Digital Government Index (DGI): 2019

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report by Barbara Ubaldi, Felipe González-Zapata & Mariane Piccinin Barbieri: “The Digital Government Index 2019 is a first effort to translate the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPG) into a measurement tool to assess the implementation of the OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies and benchmark the progress of digital government reforms across OECD Member and key partner countries. Evidence gathered from the Survey on Digital Government 1.0 aims to support countries in their concrete policy decisions. The policy paper presents the overall rankings, results and key policy messages, and provides a detailed analysis of countries’ results for each of the six dimensions of the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPG)….(More)

The State of Digital Democracy Isn’t As Dire As It Seems

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Richard Gibson at the Hedgehog Review: “American society is prone, political theorist Langdon Winner wrote in 2005, to “technological euphoria,” each bout of which is inevitably followed by a period of letdown and reassessment. Perhaps in part for this reason, reviewing the history of digital democracy feels like watching the same movie over and over again. Even Winner’s point has that quality: He first made it in the mid-eighties and has repeated it in every decade since. In the same vein, Warren Yoder, longtime director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, responded to the Pew survey by arguing that we have reached the inevitable “low point” with digital technology—as “has happened many times in the past with pamphleteers, muckraking newspapers, radio, deregulated television.” (“Things will get better,” Yoder cheekily adds, “just in time for a new generational crisis beginning soon after 2030.”)

So one threat the present techlash poses is to obscure the ways that digital technology in fact serves many of the functions the visionaries imagined. We now take for granted the vast array of “Gov Tech”—meaning internal government digital upgrades—that makes our democracy go. We have become accustomed to the numerous government services that citizens can avail themselves of with a few clicks, a process spearheaded by the Clinton-Gore administration. We forget how revolutionary the “Internet campaign” of Howard Dean was at the 2004 Democratic primaries, establishing the Internet-based model of campaigning that all presidential candidates use to coordinate volunteer efforts and conduct fundraising, in both cases pulling new participants into the democratic process.

An honest assessment of the current state of digital democracy would acknowledge that the good jostles with the bad and the ugly. Social media has become the new hotspot for Rheingold’s “disinformocracy.” The president’s toxic tweeting continues, though Twitter has attempted recently to provide more oversight. At the same time, digital media have played a conspicuous role in the protests following George Floyd’s death, from the phone used to record his murder to the apps and Google docs used by the organizers of protests. The protests, too, have sparked fresh debate about facial recognition software (rightly one of the major concerns in the Pew report), leading Amazon to announce in June that it was “pausing” police use of its facial recognition software for one year. The city of Boston has made a similar move. Senator Sherrod Brown’s Data Accountability and Transparency Act of 2020, now circulating in draft form, would also limit the federal government’s use of “facial surveillance technology.”

We thus need to avoid summary judgments at this still-early date in the ongoing history of digital democracy. In a superb research paper on “The Internet and Engaged Citizenship” commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last year, the political scientist David Karpf wisely concludes that the incredible velocity of “Internet Time” befuddles our attempts to state flatly what has or hasn’t happened to democratic practices and participation in our times. The 2016 election has rightly put many observers on guard. Yet there is a danger in living headline-by-headline. We must not forget how volatile the tech scene remains. That fact leads to Karpf’s hopeful conclusion: “The Internet of 2019 is not a finished product. The choices made by technologists, investors, policy-makers, lawyers, and engaged citizens will all shape what the medium becomes next.” The same can be said about digital technology in 2020: The landscape is still evolving….(More)“.

Laboratories of Design: A Catalog of Policy Innovation Labs in Europe

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Report by Anat Gofen and Esti Golan: “To address both persistent and emerging social and environmental problems, governments around the world have been seeking innovative ways to generate policy solutions in collaboration with citizens. One prominent trend during recent decades is the proliferation of Policy Innovation Labs (PILs), in which the search for policy solutions is embedded within scientific laboratory-like structures. Spread across the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and often funded by local, regional, or national governments, PILs utilize experimental methods, testing, and measurement to generate innovative, evidence-based policy solutions to complex public issues.

This catalog lists PILs in Europe. For each lab, a one-page profile specifies its vision, policy innovation approaches, methodologies, major projects, parent entity, funding sources, and its alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) call to action. For each lab we identify governmental, municipal, multi-sectorial, academic, non-profit, or private sector affiliation.

The goals of compiling this catalog and making it available to citizens, scholars, NGOs, and public officials are to call attention to the growing spirit of citizen engagement in developing innovative policy solutions for their own communities and to facilitate collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas between organizations. Despite their increasing importance in public policy making, PILs are as yet understudied. This catalog will provide an opportunity for scholars to explore the function and value of community-oriented policy innovation as well as the effects of approaching policy making around disruptive social problems in a “scientific” way.

Methodology: This catalog of policy innovation labs was compiled based on published reports, as well as a Google search for each individual country using the terms “policy lab” and “innovation lab,” first in English, then in the native language. Sometimes the labs themselves came up in the search results; for others, an article or a blog that mentioned them appeared. Next, each lab was searched specifically by name or by using an identified link. Each lab website that was identified was searched for other labs that were mentioned. Some labs were identified more than once, and a few that were found to be defunct or lacking a website were excluded. Innovation labs that referred only to technical or technological innovations were omitted. Only labs that relate to policy and to so-called “public innovation” were included in this catalog. Eligible PILs could be run and/or sponsored by local, regional, or national governments, universities, non-profit organizations, or the private sector. This resulted in a total of 212 European PILs.

Notably, while the global proliferation of policy innovation labs is acknowledged by formal, global organizations, there are no clear-cut criteria to determine which organizations are considered PILs. Therefore, this catalog follows the precedent set by previous catalogs and identifies PILs as organizations that generate policy recommendations for social problems and public issues by employing a user-oriented design approach and utilizing experimental methods.

Information about every lab was collected form its website, with minimal editing for coherence. For some labs, information was presented in English on its website; for others, information in the native language was translated into English using machine translation followed by human editing. Data for the catalog was collected between December 2019 and July 2020. PILs are opening and closing with increasing frequency so this catalog serves as a snapshot in time, featuring PILs that are currently active as of the time of compilation….(More)”.

Urban Platforms and the Future City

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Book by Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, and Kevin Ward: “This title takes the broadest possible scope to interrogate the emergence of “platform urbanism”, examining how it transforms urban infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and everyday life, and brings together leading scholars and early-career researchers from across five continents and multiple disciplines.

The volume advances theoretical debates at the leading edge of the intersection between urbanism, governance, and the digital economy, by drawing on a range of empirically detailed cases from which to theorize the multiplicity of forms that platform urbanism takes. It draws international comparisons between urban platforms across sites, with attention to the leading edges of theory and practice and explores the potential for a renewal of civic life, engagement, and participatory governance through “platform cooperativism” and related movements. A breadth of tangible and diverse examples of platform urbanism provides critical insights to scholars examining the interface of digital technologies and urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban knowledge production, and everyday urban life.

The book will be invaluable on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for academics and researchers in these fields, including anthropology, geography, innovation studies, politics, public policy, science and technology studies, sociology, sustainable development, urban planning, and urban studies. It will also appeal to an engaged, academia-adjacent readership, including city and regional planners, policymakers, and third-sector researchers in the realms of citizen engagement, industrial strategy, regeneration, sustainable development, and transport….(More)”.

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

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Paper by Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang: “The respect for and protection of civil liberties are one of the fundamental roles of the state, and many consider civil liberties as sacred and “nontradable.” Using cross-country representative surveys that cover 15 countries and over 370,000 respondents, we study whether and the extent to which citizens are willing to trade off civil liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the largest crises in recent history. We find four main results. First, many around the world reveal a clear willingness to trade off civil liberties for improved public health conditions. Second, consistent across countries, exposure to health risks is associated with citizens’ greater willingness to trade off civil liberties, though individuals who are more economically disadvantaged are less willing to do so. Third, attitudes concerning such trade-offs are elastic to information. Fourth, we document a gradual decline and then plateau in citizens’ overall willingness to sacrifice rights and freedom as the pandemic progresses, though the underlying correlation between individuals’ worry about health and their attitudes over the trade-offs has been remarkably constant. Our results suggest that citizens do not view civil liberties as sacred values; rather, they are willing to trade off civil liberties more or less readily, at least in the short-run, depending on their own circumstances and information….(More)”.

How Cape Town Used Behavioral Science to Beat Its Water Crisis

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Article by Ammaarah Martinus and Faisal Naru: “In March 2018, the metropolitan government of Cape Town, on South Africa’s Western Cape, announced that it had avoided “Day Zero”—the day the dams supplying the city would have reached 13.5 percent capacity, the point at which the water supply to most of the city would be turned off. Earlier in the year, the city had been forecast to hit Day Zero on April 22, 2018.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to this. The city managed to develop a successful water savings campaign which stopped the taps from running dry in Cape Town. Had this not occurred, residents would have had faced severe restrictions on water use and their daily habits would have been upended. For instance, they would have had to visit water collection sites to service their basic needs. 

The city’s bold and comprehensive communication strategy around Day Zero, which focused on changing behaviors and implementing clever nudges, was a big part of the success story. Here’s how it unfolded….(More)

Timeline: Cape Town’s Water Crisis

Inclusive Policymaking Tools: A COVID-19 Pandemic Case Study

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Paper by Ans Irfan, Ankita Arora, Christopher Jackson and Celina
Valencia: “World Health Organization (WHO) estimates indicate the United States of America has the highest novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) burden in the world, with over 5 million confirmed cases and nearly 165,000 associated deaths as of August 14th, 2020 (WHO 2020). As the COVID-19 mortality and morbidity has disproportionately impacted populations who experience vulnerabilities due to structural issues such as racism (Laurencin and McClinton 2020; Lin II and Money 2020; Martin 2020; Kim et al. 2020), it has become increasingly necessary to take this opportunity and intentionally codify diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in the policymaking process. To encourage and facilitate this, we synthesize existing literature to identify best practices that can not only be used to inform COVID-19-related public policy activities but will also continue to inform inclusive policymaking processes in the future. We identify specific tools for policymakers at all levels of government to better operationalize the DEI framework and enact inclusive, equitable public policies as a result….(More)”.

Digital Minilateralism: How governments cooperate on digital governance

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Report from the Digital State Project: “…argues for the critical function of small, agile, digitally enabled and focused networks of leaders to foster strong international cooperation on digital governance issues.

This type of cooperative working, described as ‘digital minilateralism’, has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policies. It is also important as cross-border digital infrastructure and services become increasingly common.

The policy paper, co-authored by Dr. Tanya Filer, who leads the Digital State project, and Dr. Antonio Weiss, affiliated researcher, draws on the example of the Digital Nations, a network of 10 ‘leading digital’ countries, to advance understanding of how digital leaders and policymakers can best develop and use minilateral networks, and of the particular affordances that this approach offers.

Key findings: 

  • Already beginning to prove effective, digital minilateralism has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policy.
  • National governments should recognise and reinforce the strategic value of digital minilaterals without stamping out, through over-bureaucratisation, the qualities of trust, open conversation, and ad-hocness in which their value lies.
  • As digital minilateral networks grow and mature, they will need to find mechanisms through which to retain (or adapt) their core principles while scaling across more boundaries.
  • To demonstrate their value to the global community, digital multilaterals must feed into formal multilateral conversations and arrangements….(More)”.

The New Net Delusion

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Geoff Shullenberger at the New Atlantis: “…The old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings seem to revive the old cyber-utopian dreams.

One day, democracy is irreversibly poisoned by social media, which empowers the radical right, authoritarians, and racist, misogynist trolls. The next day, the very same platforms are giving rise to a thrilling resurgence of grassroots activism. The new net delusion more closely resembles a psychotic delusion in the clinical meaning of the word, in which the sufferer often swings between megalomaniacal fantasies of control and panicked sensations of loss of control.

The shift toward a subtle endorsement of manipulation and propaganda — itself an expression of a desire for control — is a result of the fracture of our information ecosystem. The earlier cyber-utopian consensus overrated the value of information in itself and underrated the importance of narratives that bestow meaning on information. The openness of the media system to an endless stream of new users, channels, and data has overwhelmed shared stable narratives, bringing about what L. M. Sacasas calls “narrative collapse.”

But sustaining ideological projects and achieving political ends still requires narratives to extract some meaning from the noise. In the oversaturated attention economy, the most extreme narratives generally stand out. As a result, open networks, which were supposed to counteract propaganda, have instead caused its proliferation — sometimes top-down and state-directed, sometimes crowdsourced, often both.

This helps to explain why the democratization of information channels has been less inimical to authoritarian governments than was anticipated ten years ago. Much like extremists and conspiracy theorists, states with aggressive propaganda arms offer oversimplified messages to keep bewildered online users from having to navigate a swelling tide of data on their own.

Conversely, legacy media, if it remains committed to some degree of neutrality, offers fewer definitive explanatory frameworks, and its messages are accordingly more likely to get lost in the noise. It should not surprise us that news organizations are actually pivoting toward more overt ideological commitments. Adopting forceful narratives, however well they actually make sense of the world, attracts more eyeballs.

Those who celebrated Twitter and Facebook as vehicles of global liberalization and those who now denounce them as gateways into dangerous extremism (often the same people) have erred in seeing the platforms as causally linked to specific politics, rather than to a particular range of styles of politics. Their deeper mistake, however, is to view freedom and control as opposed, rather than as complementary elements of a system. The expansion of freedom through open networks generates informational chaos that, in turn, feeds a demand for reinvigorated control. We can see the demand for control in the new appeal of extreme, even bizarre views that impose an organizing principle on the chaos.

And we can also see the demand for control in the nostalgia for the old gatekeepers, whose demise was once celebrated. Ironically, the only way for these gatekeepers to stay relevant may be to follow the lead of the authoritarians and activists — to abandon any stance of being neutral and above the fray and instead furnish a cohering narrative of their own….(More)”.

Responsive Science

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Paper by Peter Drahos: “Regulatory capitalism depends heavily on science, but science faces epi-stemic critiques and crises of research integrity. These critiques and crises are outlined and then located within capitalism’s general tragedy of commodification. Drawing on Marx’s insights into the relationship between science, commodity production, and the machine age, the general tragedy of commodification is outlined. From here, the article shifts to discussing some well-known global public good problems relating to access to medicines and access to knowledge. The roots of these problems can be traced back to the way the institution of science has been bent toward processes of capital accumulation. The evidence we have from the history of science suggests that too often its research agendas have been set by capital and the demands of war-making capitalist states. The final part of the article considers whether the ideal of responsiveness might help us to reformulate the way in which we think about the responsibilities and duties of science. It focuses on human rights, citizen science, and the intellectual commons as potential sources of responsiveness. Responsiveness has been a fertile ideal for law and society theorists when it has come to theory building in law and regulation. It also has something to offer the debates around the crises of science….(More)”.