How Universities Are Tackling Society’s Grand Challenges


Michelle Popowitz and Cristin Dorgelo in Scientific American: “…Universities embarking on Grand Challenge efforts are traversing new terrain—they are making commitments about research deliverables rather than simply committing to invest in efforts related to a particular subject. To mitigate risk, the universities that have entered this space are informally consulting with others regarding effective strategies, but the entire community would benefit from a more formal structure for identifying and sharing “what works.” To address this need, the new Community of Practice for University-Led Grand Challenges—launched at the October 2017 workshop—aims to provide peer support to leaders of university Grand Challenge programs, and to accelerate the adoption of Grand Challenge approaches at more universities supported by cross-sector partnerships.

The university community has identified extensive opportunities for collaboration on these Grand Challenge programs with other sectors:

  • Philanthropy can support the development of new Grand Challenge programs at more universities by establishing planning and administration grant programs, convening experts, and providing funding support for documenting these models through white papers and other publications and for evaluation of these programs over time.
  • Relevant associations and professional development organizations can host learning sessions about Grand Challenges for university leaders and professionals.
  • Companies can collaborate with universities on Grand Challenges research, act as sponsors and hosts for university-led programs and activities, and offer leaders, experts, and other personnel for volunteer advisory roles and tours of duties at universities.
  • Federal, State, and local governments and elected officials can provide support for collaboration among government agencies and offices and the research community on Grand Challenges.

Today’s global society faces pressing, complex challenges across many domains—including health, environment, and social justice. Science (including social sciences), technology, the arts, and humanities have critical roles to play in addressing these challenges and building a bright and prosperous future. Universities are hubs for discovery, building new knowledge, and changing understanding of the world. The public values the role universities play in education; yet as a sector, universities are less effective at highlighting their roles as the catalysts of new industries, homes for the fundamental science that leads to new treatments and products, or sources of the evidence on which policy decisions should be made.

By coming together as universities, collaborating with partners, and aiming for ambitious goals to address problems that might seem unsolvable, universities can show commitment to their communities and become beacons of hope….(More)”.

World’s biggest city database shines light on our increasingly urbanised planet


EU Joint Research Centers: “The JRC has launched a new tool with data on all 10,000 urban centres scattered across the globe. It is the largest and most comprehensive database on cities ever published.

With data derived from the JRC’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), researchers have discovered that the world has become even more urbanised than previously thought.

Populations in urban areas doubled in Africa and grew by 1.1 billion in Asia between 1990 and 2015.

Globally, more than 400 cities have a population between 1 and 5 million. More than 40 cities have 5 to 10 million people, and there are 32 ‘megacities’ with above 10 million inhabitants.

There are some promising signs for the environment: Cities became 25% greener between 2000 and 2015. And although air pollution in urban centres was increasing from 1990, between 2000 and 2015 the trend was reversed.

With every high density area of at least 50,000 inhabitants covered, the city centres database shows growth in population and built-up areas over the past 40 years.  Environmental factors tracked include:

  • ‘Greenness’: the estimated amount of healthy vegetation in the city centre
  • Soil sealing: the covering of the soil surface with materials like concrete and stone, as a result of new buildings, roads and other public and private spaces
  • Air pollution: the level of polluting particles such as PM2.5 in the air
  • Vicinity to protected areas: the percentage of natural protected space within 30 km distance from the city centre’s border
  • Disaster risk-related exposure of population and buildings in low lying areas and on steep slopes.

The data is free to access and open to everyone. It applies big data analytics and a global, people-based definition of cities, providing support to monitor global urbanisation and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The information gained from the GHSL is used to map out population density and settlement maps. Satellite, census and local geographic information are used to create the maps….(More)”.

The End of the End of History?


Introduction to Special Issue of The Hedgehog Review: “Although Francis Fukuyama never said the triumph of liberal democracy was inevitable, his qualified declaration of the “the end of history” captured the optimistic, sometimes naive tenor of the early post-Cold War era. But how quickly that confidence faded! Unmistakable signs of history’s resumption began to appear less than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In its 2008 annual report on political rights and civil liberties around the world, the democracy watchdog Freedom House took troubled note of the reversal of progress in a number of key countries in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the former Soviet space.

This “profoundly disturbing deterioration,” as Freedom House put it, has continued, and not only in countries with fragile democratic institutions. The most recent survey found that “in 2016 it was established democracies—countries rated Free in the report’s ranking system—that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks.” The report’s authors went on glumly to note that the US election of 2016 “raised fears of a foreign policy divorced from America’s traditional strategic commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order that it helped to construct beginning in 1945.” And if this were not enough, they pointed to a growing “nexus” of mutual support between authoritarian regimes and populist movements in both weak and strong liberal democracies.

It would be somewhat reassuring to think the United States is the “exceptional nation” resisting the tide. But President Donald J. Trump’s casual, sometimes caustic, disdain for democratic norms and his inexplicable coziness with Vladimir Putin and lesser authoritarians have raised concerns in America and abroad, particularly among traditional allies.

Disturbing as the behavior of the forty-fifth president is, honesty compels us to recognize that Trump’s presidency is less the cause of America’s democracy woes than the product of them. Surveys and studies, including The Vanishing Center of American Democracy, published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture last year, reveal a steady decline in Americans’ confidence in their political institutions as well as various other bulwarks of a liberal and civil society. A declining faith in democratic norms has only exacerbated the culture war divisions of the last four decades, divisions that have in turn been intensified by what some call a new class war between “credentialed” elites and (mostly) white lower-income earners who see their fortunes declining. And as many have noted, democratic norms are bound to suffer when there are no shared conceptions of truth or objectivity, and when all products of journalism are dismissed, from one partisan angle or another, as “fake news.”

Is it time to declare the end of the end of history, as we tentatively suggest in the title to this issue’s theme? More fundamentally, is there something deeply flawed in what many people have long believed was the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment: not merely the idea of governments of, for, and by the people but states undergirded by commitments to personal and civil liberties. Are we witnessing the exhaustion of the once-vital liberal tradition that supported our politics, both its progressive and conservative strands, and which made politics a (relatively) civil enterprise, and compromise a desirable outcome of that enterprise?

The contributors to this issue propose widely differing answers to these questions. But all agree that the questions are urgent and the stakes are high, not only for America and other liberal democracies but also for the relatively stable global order that emerged after World War II, an order built on faith in the universal worth of liberal principles….(More)”.

A science that knows no country: Pandemic preparedness, global risk, sovereign science


Paper by J. Benjamin Hurlbut: “… examines political norms and relationships associated with governance of pandemic risk. Through a pair of linked controversies over scientific access to H5N1 flu virus and genomic data, it examining the duties, obligations, and allocations of authority articulated around the imperative for globally free-flowing information and around the corollary imperative for a science that is set free to produce such information.

It argues that scientific regimes are laying claim to a kind of sovereignty, particularly in moments where scientific experts call into question the legitimacy of claims grounded in national sovereignty, by positioning the norms of scientific practice, including a commitment to unfettered access to scientific information and to the authority of science to declare what needs to be known, as essential to global governance. Scientific authority occupies a constitutional position insofar as it figures centrally in the repertoire of imaginaries that shape how a global community is imagined: what binds that community together and what shared political commitments, norms, and subjection to delegated authority are seen as necessary for it to be rightly governed….(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and Foreign Policy


Paper by Ben ScottStefan Heumann and Philppe Lorenz: “The plot-lines of the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are debated and contested. But it is safe to predict that it will become one of the central technologies of the 21st century. It is fashionable these days to speak about data as the new oil. But if we want to “refine” the vast quantities of data we are collecting today and make sense of it, we will need potent AI. The consequences of the AI revolution could not be more far reaching. Value chains will be turned upside down, labor markets will get disrupted and economic power will shift to those who control this new technology. And as AI is deeply embedded in the connectivity of the Internet, the challenge of AI is global in nature. Therefore it is striking that AI is almost absent from the foreign policy agenda.

This paper seeks to provide a foundation for planning a foreign policy strategy that responds effectively to the emerging power of AI in international affairs. The developments in AI are so dynamic and the implications so wide-ranging that ministries need to begin engaging immediately. That means starting with the assets and resources at hand while planning for more significant changes in the future. Many of the tools of traditional diplomacy can be adapted to this new field. While the existing toolkit can get us started, this pragmatic approach does not preclude thinking about more drastic changes that the technological changes might require for our foreign policy institutions and instruments.

The paper approaches this challenge, drawing on the existing foreign policy toolbox and reflecting on the past lessons of adapting this toolbox to the Internet revolution. The paper goes on to make suggestions on how the tools could be applied to the international challenges that the AI revolution will bring about. The toolbox includes policy making, public diplomacy, bilateral and multilateral engagement, actions through international and treaty organizations, convenings and partnerships, grant-making and information-gathering and analysis. The analysis of the international challenges of the AI transformation are divided into three topical areas. Each of the three sections includes concrete suggestions how instruments from the tool box could be applied to address the challenges AI will bring about in international affairs….(More)“.

Reclaiming Civic Spaces


Special edition of  Sur International Journal on Human Rights on crackdowns on civil society around the world: “As shown by both the geographic reach of the contributions (authors from 16 countries) and the infographics to this edition, the issue is clearly of global concern. The first section of the journal seeks to address why this crackdown is happening, who is driving it and whether there is cross-fertilisation of ideas between actors.

The edition then focuses on the strategies that activists are implementing to combat the crackdown. A summary of these strategies can be seen in a video which captures a number of the author activists’ perspectives, shared when they gathered in São Paulo in October 2017 for a writers’ retreat….

The role of new media and online spaces in combatting the crackdown is prevalent in the contributions. The ease and speed with which information can be passed on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram was cited as being important in mobilising support rapidly as well as helping reach previously untapped constituents (Sara AlsherifZoya RehmanRaull SantiagoVictoria OhaeriValerie Msoka and Denise Dora, Ravindran Daniel and Barbara Klugman). Despite the opportunities, Bondita Acharya, Helen Kezie-Nwoha, Sondos Shabayek, Shalini Eddens and Susan JessopSara Alsherif and Zoya Rehman all note the challenges that digital tools present. Harassment of activists online is becoming increasingly common, particularly towards women. In addition, authorities are constantly developing new ways of monitoring these platforms. To combat this, Sara Alsherif describes how developing relationships with tech companies can help activists stay one step ahead of the curve.

The use of video is explored by Hagai El-Ad and Raull Santiago, both of whom describe how the medium is an important tool in capturing the restrictions being inflicted on civil society in their respective contexts. Moreover, Raull Santiago describes how his collective is trying to use these video images, captured by members of his community, in legal processes against the police force….(More)”.

Democracy Index 2017


The Economist: “The latest edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index records the worst decline in global democracy in years. Not a single region recorded an improvement in its average score since 2016, as countries grapple with increasingly divided electorates. Freedom of expression in particular is facing new challenges from both state and non-state actors, and is a special focus of this year’s report.

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The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy; flawed democracy; hybrid regime; and authoritarian regime….(More)”

2018 Edelman Trust Barometer


Executive Summary: “Volatility brews beneath a stagnant surface. If a single theme captures the state of the world’s trust in 2018, it is this. Even as people’s trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 28 countries remained largely unchanged, experiencing virtually no recovery from 2017 (Fig. 1), dramatic shifts are taking place at the country level and within the institution of media.

Globally, 20 of 28 countries lie in distruster territory (Fig. 2), one more than in 2017. Trust among the informed public—those with higher levels of income and education— declined slightly on a global level, from 60 percent to 59 percent, thrusting this group into neutral territory from its once trusting status. A closer look, however, reveals a world moving apart (Fig. 3).

In 2018, two poles have emerged: a cluster of six nations where trust has dramatically increased, and six where trust has deeply declined. Whereas in previous years country-level trust has moved largely in lockstep, for the first time ever there is now a distinct split between extreme trust gainers and losers. No country saw steeper declines than the United States, with a 37-point aggregate drop in trust across all institutions.

The loss of trust was most severe among the informed public—a 23-point fall on the Trust Index—nearly erasing the “mass-class” divide that once stood between this segment of the U.S. population and the country’s farless-trusting mass population. At the opposite end of the spectrum, China experienced a 27-point gain, more than any other country. Following behind in the trust gainer category are the UAE (24 points) and South Korea (23 points)….(More)”.

After Big Data: The Coming Age of “Big Indicators”


Andrew Zolli at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Consider, for a moment, some of the most pernicious challenges facing humanity today: the increasing prevalence of natural disasters; the systemic overfishing of the world’s oceans; the clear-cutting of primeval forests; the maddening persistence of poverty; and above all, the accelerating effects of global climate change.

Each item in this dark litany inflicts suffering on the world in its own, awful way. Yet as a group, they share some common characteristics. Each problem is messy, with lots of moving parts. Each is riddled with perverse incentives, which can lead local actors to behave in a way that is not in the common interest. Each is opaque, with dynamics that are only partially understood, even by experts; each can, as a result, often be made worse by seemingly rational and well-intentioned interventions. When things do go wrong, each has consequences that diverge dramatically from our day-to-day experiences, making their full effects hard to imagine, predict, and rehearse. And each is global in scale, raising questions about who has the legal obligation to act—and creating incentives for leaders to disavow responsibility (and sometimes even question the legitimacy of the problem itself).

With dynamics like these, it’s little wonder systems theorists label these kinds of problems “wicked” or even “super wicked.” It’s even less surprising that these challenges remain, by and large, externalities to the global system—inadequately measured, perennially underinvested in, and poorly accounted for—until their consequences spill disastrously and expensively into view.

For real progress to occur, we’ve got to move these externalities into the global system, so that we can fully assess their costs, and so that we can sufficiently incentivize and reward stakeholders for addressing them and penalize them if they don’t. And that’s going to require a revolution in measurement, reporting, and financial instrumentation—the mechanisms by which we connect global problems with the resources required to address them at scale.

Thankfully, just such a revolution is under way.

It’s a complex story with several moving parts, but it begins with important new technical developments in three critical areas of technology: remote sensing and big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.

Remote sensing and big data allow us to collect unprecedented streams of observations about our planet and our impacts upon it, and dramatic advances in AI enable us to extract the deeper meaning and patterns contained in those vast data streams. The rise of the cloud empowers anyone with an Internet connection to access and interact with these insights, at a fraction of the traditional cost.

In the years to come, these technologies will shift much of the current conversation focused on big data to one focused on “big indicators”—highly detailed, continuously produced, global indicators that track change in the health of the Earth’s most important systems, in real time. Big indicators will form an important mechanism for guiding human action, allow us to track the impact of our collective actions and interventions as never before, enable better and more timely decisions, transform reporting, and empower new kinds of policy and financing instruments. In short, they will reshape how we tackle a number of global problems, and everyone—especially nonprofits, NGOs, and actors within the social and environmental sectors—will play a role in shaping and using them….(More)”.

Making Credit Ratings Data Publicly Available


Paper by Marc D. Joffe and Frank Partnoy: “In the aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial crisis, regulators and policy makers recognized the importance of making bond ratings publicly available. Although rating agencies have made some dataavailable, obtaining this information in bulk can be difficult or impossible. At some times, the data is costly; at other times, it is simply unavailable. Some rating agencies have provided data only on a subscription basis for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

The cost and lack of availability of ratings data are particularly striking given the regulatory requirement that rating agencies publish such data. We describe the relevant Securities and Exchange Commission publication rules and requirements. Unfortunately, the ways in which the major credit rating agencies have responded to these rules have not made data available in an easily accessed or comprehensive way and have instead hindered academic and think-tank research into credit ratings. Financial researchers who lack the funds required to purchase bulk ratings must use a variety of ad hoc methods to obtain rating data or limit their studies of credit ratings.

This brief paper describes our recent initiative to make credit ratings data publicly available. We provide links to a software tool written in Python that crawls credit rating agency websites, downloads the XRBL files, and converts them to Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. We also provide a link to the most recently processed ratings data, separated by agency and asset category, as well as the entire universe of ratings actions, including more than eight million assignments, upgrades, downgrades, and withdrawals…(More)”.