trump those of future generations, as the latter play no explicit part as stakeholders in policy making processes. How can the interests of future generations be voiced in the present? In this paper, we explore an innovative method to incorporate the interests of future generations in the process of policymaking: future design. First, we situate future design in the policy process and relate it to other intergenerational policymaking initiatives that aim to redeem the intergenerational problem. Second, we show how we applied future design and provide insights into three pilots that we organized on two long-term public issues in the Netherlands: housing shortages and water management. We conclude that future design can effectively contribute to representing the interests of future generations, but that adoption of future design in different contexts also requires adaptation of the method. The findings increase our understanding of the value of future design as an innovative policymaking practice to strengthen intergenerational policymaking. As such, it provides policymakers with insights into how to use this method…(More)”.
Why Generative AI Isn’t Transforming Government (Yet) — and What We Can Do About It
Article by Tiago C. Peixoto: “A few weeks ago, I reached out to a handful of seasoned digital services practitioners, NGOs, and philanthropies with a simple question: Where are the compelling generative AI (GenAI) use cases in public-sector workflows? I wasn’t looking for better search or smarter chatbots. I wanted examples of automation of real public workflows – something genuinely interesting and working. The responses, though numerous, were underwhelming.
That question has gained importance amid a growing number of reports forecasting AI’s transformative impact on government. The Alan Turing Institute, for instance, published a rigorous study estimating the potential of AI to help automate over 140 million government transactions in the UK. The Tony Blair Institute also weighed in, suggesting that a substantive portion of public-sector work could be automated. While the report helped bring welcome attention to the issue, its use of GPT-4 to assess task automatability has sparked a healthy discussion about how best to evaluate feasibility. Like other studies in this area, both reports highlight potential – but stop short of demonstrating real service automation.
Without testing technologies in real service environments – where workflows, incentives, and institutional constraints shape outcomes – and grounding each pilot in clear efficiency or well-being metrics, estimates risk becoming abstractions that underestimate feasibility.
This pattern aligns with what Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue in “AI as Normal Technology:” the impact of AI is realized only when methods translate into applications and diffuse through real-world systems. My own review, admittedly non-representative, confirms their call for more empirical work on the innovation-diffusion lag.
In the public sector, the gap between capability and impact is not only wide but also structural…(More)”
Urban Development Needs Systems Thinking
Article by Yaera Chung: “More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) continue to grapple with economic stagnation, aging infrastructure, and environmental degradation while also facing new pressures from climate change and regional conflicts. In this context, traditional city planning, which tackles problems in isolation, is struggling to keep up. Urban strategies often rely on siloed, one-off interventions that fail to reflect the complexity of social challenges or adapt to shifting conditions. As a result, efforts are frequently fragmented, overlook root causes, and miss opportunities for long-term, cross-sector collaboration.
Instead of addressing one issue at a time, cities need to develop a set of coordinated, interlinked solutions that tackle multiple urban challenges simultaneously and align efforts across sectors. As part of a broader strategy to address environmental, economic, and social goals at once, for example, cities might advance a range of initiatives, such as transforming biowaste into resources, redesigning streets to reduce air pollution, and creating local green jobs. These kinds of “portfolio” approaches are leading to lasting and systems-level change.
Since 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been collaborating with 15 cities across EECA to solve problems in ways that embrace complexity and interconnectedness. Selected through open calls under two UNDP initiatives, Mayors for Economic Growth and the City Experiment Fund, these cities demonstrated a strong interest in tackling systemic issues. Their proposals highlighted the problems they face, their capacity for innovation, and local initiatives and partnerships.
Their ongoing journeys have surfaced four lessons that can help other cities move beyond conventional planning pitfalls, and adopt a more responsive, inclusive, and sustainable approach to urban development…(More)”.
The EU’s AI Power Play: Between Deregulation and Innovation
Article by Raluca Csernatoni: “From the outset, the European Union (EU) has positioned itself as a trailblazer in AI governance with the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for AI systems in use, the AI Act. The EU’s approach to governing artificial intelligence (AI) has been characterized by a strong precautionary and ethics-driven philosophy. This ambitious regulation reflects the EU’s long-standing approach of prioritizing high ethical standards and fundamental rights in tech and digital policies—a strategy of fostering both excellence and trust in human-centric AI models. Yet, framed as essential to keep pace with U.S. and Chinese AI giants, the EU has recently taken a deregulatory turn that risks trading away democratic safeguards, without addressing systemic challenges to AI innovation.
The EU now stands at a crossroads: it can forge ahead with bold, home-grown AI innovation underpinned by robust regulation, or it can loosen its ethical guardrails, only to find itself stripped of both technological autonomy and regulatory sway. While Brussels’s recent deregulatory turn is framed as a much needed competitiveness boost, the real obstacles to Europe’s digital renaissance lie elsewhere: persistent underfunding, siloed markets, and reliance on non-EU infrastructures…(More)”
How Media Ownership Matters
Book by Rodney Benson, Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel: “Does it matter who owns and funds the media? As journalists and management consultants set off in search of new business models, there’s a pressing need to understand anew the economic underpinnings of journalism and its role in democratic societies.
How Media Ownership Matters provides a fresh approach to understanding news media power, moving beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls. Through a comparative analysis of the US, Sweden, and France, as well as interviews of news executives and editors and an original collection of industry data, this book maps and analyzes four ownership models: market, private, civil society, and public. Highlighting the effects of organizational logics, funding, and target audiences on the content of news, the authors identify both the strengths and weaknesses various forms of ownership have in facilitating journalism that meets the democratic ideals of reasoned, critical, and inclusive public debate. Ultimately, How Media Ownership Matters provides a roadmap to understanding how variable forms of ownership are shaping the future of journalism and democracy…(More)”.
Addressing Digital Harms in Conflict
Report by Henriette Litta and Peter Bihr: “…takes stock and looks to the future: What does openness mean in the digital age? Is the concept still up to date? The study traces the development of Openness and analyses current challenges. It is based on interviews with experts and extensive literature research. The key insights at a glance are:
- Give Openness a purpose.
- Protect Openness by adding guard rails.
- Open innovation and infrastructure need investments.
- Openness is not neutral.
- Market domination needs to be curtailed…(More)”.
The Technopolar Paradox
Article by Ian Bremmer: “In February 2022, as Russian forces advanced on Kyiv, Ukraine’s government faced a critical vulnerability: with its Internet and communication networks under attack, its troops and leaders would soon be in the dark. Elon Musk—the de facto head of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink—stepped in. Within days, SpaceX had deployed thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine and activated satellite Internet service at no cost. Having kept the country online, Musk was hailed as a hero.
But the centibillionaire’s personal intervention—and Kyiv’s reliance on it—came with risks. Months later, Ukraine asked SpaceX to extend Starlink’s coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea, to enable a submarine drone strike that Kyiv wanted to carry out against Russian naval assets. Musk refused—worried, he said, that this would cause a major escalation in the war. Even the Pentagon’s entreaties on behalf of Ukraine failed to convince him. An unelected, unaccountable private citizen had unilaterally thwarted a military operation in an active war zone while exposing the fact that governments had remarkably little control over crucial decisions affecting their citizens and national security.
This was “technopolarity” in action: a technology leader not only driving stock market returns but also controlling aspects of civil society, politics, and international affairs that have been traditionally the exclusive preserve of nation-states. Over the past decade, the rise of such individuals and the firms they control has transformed the global order, which had been defined by states since the Peace of Westphalia enshrined them as the building blocks of geopolitics nearly 400 years ago. For most of this time, the structure of that order could be described as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, depending on how power was distributed among countries. The world, however, has since entered a “technopolar moment,” a term I used in Foreign Affairs in 2021 to describe an emerging order in which “a handful of large technology companies rival [states] for geopolitical influence.” Major tech firms have become powerful geopolitical actors, exercising a form of sovereignty over digital space and, increasingly, the physical world that potentially rivals that of states…(More)”.
How we think about protecting data
Article by Peter Dizikes: “How should personal data be protected? What are the best uses of it? In our networked world, questions about data privacy are ubiquitous and matter for companies, policymakers, and the public.
A new study by MIT researchers adds depth to the subject by suggesting that people’s views about privacy are not firmly fixed and can shift significantly, based on different circumstances and different uses of data.
“There is no absolute value in privacy,” says Fabio Duarte, principal research scientist in MIT’s Senseable City Lab and co-author of a new paper outlining the results. “Depending on the application, people might feel use of their data is more or less invasive.”
The study is based on an experiment the researchers conducted in multiple countries using a newly developed game that elicits public valuations of data privacy relating to different topics and domains of life.
“We show that values attributed to data are combinatorial, situational, transactional, and contextual,” the researchers write.
The open-access paper, “Data Slots: tradeoffs between privacy concerns and benefits of data-driven solutions,” is published today in Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The authors are Martina Mazzarello, a postdoc in the Senseable City Lab; Duarte; Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab; Cate Heine PhD ’24 of University College London; and Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab.
The study is based around a card game with poker-type chips the researchers created to study the issue, called Data Slots. In it, players hold hands of cards with 12 types of data — such as a personal profile, health data, vehicle location information, and more — that relate to three types of domains where data are collected: home life, work, and public spaces. After exchanging cards, the players generate ideas for data uses, then assess and invest in some of those concepts. The game has been played in-person in 18 different countries, with people from another 74 countries playing it online; over 2,000 individual player-rounds were included in the study…(More)”.
The Meanings of Voting for Citizens: A Scientific Challenge, a Portrait, and Implications
Book by Carolina Plescia: “On election day, citizens typically place a mark beside a party or candidate on a ballot paper. The right to cast this mark has been a historic conquest and today, voting is among the most frequent political acts citizens perform. But what does that mark mean to them? This book explores the diverse conceptualizations of voting among citizens in 13 countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. This book presents empirical evidence based on nearly a million words about voting from over 25,000 people through an open-ended survey and both qualitative and quantitative methods. The book’s innovative approach includes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical advancements and provides a comprehensive understanding of what voting means to citizens and how these meanings influence political engagement. This book challenges assumptions about universal views on democracy and reveals how meanings of voting vary among individuals and across both liberal democracies and electoral autocracies. The book also examines the implications of these meanings for political behaviour and election reforms. The Meanings of Voting for Citizens is a critical reference for scholars of public opinion, behaviour, and democratization, as well as a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative political behaviour, empirical methods, and survey research. Practitioners working on election reforms will find it particularly relevant via its insights into how citizens’ meanings of voting impact the effectiveness of electoral reforms…(More)”.
The European Data Cooperative (EDC)
Invest Europe: “The European Data Cooperative (EDC) is a joint initiative developed by Invest Europe and its national association partners to collect Europe-wide industry data on activity (fundraising, investments, & divestments), economic impact (Employment, Turnover, EBITDA, & CAPEX) and ESG.
The EDC platform is jointly owned and operated by the private equity and venture capital associations of Europe. It serves as a single data entry point for their members and other contributors across the continent. The EDC brings together:
- 4,000 firms
- 10,900 funds
- 86,700 portfolio companies
- 330,900 transactions
Using one platform with a standardised methodology allows us to have consistent, robust pan-European statistics that are comparable across the region…(More)”