Global Standards in National Contexts: The Role of Transnational Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Public Sector Governance Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brandon Brockmyer: “Multi-stakeholder initiatives (i.e., partnerships between governments, civil society, and the private sector) are an increasingly prevalent strategy promoted by multilateral, bilateral, and nongovernmental development organizations for addressing weaknesses in public sector governance. Global public sector governance MSIs seek to make national governments more transparent and accountable by setting shared standards for information disclosure and multi- stakeholder collaboration. However, research on similar interventions implemented at the national or subnational level suggests that the effectiveness of these initiatives is likely to be mediated by a variety of socio-political factors.

This dissertation examines the transnational evidence base for three global public sector governance MSIs — the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative, and the Open Government Partnership — and investigates their implementation within and across three shared national contexts — Guatemala, the Philippines, and Tanzania — in order to determine whether and how these initiatives lead to improvements in proactive transparency (i.e., discretionary release of government data), demand-driven transparency (i.e., reforms that increase access to government information upon request), and accountability (i.e., the extent to which government officials are compelled to publicly explain their actions and/or face penalties or sanction for them), as well as the extent to which they provide participating governments with an opportunity to project a public image of transparency and accountability, while maintaining questionable practices in these areas (i.e., openwashing).

The evidence suggests that global public sector governance MSIs often facilitate gains in proactive transparency by national governments, but that improvements in demand-driven transparency and accountability remain relatively rare. Qualitative comparative analysis reveals that a combination of multi-stakeholder power sharing and civil society capacity is sufficient to drive improvements in proactive transparency, while the absence of visible, high-level political support is sufficient to impede such reforms. The lack of demand-driven transparency or accountability gains suggests that national-level coalitions forged by global MSIs are often too narrow to successfully advocate for broader improvements to public sector governance. Moreover, evidence for openwashing was found in one-third of cases, suggesting that national governments sometimes use global MSIs to deliberately mislead international observers and domestic stakeholders about their commitment to reform….(More)”

Fighting Exclusion, Inequality and Distrust: The Open Government Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Remarks by Manish Bapna delivered at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit: “To the many heads of state, ministers, mayors, civil society colleagues gathered in this great hall, this is an important moment to reflect on the remarkable challenges of the past year.

We have seen the rise of various forms of populism and nationalism in the United States, Britain, the Philippines, Italy, and many other countries. This has led to surprise election results and an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-government movements.

We have seen the tragic results of conflict-driven migration, as captured in the iconic image of a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on the Turkish shore.

We have seen governments struggle to respond to the refugee crisis. Some open their arms while others close their doors.

We have seen deadly terrorist attacks in cities around the world – including this one — that have forced governments to walk a fine line between the need to protect their people and the risk of infringing on their civil liberties.

And we continue to confront two inter-linked challenges: the moral challenge of 700 million people in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day, and the existential challenge of a changing climate.

All of these point to a failure of governance and, if we are honest, to a lack of open government that truly connects, engages and meets the needs of all people.

World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Open Government

The crux of the matter is this: While open government alone can’t fix the world’s problems, they can’t be solved without it.

Too many people feel excluded and marginalized. They believe that only elites reap the benefits of growth and globalization. They feel left out of decision-making. They distrust public institutions.

How we collectively confront these challenges will be OGP’s most important test….

Here are five essential steps we can take – we, the people here today – to help accelerate the shift toward open government.

The first step: We must protect civic space – the rights to free speech, assembly and association – because these bedrock rights are at the heart of a functioning society. Serious violations of these rights have been recently reported by CIVICUS in over 100 countries. In 25 active OGP countries, these rights are repressed or obstructed….

The second step: We must foster citizen-centered governance.

We cherish OGP as a unique platform where government and civil society are equal partners in a way that amplifies the concerns of ordinary citizens.

We commend the many OGP countries that have made significant strides. But we recognize that for others, this remains a major struggle.

As heads of state and ministers, we need you to embrace the concept of co-creation. …

The third step: We must make changes that are transformational, not incremental.

Drawing on our commitment to open government and the urgency of this moment, we must be willing to go further, faster…..

Transforming government brings us to the fourth step.

We need to make a real difference in people’s lives.

This is our Partnership’s ultimate aim. Because when open government works, it improves every facet of people’s lives.

• This means giving all people safe drinking water and clean air.
• It means reliable electricity so children can have light to do homework and play.
• It means health clinics where the sick can go to get quality care, where medicines are available
• And it means building trust in public officials who are untainted by corruption….

The fifth and final step: We need to reinvigorate the Partnership’s political leadership….(More)”

Scaling accountability through vertically integrated civil society policy monitoring and advocacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working paper by Jonathan Fox: “…argues that the growing field of transparency, participation and accountability (TPA) needs a conceptual reboot, to address the limited traction gained so far on the path to accountability. To inform more strategic approaches and to identify the drivers of more sustainable institutional change, fresh analytical work is needed.

The paper makes the case for one among several possible strategic approaches by distinguishing between ‘scaling up’ and ‘taking scale into account’, going on to examine several different ways that ‘scale’ is used in different fields.

It goes on to explain and discuss the strategy of vertical integration, which involves multi-level coordination by civil society organisations of policy monitoring and advocacy, grounded in broad pro-accountability constituencies. Vertical integration is discussed from several different angles, from its roots in politcal economy to its relationship with citizen voice, its capacity for multi-directional communication, and its relationship with feedback loops.

To spell out how this strategy can empower pro accountability actors, the paper contrasts varied terms of engagement between state and society, proposing a focus on collaborative coalitions as an alternative to the conventional dichotomy between confrontation and constructive engagement.

The paper continues by reviewing existing multi-level approaches, summarising nine cases – three each in the Philippines, Mexico and India – to demonstrate what can be revealed when TPA initiatives are seen through the lens of scale.

It concludes with a set of broad analytical questions for discussion, followed by testable hypotheses proposed to inform future research agendas.(Download the paper here, and a short summary here)…(More)”

Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Parag Khanna: “American democracy just isn’t good enough anymore. A costly election has done more to divide American society than unite it, while trust in government—and democracy itself—is plummeting. But there are better systems out there, and America would be wise to learn from them. In this provocative manifesto, globalization scholar Parag Khanna tours cutting-edge nations from Switzerland to Singapore to reveal the inner workings that allow them that lead the way in managing the volatility of a fast-changing world while delivering superior welfare and prosperity for their citizens.

The ideal form of government for the complex 21st century is what Khanna calls a “direct technocracy,” one led by experts but perpetually consulting the people through a combination of democracy and data. From a seven-member presidency and a restructured cabinet to replacing the Senate with an Assembly of Governors, Technocracy in America is full of sensible proposals that have been proven to work in the world’s most successful societies. Americans have a choice for whom they elect president, but they should not wait any longer to redesign their political system following Khanna’s pragmatic vision….(More)”

Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “…Over much of the last decade, we have seen progressive social movementspowered by the web spring up across the world. There was the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa. In the United States, we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement andthe #BlackLivesMatter protests.

Social networks also played a role in electoral politics — first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, and then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008.

Yet now those movements look like the prelude to a wider, tech-powered crack up in the global order. In Britain this year, organizing on Facebook played a major role in the once-unthinkable push to get the country to leave the European Union. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand mayor who was vastly outspent by opponents, managed to marshal a huge army of online supporters to help him win the presidency.

The Islamic State has used social networks to recruit jihadists from around the world to fight in Iraq and Syria, as well as to inspire terrorist attacks overseas.

And in the United States, both Bernie Sanders, a socialist who ran for president as a Democrat, and Mr. Trump, who was once reviled by most members of the party he now leads, relied on online movements to shatter the political status quo.

Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons.

One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.

“When the technology gets boring, that’s when the crazy social effects get interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.

One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of the Overton Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.

From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias (there were exceptions, of course, like the Willie Horton ad). But the internet shifted that window.

“White ethno nationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance,”Mr. Shirky said. “Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans — they didn’t know how many others shared their views.”

Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world victories.

Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isn’t just shifting on the right. We see it happening on the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an anti-Wall Street platform that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago….(More)”

Talent Gap Is a Main Roadblock as Agencies Eye Emerging Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Douglas in GovTech: “U.S. public service agencies are closely eyeing emerging technologies, chiefly advanced analytics and predictive modeling, according to a new report from Accenture, but like their counterparts globally they must address talent and complexity issues before adoption rates will rise.

The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, compiled a nine-nation survey of IT officials across all levels of government in policing and justice, health and social services, revenue, border services, pension/Social Security and administration, and was released earlier this week.

It revealed a deep interest in emerging tech from the public sector, finding 70 percent of agencies are evaluating their potential — but a much lower adoption level, with just 25 percent going beyond piloting to implementation….

The revenue and tax industries have been early adopters of advanced analytics and predictive modeling, he said, while biometrics and video analytics are resonating with police agencies.

In Australia, the tax office found using voiceprint technology could save 75,000 work hours annually.

Closer to home, Utah Chief Technology Officer Dave Fletcher told Accenture that consolidating data centers into a virtualized infrastructure improved speed and flexibility, so some processes that once took weeks or months can now happen in minutes or hours.

Nationally, 70 percent of agencies have either piloted or implemented an advanced analytics or predictive modeling program. Biometrics and identity analytics were the next most popular technologies, with 29 percent piloting or implementing, followed by machine learning at 22 percent.

Those numbers contrast globally with Australia, where 68 percent of government agencies have charged into piloting and implementing biometric and identity analytics programs; and Germany and Singapore, where 27 percent and 57 percent of agencies respectively have piloted or adopted video analytic programs.

Overall, 78 percent of respondents said they were either underway or had implemented some machine-learning technologies.

The benefits of embracing emerging tech that were identified ranged from finding better ways of working through automation to innovating and developing new services and reducing costs.

Agencies told Accenture their No. 1 objective was increasing customer satisfaction. But 89 percent said they’d expect a return on implementing intelligent technology within two years. Four-fifths, or 80 percent, agreed intelligent tech would improve employees’ job satisfaction….(More).

Empowering cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The real story on how citizens and businesses are driving smart cities” by the Economist Intelligence Unit: “Digital technologies are the lifeblood of today’s cities. They are applied widely in industry and society, from information and communications technology (ICT) to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which objects are connected to the Internet. As sensors turn any object into part of an intelligent urban network, and as computing power facilitates analysis of the data these sensors collect, elected officials and city administrators can gain an unparalleled understanding of the infrastructure and services of their city. However, to make the most of this intelligence, another ingredient is essential: citizen engagement. Thanks to digital technologies, citizens can provide a steady flow of feedback and ideas to city officials.

This study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Philips Lighting, investigates how citizens and businesses in 12 diverse cities around the world—Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—envision the benefits of smart cities. The choices of the respondents to the survey reflect the diverse nature of the challenges and opportunities facing different cities, from older cities in mature markets, where technology is at work with infrastructure that may be centuries old, to new cities in emerging markets, which have the opportunity to incorporate digital technologies as they grow.

Coupled with expert perspectives, these insights paint a fresh picture of how digital technologies can empower people to contribute-giving city officials a roadmap to smart city life in the 21st century….(More)”

Artificial intelligence is hard to see

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker on “Why we urgently need to measure AI’s societal impacts“: “How will artificial intelligence systems change the way we live? This is a tough question: on one hand, AI tools are producing compelling advances in complex tasks, with dramatic improvements in energy consumption, audio processing, and leukemia detection. There is extraordinary potential to do much more in the future. On the other hand, AI systems are already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives.

AI and decision-support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions, from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see. For example, Facebook’s automated content editing system recently censored the Pulitzer-prize winning image of a nine-year old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. The girl is naked; to an image processing algorithm, this might appear as a simple violation of the policy against child nudity. But to human eyes, Nick Ut’s photograph, “The Terror of War”, means much more: it is an iconic portrait of the indiscriminate horror of conflict, and it has an assured place in the history of photography and international politics. The removal of the image caused an international outcry before Facebook backed down and restored the image. “What they do by removing such images, no matter what good intentions, is to redact our shared history,” said the Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg.

It’s easy to forget that these high-profile instances are actually the easy cases. As Tarleton Gillespie has observed, hundreds of content reviews are occurring with Facebook images thousand of times per day, and rarely is there a Pulitzer prize to help determine lasting significance. Some of these reviews include human teams, and some do not. In this case, there is alsoconsiderable ambiguity about where the automated process ended and the human review began: which is part of the problem. And Facebook is just one player in complex ecology of algorithmically-supplemented determinations with little external monitoring to see how decisions are made or what the effects might be.

The ‘Terror of War’ case, then, is the tip of the iceberg: a rare visible instance that points to a much larger mass of unseen automated and semi-automated decisions. The concern is that most of these ‘weak AI’ systems are making decisions that don’t garner such attention. They are embedded at the back-end of systems, working at the seams of multiple data sets, with no consumer-facing interface. Their operations are mainly unknown, unseen, and with impacts that take enormous effort to detect.

Sometimes AI techniques get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong. Only rarely will those errors be seen by the public: like the Vietnam war photograph, or when a AI ‘beauty contest’ held this month was called out for being racist for selecting white women as the winners. We can dismiss this latter case as a problem of training data — they simply need a more diverse selection of faces to train their algorithm with, and now that 600,000 people have sent in their selfies, they certainly have better means to do so. But while a beauty contest might seem like a bad joke, or just a really good trick to get people to give up their photos to build a large training data set, it points to a much bigger set of problems. AI and decision-support systems are reaching into everyday life: determining who will be on a predictive policing‘heat list’, who will be hired or promoted, which students will be recruited to universities, or seeking to predict at birth who will become a criminal by the age of 18. So the stakes are high…(More)”

5 Crowdsourced News Platforms Shaping The Future of Journalism and Reporting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Crowdsourcing Week: “We are exposed to a myriad of news and updates worldwide. As the crowd becomes moreinvolved in providing information, adopting that ‘upload mindset’ coined by Will Merritt ofZooppa, access to all kinds of data is a few taps and clicks away….

Google News Lab – Better reporting and insightful storytelling

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Last week, Google announced its own crowdsourced news platform dubbed News Lab as part of their efforts “to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media.”

Scouting for real-time stories, updates, and breaking news is much easier and systematize for journalists worldwide. They can use Google’s tools for better reporting, data for insightful storytelling and programs to focus on the future of media, tackling this initiative in three ways.

“There’s a revolution in data journalism happening in newsrooms today, as more data sets and more tools for analysis are allowing journalists to create insights that were never before possible,” Google said.

Grasswire – first-hand information in real-time

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The design looks bleak and simple, but the site itself is rich with content—first-hand information crowdsourced from Twitter users in real-time and verified. Austen Allred, co-founder of Grasswire was inspired to develop the platform after his “minor slipup” as the American Journalism Review (AJR) puts it, when he missed his train out of Shanghai that actually saved his life.

“The bullet train Allred was supposed to be on collided with another train in the Wenzhou area ofChina’s Zhejiang province,” AJR wrote. “Of the 1,630 passengers, 40 died, and another 210 were injured.” The accident happened in 2011. Unfortunately, the Chinese government made some cover upon the incident, which frustrated Allred in finding first-hand information.

After almost four years, Grasswire was launched, a website that collects real-time information from users for breaking news infused with crowdsourcing model afterward. “It’s since grown into a more complex interface, allowing users to curate selected news tweets by voting and verifying information with a fact-checking system,” AJR wrote, which made the verification of data open and systematized.

Rappler – Project Agos: a technology for disaster risk reduction

crowdsourced-news-platforms-projectagos

The Philippines is a favorite hub for typhoons. The aftermath of typhoon Haiyan was exceedingly disastrous. But the crowds were steadfast in uploading and sharing information and crowdsourcing became mainstream during the relief operations. Maria Ressa said that they had to educate netizens to use the appropriate hashtags for years (#nameoftyphoonPH, e.g. #YolandaPH) for typhoons to collect data on social media channels easily.

Education and preparation can mitigate the risks and save lives if we utilize the right technology and act accordingly. In her blog, After Haiyan: Crisis management and beyond, Maria wrote, “We need to educate not just the first responders and local government officials, but more importantly, the people in the path of the storms.” …

China’s CCDI app – Crowdsourcing political reports to crack down corruption practices

crowdsourced-news-platforms-ccdiapp

In China, if you want to mitigate or possible, eradicate corrupt practices, then there’s an app for that.China launched its own anti-corruption app called, Central Commission for Discipline InspectionWebsite App, allowing the public to upload text messages, photos and videos of Chinese officials’ any corrupt practices.

The platform was released by the government agency, Central Committee for Discipline Inspection.Nervous in case you’ll be tracked as a whistleblower? Interestingly, anyone can report anonymously.China Daily said, “the anti-corruption authorities received more than 1,000 public reports, and nearly70 percent were communicated via snapshots, text messages or videos uploaded,” since its released.Kenya has its own version, too, called Ushahidi using crowdmapping, and India’s I Paid a Bribe.

Newzulu – share news, publish and get paid

crowdsourced-news-platforms-newzulu

While journalists can get fresh insights from Google News Labs, the crowd can get real-time verified news from Grasswire, and CCDI is open for public, Newzulu crowdsourced news platforms doesn’t just invite the crowd to share news, they can also publish and get paid.

It’s “a community of over 150,000 professional and citizen journalists who share and break news to the world as it happens,” originally based in Sydney. Anyone can submit stories, photos, videos, and even stream live….(More)”

Through the looking glass: Harnessing big data to respond to violent extremism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michele Piercey, Carolyn Forbes, and Hasan Davulcu at Devex:”People think and say all sorts of things that they would never actually do. One of the biggest challenges in countering violent extremism is not only figuring out which people hold radical views, but who is most likely to join and act on behalf of violent extremist organizations. Determining who is likely to become violent is key to designing and evaluating more targeted interventions, but it has proven to be extremely difficult.

There are few recognized tools for assessing perceptions and beliefs, such as whether community sentiment about violent extremist organizations is more or less favorable, or which narratives and counternarratives resonate with vulnerable populations.

Program designers and monitoring and evaluation staff often rely on perception surveying to assess attitudinal changes that CVE programs try to achieve, but there are limitations to this method. Security and logistical challenges to collecting perception data in a conflict-affected community can make it difficult to get a representative sample, while ensuring the safety of enumerators and respondents. And given the sensitivity of the subject matter, respondents may be reluctant to express their actual beliefs to an outsider (that is, social desirability bias can affect data reliability).

The rise of smartphone technology and social media uptake among the burgeoning youth populations of many conflict-affected countries presents a new opportunity to understand what people believe from a safer distance, lessening the associated risks and data defects. Seeing an opportunity in the growing mass of online public data, the marketing industry has pioneered tools to “scrape” and aggregate the data to help companies paint a clearer picture of consumer behavior and perceptions of brands and products.

These developments present a critical question for CVE programs: Could similar tools be developed that would analyze online public data to identify who is being influenced by which extremist narratives and influences, learn which messages go viral, and distinguish groups and individuals who simply hold radical views from those who support or carry out violence?

Using data to track radicalization

Seeking to answer this question, researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Cornell University’s Social Dynamics Laboratory, and Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational systems have been innovating a wide variety of data analytics tools. ASU’s LookingGlass tool, for example, maps networks of perception, belief, and influence online. ASU and Chemonics International are now piloting the tool on a CVE program in Libya.

Drawn from the humanities and social and computational sciences, LookingGlass retrieves, categorizes, and analyzes vast amounts of data from across the internet to map the spread of extremist and counter-extremist influence online. The tool displays what people think about their political situation, governments and extremist groups, and tracks changes in these perceptions over time and in response to events. It also lets users visualize how groups emerge, interact, coalesce, and fragment in relation to emerging issues and events and evaluates “information cascades” to assess what causes extremist messages to go viral on social media and what causes them to die out.

By assessing the relative influence and expressed beliefs of diverse groups over time and in critical locations, LookingGlass represents an advanced capability for providing real-time contextual information about the ideological drivers of violent and counter-violent extremist movements online. Click here to view a larger version.

For CVE planners, LookingGlass can map social movements in relation to specific countries and regions. Indonesia, for example, has been the site of numerous violent movements and events. A relatively young democracy, the country’s complex political environment encompasses numerous groups seeking radical change across a wide spectrum of social and political issues….(More)”