Can Smart Cities Be Equitable?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Homi Kharas and Jaana Remes at Project Syndicate: “Around the world, governments are making cities “smarter” by using data and digital technology to build more efficient and livable urban environments. This makes sense: with urban populations growing and infrastructure under strain, smart cities will be better positioned to manage rapid change.

But as digital systems become more pervasive, there is a danger that inequality will deepen unless local governments recognize that tech-driven solutions are as important to the poor as they are to the affluent.

While offline populations can benefit from applications running in the background of daily life – such as intelligent signals that help with traffic flows – they will not have access to the full range of smart-city programs. With smartphones serving as the primary interface in the modern city, closing the digital divide, and extending access to networks and devices, is a critical first step.

City planners can also deploy technology in ways that make cities more inclusive for the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable people. Examples are already abundant.

In New York City, the Mayor’s Public Engagement Unit uses interagency data platforms to coordinate door-to-door outreachto residents in need of assistance. In California’s Santa Clara County, predictive analytics help prioritize shelter space for the homeless. On the London Underground, an app called Wayfindr uses Bluetooth to help visually impaired travelers navigate the Tube’s twisting pathways and escalators.

And in Kolkata, India, a Dublin-based startup called Addressing the Unaddressedhas used GPS to provide postal addresses for more than 120,000 slum dwellers in 14 informal communities. The goal is to give residents a legal means of obtaining biometric identification cards, essential documentation needed to access government services and register to vote.

But while these innovations are certainly significant, they are only a fraction of what is possible.

Public health is one area where small investments in technology can bring big benefits to marginalized groups. In the developing world, preventable illnesses comprise a disproportionate share of the disease burden. When data are used to identify demographic groups with elevated risk profiles, low-cost mobile-messaging campaigns can transmit vital prevention information. So-called “m-health” interventions on issues like vaccinations, safe sex, and pre- and post-natal care have been shown to improve health outcomes and lower health-care costs.

Another area ripe for innovation is the development of technologies that directly aid the elderly….(More)”.

Democracy doomsday prophets are missing this critical shift

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruno Kaufmann and Joe Mathews in the Washington Post: “The new conventional wisdom seems to be that electoral democracy is in decline. But this ignores another widespread trend: direct democracy at the local and regional level is booming, even as disillusion with representative government at the national level grows.

Today, 113 of the world’s 117 democratic countries offer their citizens legally or constitutionally established rights to bring forward a citizens’ initiative, referendum or both. And since 1980, roughly 80 percent of countries worldwide have had at least one nationwide referendum or popular vote on a legislative or constitutional issue.

Of all the nationwide popular votes in the history of the world, more than half have taken place in the past 30 years. As of May 2018, almost 2,000 nationwide popular votes on substantive issues have taken place, with 1,059 in Europe, 191 in Africa, 189 in Asia, 181 in the Americas and 115 in Oceania, based on our research.

That is just at the national level. Other major democracies — Germany, the United States and India — do not permit popular votes on substantive issues nationally but support robust direct democracy at the local and regional levels. The number of local votes on issues has so far defied all attempts to count them — they run into the tens of thousands.

This robust democratization, at least when it comes to direct legislation, provides a context that’s generally missing when doomsday prophets suggest that democracy is dying by pointing to authoritarian-leaning leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Indeed, the two trends — the rise of populist authoritarianism in some nations and the rise of local and direct democracy in some areas — are related. Frustration is growing with democratic systems at national levels, and yes, some people become more attracted to populism. But some of that frustration is channeled into positive energy — into making local democracy more democratic and direct.

Cities from Seoul to San Francisco are hungry for new and innovative tools that bring citizens into processes of deliberation that allow the people themselves to make decisions and feel invested in government actions. We’ve seen local governments embrace participatory budgeting, participatory planning, citizens’ juries and a host of experimental digital tools in service of that desired mix of greater public deliberation and more direct public action….(More).”

Examining Civil Society Legitimacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Civil society is under stress globally as dozens of governments across multiple regions are reducing space for independent civil society organizations, restricting or prohibiting international support for civic groups, and propagating government-controlled nongovernmental organizations. Although civic activists in most places are no strangers to repression, this wave of anti–civil society actions and attitudes is the widest and deepest in decades. It is an integral part of two broader global shifts that raise concerns about the overall health of the international liberal order: the stagnation of democracy worldwide and the rekindling of nationalistic sovereignty, often with authoritarian features.

Attacks on civil society take myriad forms, from legal and regulatory measures to physical harassment, and usually include efforts to delegitimize civil society. Governments engaged in closing civil society spaces not only target specific civic groups but also spread doubt about the legitimacy of the very idea of an autonomous civic sphere that can activate and channel citizens’ interests and demands. These legitimacy attacks typically revolve around four arguments or accusations:

  • That civil society organizations are self-appointed rather than elected, and thus do not represent the popular will. For example, the Hungarian government justified new restrictions on foreign-funded civil society organizations by arguing that “society is represented by the elected governments and elected politicians, and no one voted for a single civil organization.”
  • That civil society organizations receiving foreign funding are accountable to external rather than domestic constituencies, and advance foreign rather than local agendas. In India, for example, the Modi government has denounced foreign-funded environmental NGOs as “anti-national,” echoing similar accusations in Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey, and elsewhere.
  • That civil society groups are partisan political actors disguised as nonpartisan civic actors: political wolves in citizen sheep’s clothing. Governments denounce both the goals and methods of civic groups as being illegitimately political, and hold up any contacts between civic groups and opposition parties as proof of the accusation.
  • That civil society groups are elite actors who are not representative of the people they claim to represent. Critics point to the foreign education backgrounds, high salaries, and frequent foreign travel of civic activists to portray them as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens and only working to perpetuate their own privileged lifestyle.

Attacks on civil society legitimacy are particularly appealing for populist leaders who draw on their nationalist, majoritarian, and anti-elite positioning to deride civil society groups as foreign, unrepresentative, and elitist. Other leaders borrow from the populist toolbox to boost their negative campaigns against civil society support. The overall aim is clear: to close civil society space, governments seek to exploit and widen existing cleavages between civil society and potential supporters in the population. Rather than engaging with the substantive issues and critiques raised by civil society groups, they draw public attention to the real and alleged shortcomings of civil society actors as channels for citizen grievances and demands.

The widening attacks on the legitimacy of civil society oblige civil society organizations and their supporters to revisit various fundamental questions: What are the sources of legitimacy of civil society? How can civil society organizations strengthen their legitimacy to help them weather government attacks and build strong coalitions to advance their causes? And how can international actors ensure that their support reinforces rather than undermines the legitimacy of local civic activism?

To help us find answers to these questions, we asked civil society activists working in ten countries around the world—from Guatemala to Tunisia and from Kenya to Thailand—to write about their experiences with and responses to legitimacy challenges. Their essays follow here. We conclude with a final section in which we extract and discuss the key themes that emerge from their contributions as well as our own research…

  1. Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Landscape
  2. César Rodríguez-Garavito, Objectivity Without Neutrality: Reflections From Colombia
  3. Walter Flores, Legitimacy From Below: Supporting Indigenous Rights in Guatemala
  4. Arthur Larok, Pushing Back: Lessons From Civic Activism in Uganda
  5. Kimani Njogu, Confronting Partisanship and Divisions in Kenya
  6. Youssef Cherif, Delegitimizing Civil Society in Tunisia
  7. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, The Legitimacy Deficit of Thailand’s Civil Society
  8. Özge Zihnioğlu, Navigating Politics and Polarization in Turkey
  9. Stefánia Kapronczay, Beyond Apathy and Mistrust: Defending Civic Activism in Hungary
  10. Zohra Moosa, On Our Own Behalf: The Legitimacy of Feminist Movements
  11. Nilda Bullain and Douglas Rutzen, All for One, One for All: Protecting Sectoral Legitimacy
  12. Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Menu….(More)”.

The global identification challenge: Who are the 1 billion people without proof of identity?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vyjayanti Desai at The Worldbank: “…Using a combination of the self-reported figures from country authorities, birth registration and other proxy data, the 2018 ID4D Global Dataset suggests that as many as 1 billion people struggle to prove who they are. The data also revealed that of the 1 billion people without an official proof of identity:

  • 81% live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, indicating the need to scale up efforts in these regions
  • 47% are below the national ID age of their country, highlighting the importance of strengthening birth registration efforts and creating a unique, lifetime identity;
  • 63% live in lower-middle income economies, while 28% live in low-income economies, reinforcing that lack of identification is a critical concern for the global poor….

In addition, to further strengthen understanding of who the undocumented are and the barriers they face, ID4D partnered with the 2017 Global Findex to gather for the first time this year, nationally-representative survey data from 99 countries on foundational ID coverage, use, and barriers to access. Early findings suggest that residents of low income countries, particularly women and the poorest 40%, are the most affected by a lack of ID. The survey data (albeit limited in its coverage to people aged 15 and older) confirm that the coverage gap is largest in low income countries (LICs), where 38% of the surveyed population does not have a foundational ID. Regionally, sub-Saharan Africa shows the largest coverage gap, where close to one in three people in surveyed countries lack a foundational ID.

Although global gender gaps in foundational ID coverage are relatively small, there is a large gender gap for the unregistered population in low income countries – where over 45% of women lack a foundational ID, compared to 30% of men.  The countries with the greatest #gender gaps in foundational ID coverage also tend to be those with #legal barriers for women’s access to #identity documents….(More)”.

Use of data & technology for promoting waste sector accountability in Nepal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Saroj Bista at YoungInnovations: “All the Nepalese people are saddened to see waste abandoned in the Capital, Kathmandu. Among them, many are concerned to find solutions to such a problem, including Kathmandu City. A 2015 report stated that Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) alone receives 525 tonnes of waste in a day while it manages to collect 516 tonnes out if it, meaning that 8 tonnes of waste are left/abandoned….

Despite many stakeholders including the government sector, non-governmental organizations, private sectors have been working to address the problem associated with solid waste mapping in urban sector, the problem continued to exist.

YoungInnovations and Clean Up Nepal came together to discuss if we could tackle this problem. We discussed if keeping track of everybody’s efforts as well as noticing every piece of waste in the city raises accountability of stakeholders adds a value. YoungInnovations has over a decade of experience in developing data and evidence-based tech solutions to problem. Clean Up Nepal is a civil society organization working to provide an enabling environment to improve solid waste management and water, sanitation and hygiene in Nepal by working closely with local communities and relevant stakeholders. In this, both the organizations agreed to work mixing the expertise of each other to offer the government with an technology that avails stakeholders with proper data related to solid waste and its management.

Also, the preliminary idea was tested with some ongoing initiatives of such kind (Waste Atlas, Letsdoitworld etc) while consultations were held with some of the organizations like The GovLab, ICIMOD learn from their expertise on open data as well as environmental aspects. A remarkable example of smart waste management being carried out in Ulaanbaatar, Capital of Mongolia did motivate us to test the idea in Nepal….

Nepal Waste Map Web App

Nepal Waste Map web is a composite of several features primarily focused at the following:

  1. Display of key stats and information about solid waste
  2. Admin panel to interact with the data for taking possible actions (update, edit and delete)…

Nepal Waste Map Mobile

A Mobile App primarily reflects Nepal Waste Map in the mobile phones. Most of the features resemble with the Nepal Waste Map Web App.

However, some functionalities in the app are key in terms of data aspects:

Crowdsourcing Functionality

Any public (users) who use the app can report issues related to illegal waste dumping and waste esp. Plastic burning. Example: if I saw somebody burning plastic wastes, I can use the app for reporting such an incident along with the photo as evidence as well as coordinates. The admin of the web app can view the report in a real time and take action (not limited to defined as acknowledge and marking resolved)…(More)”.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Yascha Mounk: “The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, Yascha Mounk shows, democracy itself may now be at risk.

Two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”

The consequence, Mounk shows in The People vs. Democracy, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fears of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

The People vs. Democracy is the first book to go beyond a mere description of the rise of populism. In plain language, it describes both how we got here and where we need to go. For those unwilling to give up on either individual rights or the popular will, Mounk shows, there is little time to waste: this may be our last chance to save democracy….(More)”

International Development Doesn’t Care About Patient Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yogesh Rajkotia at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “In 2013, in southern Mozambique, foreign NGO workers searched for a man whom the local health facility reported as diagnosed with HIV. The workers aimed to verify that the health facility did indeed diagnose and treat him. When they could not find him, they asked the village chief for help. Together with an ever-growing crowd of onlookers, the chief led them to the man’s home. After hesitating and denying, he eventually admitted, in front of the crowd, that he had tested positive and received treatment. With his status made public, he now risked facing stigma, discrimination, and social marginalization. The incident undermined both his health and his ability to live a dignified life.

Similar privacy violations were documented in Burkina Faso in 2016, where community workers asked partners, in the presence of each other, to disclose what individual health services they had obtained.

Why was there such a disregard for the privacy and dignity of these citizens?

As it turns out, unbeknownst to these Mozambican and Burkinabé patients, their local health centers were participating in performance-based financing (PBF) programs financed by foreign assistance agencies. Implemented in more than 35 countries, PBF programs offer health workers financial bonuses for delivering priority health interventions. To ensure that providers do not cheat the system, PBF programs often send verifiers to visit patients’ homes to confirm that they have received specific health services. These verifiers are frequently community members (the World Bank callously notes in its “Performance-Based Financing Toolkit” that even “a local soccer club” can play this role), and this practice, known as “patient tracing,” is common among PBF programs. In World Bank-funded PBF programs alone, 19 out of the 25 PBF programs implement patient tracing. Yet the World Bank’s toolkit never mentions patient privacy or confidentiality. In patient tracing, patients’ rights and dignity are secondary to donor objectives.

Patient tracing within PBF programs is just one example of a bigger problem: Privacy violations are pervasive in global health. Some researchers and policymakers have raised privacy concerns about tuberculosis (TB), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), family planning, post-abortion care, and disease surveillance programs. A study conducted by the Asia-Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS found that 34 percent of people living with HIV in India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand reported that health workers breached confidentiality. In many programs, sensitive information about people’s sexual and reproductive health, disease status, and other intimate health details are often collected to improve health system effectiveness and efficiency. Usually, households have no way to opt out, nor any control over how heath care programs use, store, and disseminate this data. At the same time, most programs do not have systems to enforce health workers’ non-disclosure of private information.

In societies with strong stigma around certain health topics—especially sexual and reproductive health—the disclosure of confidential patient information can destroy lives. In contexts where HIV is highly stigmatized, people living with HIV are 2.4 times more likely to delay seeking care until they are seriously ill. In addition to stigma’s harmful effects on people’s health, it can limit individuals’ economic opportunities, cause them to be socially marginalized, and erode their psychological wellbeing….(More)”.

Citicafe: conversation-based intelligent platform for citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amol Dumrewal et al in the Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data: “Community civic engagement is a new and emerging trend in urban cities driven by the mission of developing responsible citizenship. The recognition of civic potential in every citizen goes a long way in creating sustainable societies. Technology is playing a vital role in helping this mission and over the last couple of years, there have been a plethora of social media avenues to report civic issues. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and other online portals help citizens to report issues and register complaints. These complaints are analyzed by the public services to help understand and in-turn address these issues. However, once the complaint is registered, often no formal or informal feedback is given back from these sites to the citizens. This de-motivates citizens and may deter them from registering further complaints. In addition, these sites offer no holistic information about a neighborhood to the citizens. It is useful for people to know whether there are similar complaints posted by other people in the same area, the profile of all complaints and a know-how of how and when these complaints will be addressed.

In this paper, we create a conversation-based platform CitiCafe for enhancing citizen engagement front-ended by a virtual agent with a Twitter interface. This platform back-end stores and processes information pertaining to civic complaints in a city. A Twitter based conversation service allows citizens to have a direct correspondence with CitiCafe via “tweets” and direct messages. The platform also helps citizens to (a) report problems and (b) gather information related to civic issues in different neighborhoods. This can also help, in the long run, to develop civic conversations among citizens and also between citizens and public services….(More)”.

The nation that thrived by ‘nudging’ its population

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Keating at the BBC: “Singapore has grown from almost nothing in 50 years. And this well-regarded society has been built up, partly, thanks to the power of suggestion….But while Singapore still loves a public campaign, it has moved toward a more nuanced approach of influencing the behaviours of its inhabitants.

Nudging the population isn’t uniquely Singaporean; more than 150 governments across the globe have tried nudging as a better choice. A medical centre in Qatar, for example, managed to increase the uptake of diabetes screening by offering to test people during Ramadan. People were fasting anyway so the hassle of having to not eat before your testing was removed. It was convenient and timely, two key components to a successful nudge.

Towns in Iceland, India and China have trialed ‘floating zebra crossings’ – 3D optical illusions which make the crossings look like they are floating above the ground designed to urge drivers to slow down. And in order to get people to pay their taxes in the UK, people were sent a letter saying that the majority of taxpayers pay their taxes on time which has had very positive results. Using social norms make people want to conform.

In Singapore some of the nudges you come across are remarkably simple. Rubbish bins are placed away from bus stops to separate smokers from other bus users. Utility bills display how your energy consumption compares to your neighbours. Outdoor gyms have been built near the entrances and exits of HDB estates so they are easy to use, available and prominent enough to consistently remind you. Train stations have green and red arrows on the platform indicating where you should stand so as to speed up the alighting process. If you opt to travel at off-peak times (before 0700), your fare is reduced.

And with six out of 10 Singaporeans eating at food courts four or more times a week, getting people to eat healthier is also a priority. As well as the Healthier Dining Programme, some places make it cheaper to take the healthy option. If you’re determined to eat that Fried Bee Hoon at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, for example, you’re going to have to pay more for it.

The National Steps Challenge, which encourages participants to get exercising using free step counters in exchange for cash and prizes, has been so successful that the programme name has been trademarked. This form of gamifying is one of the more successful ways of engaging users in achieving objectives. Massive queues to collect the free fitness tracker demonstrated the programme’s popularity.

And it’s not just in tangible ways that nudges are being rolled out. Citizens pay into a mandatory savings programme called the Central Provident Fund at a high rate. This can be accessed for healthcare, housing and pensions as a way to get people to save long-term because evidence has shown that people are too short-sighted when it comes to financing their future

And as the government looks to increase the population 30% by 2030, the city-state’s ageing population and declining birth rate is a problem. The Baby Bonus Scheme goes some way to encouraging parents to have more children by offering cash incentives. Introduced in 2001, the scheme means that all Singapore citizens who have a baby get a cash gift as well as a money into a Child Development Account (CDA) which can be used to pay for childcare and healthcare. The more children you have, the more money you get – since March 2016 you get a cash gift of $8,000 SGD (£4,340) for your first child and up to $10,000 (£5,430) for the third and any subsequent children, as well as money into your CDA.

So do people like being nudged? Is there any cultural difference in the way people react to being swayed toward a ‘better’ choice or behaviour? Given the breadth of the international use of behavioural insights, there is relatively little research done into whether people are happy about it….(More)”.

The End of the End of History?

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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)”.