Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
Many of these interventions and products have related apps that use gamification in some capacity in order to improve the user experience, offer motivation, and encourage behavior change. We identified 57 apps from nearly 2400 screened apps that both target direct energy use and employ at least one element of gamification.
We evaluated these apps with
Blog by Yoichi Funabashi: “Without the high-quality research that independent think tanks provide, there can be no effective policymaking, nor even a credible basis for debating major issues. Insofar as funding challenges, foreign influence-peddling, and populist attacks on truth pose a threat to such institutions tanks, they threaten democracy itself
The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC – perhaps the world’s top think tank – is under scrutiny for receiving six-figure donations from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which many consider to be a security threat. And since the barbaric murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October, many other Washington-based think tanks have come under pressure to stop accepting donations from Saudi Arabia.
These recent controversies have given rise to a narrative that Washington-based think tanks are facing a funding crisis. In fact, traditional think tanks are confronting three major challenges that have put them in a uniquely difficult situation. Not only are they facing increased competition from for-profit think tanks such as the McKinsey Global Institute and the Eurasia Group; they also must negotiate rising geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China.And complicating matters further, many citizens, goaded by populist harangues, have become dismissive of “experts” and the fact-based analyses that think tanks produce (or at least should produce).
With respect to the first challenge, Daniel Drezner of Tufts University argues in The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas that for-profit think tanks have engaged in thought leadership by operating as platforms for provocative thinkers who push big ideas. Whereas many non-profit think tanks – as well as universities and non-governmental organizations – remain “old-fashioned” in their approach to data, their for-profit counterparts thrive by finding the one statistic that captures public attention in the digital age. Given their access to both public and proprietary information, for-profit think tanks are also able to maximize the potential of big data in ways that traditional think tanks cannot.
Moreover, with the space for balanced foreign-policy arguments narrowing, think tanks are at risk of becoming tools of geopolitical statecraft. This is especially true now that US-China relations are deteriorating and becoming more ideologically tinged.
Over time, foreign governments of all stripes have cleverly sought to influence policymaking not only in Washington, but also in London, Brussels, Berlin, and elsewhere, by becoming significant donors to think tanks. Governments realize that the well-connected think tanks that act as “power brokers” vis-à-vis the political establishment have been facing fundraising challenges since the 2008 financial crisis. In some cases, locally based think tanks have even been accused of becoming fronts for foreign authoritarian governments….(More)”.
John Kay: “For the past fifty years or so, the economic theory of the firm has been based on the paradigmatic model of corporate activity which perceives the firm as a nexus of contracts, its boundaries defined by the relative transaction costs of market-based and hierarchical organisation. Issues of both corporate governance and corporate management are seen as principal-agent problems, to be resolved by the establishment of appropriate incentives. This approach has had considerable influence on corporate behaviour and on public policy. Business has placed ever-greater emphasis on ‘shareholder value’ and incentive-based schemes of executive remuneration have become widespread.
In this paper, I describe the origins, development and effect of the ‘markets and hierarchies’ approach. I argue that this reductionist account fails at a political level, giving no coherent account of the legitimacy of such corporate activity – that is, no answer to the question ‘what gives them the right to do that?’ – and additionally that the model bears little relation to the reality of successful corporations. I describe an alternative tradition in the understanding of business, owing more to organisation theory, corporate strategy and business history, which treats the concept of corporate personality as more than a legal doctrine. In this view, corporations are social organisations: their competitive advantage is based on distinctive capabilities which are the product of their history, their internal architecture and organisational design, and the relationships with employers, customers, suppliers and commentators at large which arise from them. This is not just a more plausible account of what firms actually do: by
Paper by Jonathan Spiteri and Marie Briguglio: “This study examines the relationship between good governance and trust in government. It sets out to test which aspects of good governance, if any, foster strong trust in government. We construct a panel data set drawn from 29 European countries over the period 2004 to 2015. The data set includes measures of government trust, six different dimensions of good governance, as well as variables on GDP growth and income inequality.
We find that freedom of expression and citizen involvement in the democratic process, to be the good governance dimension that has the strongest relationship with government trust, across all specifications of our regression models. We also find that real GDP growth rates have a significant (albeit weaker) relationship with trust in government. Our results suggest that certain elements of good governance foster trust in government over and above that generated by economic success. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of declining levels of public trust in government around the world….(More)”.
Press Release: “The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).
There is a 16-point gap between the more trusting informed public and the far-more-skeptical mass population, marking a return to record highs of trust inequality. The phenomenon fueling this divide was a pronounced rise in trust among the informed public. Markets such as the U.S., UK, Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong saw trust gains of 12 points or more among the informed public. In 18 markets, there is now a double-digit trust gap between the informed public and the mass population.
Despite the divergence in trust between the informed public and mass population the world is united on one front—all share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.
In conjunction with pessimism and worry, there is a growing move toward engagement and action. In 2019, engagement with the news surged by 22 points; 40 percent not only consume news once a week or more, but they also routinely amplify it. But people are encountering roadblocks in their quest for facts, with 73 percent worried about fake news being used as a weapon.
Despite a high lack of faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer.” Fifty-eight percent of general population employees say they look to their employer to be a trustworthy source of information about contentious societal issues.
Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual.” Employees’ expectation that prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues (67 percent) is nearly as high as their expectations of personal empowerment (74 percent) and job opportunity (80 percent)….(More)”.
Book edited by Bill Johnston, Sheila MacNeill and Keith Smyth: “Despite the increasing ubiquity of the term, the concept of the digital university remains diffuse and indeterminate. This book examines what the term ‘digital university’ should encapsulate and the resulting challenges, possibilities
Jen Gold at What Works Blog: “There’s a small but growing band of government teams around the world dedicated to making experiments happen. The Cabinet Office’s What Works Team, set up in 2013, was the first of its kind. But you’ll now find them in Canada, the US, Finland, Australia, Colombia, and the UAE.
All of these teams work across government to champion the testing and evaluation of new approaches to public service delivery. This blog takes a look at the many ways in which we’re striving to make experimentation the norm in our governments.
Unsurprisingly we’re all operating in very different contexts. Some teams were set up in response to central requirements for greater experimentation. Take Canada, for instance. In 2016 the Treasury Board directed departments and agencies to devote a fixed proportion of programme funds to “experimenting with new approaches” (building on Prime Minister Trudeau’s earlier instruction to Ministers). An Innovation and Experimentation Team was then set up in the Treasury Board to provide some central support.
Finland’s Experimentation Office, based in the Prime Minister’s Office, is in a similar position. The team supports the delivery of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s 2016 national action plan that calls for “a culture of experimentation” in public services and a series of flagship policy experiments.
Others, like the US Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), grew out of political interest in using behavioural science experiments in public policy. But these teams now run experiments in a much broader set of areas.
What unites us is a focus on helping public servants generate and use new evidence in policy decisions and service delivery
Paper by Samuli Reijula, Jaakko Kuorikoski et al: “Nudge and boost are two competing approaches to applying the psychology of reasoning and decision making to improve policy. Whereas nudges rely on manipulation of choice architecture to steer people towards better choices, the objective of boosts is to develop good decision-making competences. Proponents of both approaches claim capacity to enhance social welfare through better individual decisions.
We suggest that such efforts should involve a more careful analysis of how individual and social welfare are related in the policy context. First, individual rationality is not always sufficient or necessary for improving collective outcomes. Second, collective outcomes of complex social interactions among individuals are largely ignored by the focus of both nudge and boost on individual decisions. We suggest that the design of mechanisms and social norms can sometimes lead to better collective outcomes than nudge and boost, and present conditions under which the three approaches (nudge, boost, and design) can be expected to enhance social welfare….(More)”.
Speech by Professor Gary Banks: “One of the challenges in talking about EBPM (evidence-based
For example, some have interpreted the term EBPM so literally as to insist that the word “based” be replaced by “influenced”, arguing that policy decisions are rarely based on evidence alone. That of course is true, but few using the term (myself included) would have thought otherwise. And I am sure no-one in an audience such as this, especially in our nation’s capital, believes policy decisions could derive solely from evidence — or even rational analysis!
If you’ll pardon a quotation from my earlier address: “Values, interests, personalities, timing, circumstance and happenstance – in short, democracy – determine what actually happens” (EBPM: What is it? How do we get it?). Indeed it is precisely because of such multiple influences, that “evidence” has a potentially significant role to play.
So, adopting the position from Alice in Wonderland, I am inclined to stick with the term EBPM, which I choose to mean an approach to policy-making that makes systematic provision for evidence and analysis. Far from the deterministic straw man depicted in certain academic articles, it is an approach that seeks to achieve policy decisions that are better informed in a substantive sense, accepting that they will nevertheless ultimately be – and in a democracy need to be — political in nature.
A second and more significant area of debate concerns the meaning and value of “evidence” itself. There are a number of strands involved.
One relates to methodology, and can be likened to the differences between the thresholds for a finding of guilt under civil and criminal law (“balance of probabilities” versus “beyond reasonable doubt”).
Some analysts have argued that, to be useful for policy, evidence must involve rigorous unbiased research techniques, the “gold standard” for which are “randomized control trials”. The “randomistas”, to use the term which headlines Andrew Leigh’s new book (Leigh, 2018), claim that only such a methodology is able to truly tell us “what works”
However adopting this exacting standard from the medical research world would leave policy makers with an excellent tool of limited application. Its forte is testing a specific policy or program relative to business as usual, akin to drug tests involving a placebo for a control group. And there are some inspiring examples of insights gained. But for many areas of public policy the technique is not practicable. Even where it is, it requires that a case has to some extent already been made. And while it can identify the extent to which a particular program “works”, it is less useful for understanding why, or whether something else might work even better.
That is not to say that any evidence will do. Setting the quality bar too low is the bigger problem in practice and the notion of a hierarchy of methodologies is helpful. However, no such analytical tools are self-sufficient for policy-making purposes and in my view are best thought of as components of a “
Paper by Jäske, Maija and Ertiö,