Cities in International Decision-Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Agnieszka Szpak et al: “…argues that cities are becoming more active participants in international law-making and challenging the previously dominant nation-state approach of recent history.

Chapters explore key literature and legal regulations surrounding cities, providing the latest information on their international normative activities. This book includes multiple interviews conducted with the official representatives of cities and various international institutions, such as UN-Habitat, the EU Committee of the Regions, and the Congress for Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe. The authors investigate how, despite their strong role in international relations and international law implementation, the importance of cities has still not been adequately reflected in the structures of the Council of Europe, the EU and the UN. Ultimately, the book finds that cities have more impact on policy-making than on decision-making processes…(More)”.

Disinformation: Definitions and examples

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Explainer by Perthusasia Centre: “Disinformation has been a tool of manipulation and control for centuries, from ancient military strategies to Cold War propaganda. With the rapid advancement of technology,
it has evolved into a sophisticated and pervasive security threat that transcends traditional boundaries.

This explainer takes the definitions and examples from our recent Indo-Pacific Analysis Brief, Disinformation and cognitive warfare by Senior Fellow Alana Ford, and creates an simple, standalone guide for quick reference…(More)”.

Legitimacy: Working hypotheses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by TIAL: “Today more than ever, legitimacy is a vital resource for institutions seeking to lead and sustain impactful change. Yet, it can be elusive.

What does it truly mean for an institution to be legitimate? This publication delves into legitimacy as both a practical asset and a dynamic process, offering institutional entrepreneurs the tools to understand, build, and sustain it over time.

Legitimacy is not a static quality, nor is it purely theoretical. Instead, it’s grounded in the beliefs of those who interact with or are governed by an institution. These beliefs shape whether people view an institution’s authority as rightful and worth supporting. Drawing from social science research and real-world insights, this publication provides a framework to help institutional entrepreneurs address one of the most important challenges of institutional design: ensuring their legitimacy is sufficient to achieve their goals.

The paper emphasizes that legitimacy is relational and contextual. Institutions gain it through three primary sources: outcomes (delivering results), fairness (ensuring just processes), and correct procedures (following accepted norms). However, the need for legitimacy varies depending on the institution’s size, scope, and mission. For example, a body requiring elite approval may need less legitimacy than one relying on mass public trust.

Legitimacy is also dynamic—it ebbs and flows in response to external factors like competition, crises, and shifting societal narratives. Institutional entrepreneurs must anticipate these changes and actively manage their strategies for maintaining legitimacy. This publication highlights actionable steps for doing so, from framing mandates strategically to fostering public trust through transparency and communication.

By treating legitimacy as a resource that evolves over time, institutional entrepreneurs can ensure their institutions remain relevant, trusted, and effective in addressing pressing societal challenges.

Key takeaways

  • Legitimacy is the belief by an audience that an institution’s authority is rightful.
  • Institutions build legitimacy through outcomes, fairness, and correct procedures.
  • The need for legitimacy depends on an institution’s scope and mission.
  • Legitimacy is dynamic and shaped by external factors like crises and competition.
  • A portfolio approach to legitimacy—balancing outcomes, fairness, and procedure—is more resilient.
  • Institutional entrepreneurs must actively manage perceptions and adapt to changing contexts.
  • This publication offers practical frameworks to help institutional entrepreneurs build and sustain legitimacy…(More)”.

Redesigning Public Organizations: From “what” to “how

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by the Transition Collective: “Government organizations and their leaders are in a pinch. They are caught between pressures from politicians, citizens and increasingly complex external environments on the one hand — and from civil servants calling for new ways of working, thriving and belonging on the other hand. They have to enable meaningful, joined-up and efficient services for people, leveraging digital and physical resources, while building an attractive organizational culture. Indeed, the challenge is to build systems as human as the people they are intended to serve.

While this creates massive challenges for public sector organizations, this is also an opportunity to reimagine our institutions to meet the challenges of today and the future. To succeed, we must not only think about other models of organization — we also have to think of other ways of changing them.

Traditionally, we think of the organization as something static, a goal we arrive at or a fixed model we decide upon. If asked to describe their organization, most civil servants will point to an organigram — and more often than not it will consist of a number of boxes and lines, ordered in a hierarchy.

But in today’s world of complex challenges, accelerated frequency of change and dynamic interplay between the public sector and its surroundings, such a fixed model is less and less fit for the purposes it must fulfill. Not only does it not allow the collective intelligence and creativity of the organization’s members to be fully unleashed, it also does not allow for the speed and adaptability required by today’s turbulent environment. It does not allow for truly joined up, meaningful human services.

Unfreezing the organization

Rather than thinking mainly about models and forms, we should think of organizational design as an act or a series of actions. In other words, we should think about the organization not just as a what but also as a how: Less as a set of boxes describing a power hierarchy, and more as a set of living, organic roles and relationships. We need to thaw up our organizations from their frozen state — and keep them warmer and more fluid.

In this piece, we suggest that many efforts to reimagine public sector organizations have failed because the challenge of transforming an organization has been underestimated. We draw on concrete experiences from working with international and Danish public sector institutions, in particular in health and welfare services.

We propose a set of four approaches which, taken together, can support the work of redesigning organizations to be more ambitious, free, human, creative and self-managing — and thus better suited to meet the ever more complex challenges they are faced with…(More)”.

Bayes is not a phase

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by dynomight: “Because everyone uses Bayesian reasoning all the time, even if they don’t think of it that way. Arguably, we’re born Bayesian and do it instinctively. It’s normal and natural and—I daresay—almost boring. “Bayesian reasoning” is just a slight formalization of everyday thought.

It’s not a trend. It’s forever. But it’s forever like arithmetic is forever: Strange to be obsessed with it, but really strange to make fun of someone for using it.

Here, I’ll explain what Bayesian reasoning is, why it’s so fundamental, why people argue about it, and why much of that controversy is ultimately a boring semantic debate of no interest to an enlightened person like yourself. Then, for the haters, I’ll give some actually good reasons to be skeptical about how useful it is in practice.

I won’t use any equations. That’s not because I don’t think you can take it, but Bayesian reasoning isn’t math. It’s a concept. The typical explanations use lots of math and kind of gesture around the concept, but never seem to get to the core of it, which I think leads people to miss the forest for the trees…(More)”.

When forecasting and foresight meet data and innovation: toward a taxonomy of anticipatory methods for migration policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sara Marcucci, Stefaan Verhulst and María Esther Cervantes: “The various global refugee and migration events of the last few years underscore the need for advancing anticipatory strategies in migration policy. The struggle to manage large inflows (or outflows) highlights the demand for proactive measures based on a sense of the future. Anticipatory methods, ranging from predictive models to foresight techniques, emerge as valuable tools for policymakers. These methods, now bolstered by advancements in technology and leveraging nontraditional data sources, can offer a pathway to develop more precise, responsive, and forward-thinking policies.

This paper seeks to map out the rapidly evolving domain of anticipatory methods in the realm of migration policy, capturing the trend toward integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies and harnessing novel tools and data. It introduces a new taxonomy designed to organize these methods into three core categories: Experience-based, Exploration-based, and Expertise-based. This classification aims to guide policymakers in selecting the most suitable methods for specific contexts or questions, thereby enhancing migration policies…(More)”

The Preventative Shift: How can we embed prevention and achieve long term missions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.

There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.

In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:

  • Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
  • This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.

The New Control Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.

In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.

To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.

What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.

Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.

Organisations in the Age of Algorithms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Phanish Puranam: “When Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25 percent of the company’s software is now machine-generated, it underscored how quickly artificial intelligence is reshaping the workplace. 

What does this mean for how we organise and manage? Will there still be room for humans in tomorrow’s organisations? And what might their work conditions look like? I tackle these questions in my new book “Re-Humanize: How to Build Human-Centric Organizations in the Age of Algorithms”. 

The answers are not a given. They will depend on what we choose to do – what kinds of organisations we design. I make the case that successful organisation designs will have to pursue both goal-centricity (i.e. achieving objectives) and human-centricity (i.e. creating social environments that people find attractive). A myopic focus on only one or the other will not bode well for us.

The dual purpose of organisations

Why focus on organisations at a time when technology seems to be making such exciting strides? This was the very first question that INSEAD alumna Joanna Gordon asked me in a recent digital@INSEAD webinar. 

My answer: Homo sapiens’s most impressive accomplishments, from building the pyramids to developing Covid-19 vaccines, are not individual achievements. They were possible only because many people worked together effectively. “How to organise groups to attain goals” is our oldest general-purpose technology (GPT!). 

But there is more. To humans, organisations don’t just help accomplish goals. We are a species that has evolved to survive and thrive in groups, and organisations (i.e. groups with goals) are the natural habitat of Homo sapiens. They provide us with a sense of community and, as research has shown, help us strike a balance between our needs for social connection, individual autonomy and feeling capable and effective…(More)”.