Chapter by Christoph Busch in “Data Economy and Algorithmic Regulation: A Handbook on Personalized Law”, C.H.Beck Nomos Hart, 2020: “Technological advances in data collection and information processing makes it possible to tailor legal norms to specific individuals and achieve an unprecedented degree of regulatory precision. However, the benefits of such a “personalized law” must not be confounded with the false promise of “perfect enforcement”. To the contrary, the enforcement of personalized law might be even more challenging and complex than the enforcement of impersonal and uniform rules. Starting from this premise, the first part of this Essay explores how algorithmic personalization of legal rules could be operationalized for tailoring disclosures on digital marketplaces, mitigating discrimination in the sharing economy and optimizing the flow of traffic in smart cities. The second part of the Essay looks into an aspect of personalized law that has so far been rather under-researched: a transition towards personalized law involves not only changes in the design of legal rules, but also necessitates modifications regarding compliance monitoring and enforcement. It is argued that personalized law can be conceptualized as a form of algorithmic regulation or governance-by-data. Therefore, the implementation of personalized law requires setting up a regulatory framework for ensuring algorithmic accountability. In a broader perspective, this Essay aims to create a link between the scholarly debate on algorithmic decision-making and automated legal enforcement and the emerging debate on personalized law….(More)”.
Philosophy Is a Public Service
Jonathon Keats at Nautilus: “…One of my primary techniques, adapted from philosophy, is to undertake large-scale thought experiments. In these experiments, I create alternative realities that provide perspectives on our own society, and provoke dialogue about who and what we want to become. Another of my techniques is to create philosophical instruments: tools and devices with which people can collectively investigate the places they inhabit.
The former technique is exemplified by Centuries of the Bristlecone, and other environmentally-calibrated clocks I’m developing in other cities, such as a timepiece modulated by the flow of rivers in Alaska, currently in planning at the Anchorage Museum.
The latter is exemplified by a project I initiated in Berlin in 2014, which I’ve now instigated in cities around the world. It’s a new kind of camera that produces a single exposure over a span of 100 years. People hide these cameras throughout their city, providing a means for the next generation to observe the decisions that citizens make about their urban environment: decisions about development and gentrification and sustainability. In a sense, these devices are intergenerational surveillance cameras. They prompt people to consider the long-term impact of their actions. They encourage people to act in ways that will change the picture to reflect what they want the next generation to see.
But the truth is that most of my projects—perhaps even the two I’ve just mentioned—combine techniques from philosophy and many other disciplines. In order to map out possible futures for society, especially while navigating the shifting terrain of climate change, the philosopher-explorer needs to be adaptable. And most likely you won’t have all the skills and tools you need. I believe that anyone can become a philosopher-explorer. The practice benefits from more practitioners. No particular abilities are needed, except a capacity for collaboration.
Ayear ago, I was invited by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics to envision the city of the future. Through Fraunhofer’s artist-in-lab program, I had the opportunity to work with leading scientists and engineers, and to run computer simulations and physical experiments on state-of-the-art equipment in Stuttgart and Holzkirchen, Germany.
My starting point was to consider one of the most serious problems faced by cities today: sea level rise. Global sea levels are expected to increase by two-and-a-half meters by the end of the century, and as much as 15 meters in the next 300 years. With 11 percent of the world population living less than 10 meters above the current sea level, many cities will probably be submerged in the future: mega-cities including New York and Shanghai. One likely response is that people will migrate inland, seeking ever higher elevations.
The question I asked myself was this: Would it make more sense to stay put?…(More)”.
From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
Paper by Elettra Bietti: “The word ‘ethics’ is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or hands-off governance, “ethics” is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-regulatory efforts and with shallow appearances of ethical behavior. So-called “ethics washing” by tech companies is on the rise, prompting criticism and scrutiny from scholars and the tech community at large. In parallel to the growth of ethics washing, its condemnation has led to a tendency to engage in “ethics bashing.” This consists in the trivialization of ethics and moral philosophy now understood as discrete tools or pre-formed social structures such as ethics boards, self-governance schemes or stakeholder groups.
The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three-fold: (a) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a communications strategy and as a form of instrumentalized cover-up or façade for unethical behavior, (b) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to political representation and social organizing and (c) the role and importance of moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with in practice.
This paper argues that the rhetoric of ethics and morality should not be reductively instrumentalized, either by the industry in the form of “ethics washing,” or by scholars and policy-makers in the form of “ethics bashing.” Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics requires moving beyond both tendencies and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. In other words, we must resist narrow reductivism of moral philosophy as instrumentalized performance and renew our faith in its intrinsic moral value as a mode of knowledge-seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating a self-regulatory scheme or a given governance structure, moral philosophy in fact facilitates the questioning and reconsideration of any given practice, situating it within a complex web of legal, political and economic institutions. Moral philosophy indeed can shed new light on human practices by adding needed perspective, explaining the relationship between technology and other worthy goals, situating technology within the human, the social, the political. It has become urgent to start considering technology ethics also from within and not only from outside of ethics….(More)”.
A Formal Theory of Democratic Deliberation
Paper by Hun Chung and John Duggan: “Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73).
However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo….(More)”.
Dissent in Consensusland: An Agonistic Problematization of Multi-stakeholder Governance
Martin Fougère and Nikodemus Solitander at the Journal of Business Ethics: “Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society (market, civil society and state) in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic.
We draw on Mouffe’s works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led multi-stakeholder initiatives bring more democratic control on corporate power. We examine two initiatives which address two very different issue areas: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (The Accord).
We map the different kinds of adversarial relations involved in connection with the issues meant to be governed by the two initiatives, and find those adversarial relations to take six main shapes, affecting the initiatives in different ways: (1) competing regulatory initiatives; (2) pressure-response relations within multi-stakeholder initiatives; (3) pressure-response relations between NGOs and states through multi-stakeholder initiatives; (4) collaboration and competition between multi-stakeholder initiatives and states; (5) pressure-response relations between civil society actors and multi-stakeholder initiatives; and (6) counter-hegemonic movements against multi-stakeholder initiatives as hegemonic projects.
We conclude that multi-stakeholder initiatives cannot be democratic by themselves, and we argue that business and society researchers should not look at democracy or politics only internally to these initiatives, but rather study how issue areas are regulated through interactions between a variety of actors—both within and without the multi-stakeholder initiatives—who get to have a legitimate voice in this regulation….(More)”.
Practical Knowledge: Sustaining Massively-Multiplayer Innovation
Paper by Amar Bhide: “Governments and universities are pouring money into more ‘practical’ research – ‘translational’ medicine and ‘evidence-based’ policies in education, public health and economic development, for instance. But just translating or applying science rarely produces practical advances – and an inflexible adherence to the methods of natural or social scientists can do more harm than good. Instead, I propose a general approach – and specific research topics – to advance practical knowledge and study its distinctive contemporary nature….(More)”
Governing the Plural City
Introduction by Ash Amin: “….More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and this figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. World affairs and city affairs have become deeply enmeshed, and what goes on within cities – their economic productivity, environmental footprint, cultural practices, social wellbeing, and political stability – affects the world at large. They shape the weather and are the weathervane of our times, so getting them right matters. But what this involves and how far it is within reach is by no means clear….
Thus, while the international policy community may confidently call for cities to be made ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ in the way headlined in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it tends to underestimate the challenges of achieving traction in a distributed, plural and often hidden force field. A number of pressing questions arise. Should state effort focus on comprehensive master plans and general infrastructures and services, or on strategic risks and vulnerabilities, while coordinating risks? What are the limits and limitations of state action, and how is the balance between the general and the specific or the communal
and sectionalist to be found? What is the relationship between central authority plans and the communities who are to benefit, and how can neighbourhood knowledge and effort be supported amidst policy neglect or corporatist calculation? Is it possible to reconcile strategic and democratic goals in the twenty first-century city of multiple logics, demands and actors?…(More)”.
Coping with societal challenges: Lessons for innovation policy governance
Paper by Jan Fagerberg & Gernot Hutschenreiter: “Grand societal challenges, such as global warming, can only be adequately dealt with through wide-ranging changes in technology, production and consumption, and ways of life, that is, through innovation. Furthermore, change will involve a variety of sectors or parts of the economy and society, and these change processes must be sufficiently consistent in order to achieve the desired results. This poses huge challenges for policy-making.
In this paper we focus on implications for the governance of innovation policy, i.e., policies influencing a country’s innovation performance. Based on a systemic understanding of innovation and the factors shaping it, the paper highlights the need for effective coordination of policies influencing innovation and what changes in innovation policy governance this may require. To throw further light on how this may be realised the paper discusses evidence on national innovation policy practice, from Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, respectively, drawing on the country reviews of innovation policy conducted by the OECD as well as other sources. It is concluded that for innovation policy to tackle societal challenges effectively, clearer goals and stronger and better coordination among the various actors – both public and private – whose actions matter for innovation performance will be required. Based on the experiences of the three countries the paper particularly considers the role that comprehensive and inclusive innovation policy councils, with the prime minister in a central role, may play in such a process….(More)”.
Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective
Paper by Michael Lissack: “Understanding and cognition are traditionally viewed as philosophical and scientific issues where there is little room for contribution from the design community. This article proposes a radically different approach based on the observation that we live in a world that is more complex than our minds/brains possess the ability to process in its entirety. Our limited equipment forces us to deal with only selected aspects of any given piece of that complex world at each instant. Selection—be it conscious or unconscious—involves agency and choice. Design and design thinking scholars have much to say about how agency and choice can be impacted by still other choices—context, symbols, movement, audience, and so on. Suppose cognition and meaning making were re-cast as design processes? This would highlight the role played by cybernetics—the science of how we learn how to steer—in shaping how we cognitively deal with the world. Together design and cybernetics have much to offer the cognitive sciences….(More)”
Network governance
Book by Naim Kapucu and Qian Hu: “Network governance has received much attention within the fields of public administration and policy in recent years, but surprisingly few books are designed specifically to help students, researchers, and practitioners examine key concepts, synthesize the growing body of literature into reliable frameworks, and to bridge the theory-practice gap by exploring network applications. Network Governance: Theories, Frameworks, and Applications is the first textbook to focus on interorganizational networks and network governance from the perspective of public policy and administration, asking important questions such as: How are networks designed and developed? How are they governed, and what type of leadership do they require? To whom are networks accountable, and when are they effective? How can network governance contribute to effective delivery of public services and policy implementation?
In this timely new book, authors Naim Kapucu and Qian Hu define and examine key concepts, propose exciting new theoretical frameworks to synthetize the fast-growing body of network research in public policy and administration, and provide detailed discussion of applications. Network Governance offers not only a much-needed systematic examination of existing knowledge, but it also goes much further than existing books by discussing the applications of networks in a wide range of management practice and policy domains—including natural resource management, environmental protection, public health, emergency and crisis management, law enforcement, transportation, and community and economic development. Chapters include understudied network research topics such as power and decision-making in interorganizational networks, virtual networks, global networks, and network analysis applications. What sets this book apart is the introduction of social network analysis and coverage of applications of social network analysis in the policy and management domains. PowerPoint slides and a sample syllabus are available for adopters on an accompanying website. Drawing on literature from sociology, policy sciences, organizational studies, and economics, this textbook will be required reading for courses on network governance, collaborative public management, cross-sector governance, and collaboration and partnerships in programs of public administration, public affairs, and public policy….(More)”.