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

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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

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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)”.

Reimagining the Policy Cycle in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sara Marcucci and Stefaan Verhulst: “The increasing complexity of global challenges, such as climate change, public health crises, and socioeconomic inequalities, underscores the need for a more sophisticated and adaptive policymaking approach. Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM) has emerged as a critical framework, leveraging data and research to guide policy design, implementation, and impact assessment. However, traditional evidence-based approaches, such as reliance on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews, face limitations, including resource intensity, contextual constraints, and difficulty in addressing real-time challenges. Artificial Intelligence offers transformative potential to enhance EIDM by enabling large-scale data analysis, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and stakeholder engagement across the policy cycle. While generative AI has attracted significant attention, this paper emphasizes the broader spectrum of AI applications (beyond Generative AI) —such as natural language processing (NLP), decision trees, and basic machine learning algorithms—that continue to play a critical role in evidence-informed policymaking. These models, often more transparent and resource-efficient, remain highly relevant in supporting data analysis, policy simulations, and decision-support.

This paper explores AI’s role in three key phases of the policy cycle: (1) problem identification, where AI can support issue framing, trend detection, and scenario creation; (2) policy design, where AI-driven simulations and decision-support tools can improve solution alignment with real-world contexts; and (3) policy implementation and impact assessment, where AI can enhance monitoring, evaluation, and adaptive decision-making. Despite its promise, AI adoption in policymaking remains limited due to challenges such as algorithmic bias, lack of explainability, resource demands, and ethical concerns related to data privacy and environmental impact. To ensure responsible and effective AI integration, this paper highlights key recommendations: prioritizing augmentation over automation, embedding human oversight throughout AI-driven processes, facilitating policy iteration, and combining AI with participatory governance models…(More)”.

Policymaking assessment framework

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Guide by the Susan McKinnon Foundation: “This assessment tool supports the measurement of the quality of policymaking processes – both existing and planned – across  sectors. It provides a flexible framework for rating public policy processes using information available in the public domain. The framework’s objective is to simplify the path towards best practice, evidence-informed policy.

It is intended to accommodate the complexity of policymaking processes and reflect the realities and context within which policymaking is undertaken. The criteria can be tailored for different policy problems and policy types and applied across sectors and levels of government.

The framework is structured around five key domains:

  1. understanding the problem
  2. engagement with stakeholders and partners
  3. outcomes focus
  4. evidence for the solution, and
  5. design and communication…(More)”.

On conspiracy theories of ignorance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by In “On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance”, Karl Popper identifies a kind of “epistemological optimism”—an optimism about “man’s power to discern truth and to acquire knowledge”—that has played a significant role in the history of philosophy. At the heart of this optimistic view, Popper argues, is the “doctrine that truth is manifest”:

“Truth may perhaps be veiled, and removing the veil may not be easy. But once the naked truth stands revealed before our eyes, we have the power to see it, to distinguish it from falsehood, and to know that it is truth.”

According to Popper, this doctrine inspired the birth of modern science, technology, and liberalism. If the truth is manifest, there is “no need for any man to appeal to authority in matters of truth because each man carried the sources of knowledge in himself”:

“Man can know: thus he can be free. This is the formula which explains the link between epistemological optimism and the ideas of liberalism.”

Although a liberal himself, Popper argues that the doctrine of manifest truth is false. “The simple truth,” he writes, “is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again.” Moreover, he argues that the doctrine is pernicious. If we think the truth is manifest, we create “the need to explain falsehood”:

“Knowledge, the possession of truth, need not be explained. But how can we ever fall into error if truth is manifest? The answer is: through our own sinful refusal to see the manifest truth; or because our minds harbour prejudices inculcated by education and tradition, or other evil influences which have perverted our originally pure and innocent minds.”

In this way, the doctrine of manifest truth inevitably gives rise to “the conspiracy theory of ignorance”…

In previous work, I have criticised how the concept of “misinformation” is applied by researchers and policy-makers. Roughly, I think that narrow applications of the term (e.g., defined in terms of fake news) are legitimate but focus on content that is relatively rare and largely symptomatic of other problems, at least in Western democracies. In contrast, broad definitions inevitably get applied in biased and subjective ways, transforming misinformation research and policy-making into “partisan combat by another name”…(More)”

Tab the lab: A typology of public sector innovation labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aline Stoll and Kevin C Andermatt: “Many public sector organizations set up innovation laboratories in response to the pressure to tackle societal problems and the high expectations placed on them to innovate public services. Our understanding of the public sector innovation laboratories’ role in enhancing the innovation capacity of administrations is still limited. It is challenging to assess or compare the impact of innovation laboratories because of how they operate and what they do. This paper closes this research gap by offering a typology that organizes the diverse nature of innovation labs and makes it possible to compare various lab settings. The proposed typology gives possible relevant factors to increase the innovation capacity of public organizations. The findings are based on a literature review of primarily explorative papers and case studies, which made it possible to identify the relevant criteria. The proposed typology covers three dimensions: (1) value (intended innovation impact of the labs); (2) governance (role of government and financing model); and (3) network (stakeholders in the collaborative arrangements). Comparing European countries and regions with regards to the repartition of labs shows that Nordic and British countries tend to have broader scope than continental European countries…(More)”.

Social Informatics

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Book edited by Noriko Hara, and Pnina Fichman: “Social informatics examines how society is influenced by digital technologies and how digital technologies are shaped by political, economic, and socio-cultural forces. The chapters in this edited volume use social informatics approaches to analyze recent issues in our increasingly data-intensive society.

Taking a social informatics perspective, this edited volume investigates the interaction between society and digital technologies and includes research that examines individuals, groups, organizations, and nations, as well as their complex relationships with pervasive mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, artificial intelligence, and big data. This volume’s contributors range from seasoned and renowned researchers to upcoming researchers in social informatics. The readers of the book will understand theoretical frameworks of social informatics; gain insights into recent empirical studies of social informatics in specific areas such as big data and its effects on privacy, ethical issues related to digital technologies, and the implications of digital technologies for daily practices; and learn how the social informatics perspective informs research and practice…(More)”.