Book by Sarah Sunn Bush and Jennifer Hadden: “…delves into the complex landscape of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Bush and Hadden trace INGOs’ rise to prominence at the end of the twentieth century and three significant but overlooked recent trends: a decrease in new INGO foundings, despite persistent global need; a shift towards specialization, despite the complexity of global problems; and a dispersal of INGO activities globally, despite potential gains from concentrating on areas of acute need. Assembling a wealth of new data on INGO foundings, missions, and locations, Bush and Hadden show how INGOs are being crowded out of dense organizational environments. They conduct case studies of INGOs across issue areas, relying on dozens of interviews and a large-scale survey to bring practitioners’ voices to the study of INGOs. To effectively address today’s global challenges, organizations must innovate in a crowded world. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core…(More)”.
How Behaviorally-Informed Technologies Are Shaping Global Aid
Article by Heather Graci: “Contraceptives are available in Sub-Saharan Africa, but maternal deaths caused by unwanted pregnancies are still rampant. Refugee agencies support those forced to flee their homes, but don’t always know where they’ll go—or what they’ll need when they get there. AI-powered tutors provide crucial support to kids struggling in under-resourced schools, but may not treat their students equally.
These are the sorts of humanitarian challenges that featured at the seventh annual United Nations Behavioural Science Week earlier this month. Each year, the UN Behavioural Science Group brings together researchers and practitioners from inside and outside of the UN to discuss how to use behavioral science for social good. Practitioners are exposed to the latest research that could inform their work; academics glimpse how their ideas play out amid the chaos of the real world. And everyone learns about projects happening beyond their focus area. Experts in healthcare, finance, education, peace and security, and beyond share a common language—and common solutions—in behavioral science.
This year technology was a central theme. Panelists from organizations like UNICEF and the World Bank joined academic experts from behavioral science, data science, and AI to discuss how thoughtful, behaviorally-informed technologies can bolster global development and aid efforts.
I’ve curated three sessions from the week that capture the different ways this is happening. Digital assistants that boost the capacity of health care workers or teachers. Predictive models that help aid agencies send the right resources to the right regions. And just as AI can exacerbate bias, it can mitigate it too—as long as we understand how it intersects with different cultures as it’s deployed around the world…(More)”.
The Importance of Co-Designing Questions: 10 Lessons from Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking
Article by Hannah Chafetz and Stefaan Verhulst: “How can a question-based approach to philanthropy enable better learning and deeper evaluation across both sides of the partnership and help make progress towards long-term systemic change? That’s what Siegel Family Endowment (Siegel), a family foundation based in New York City, sought to answer by creating an Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach.
While many philanthropies continue to follow traditional practices that focus on achieving a set of strategic objectives, Siegel employs an inquiry-driven approach, which focuses on answering questions that can accelerate insights and iteration across the systems they seek to change. By framing their goal as “learning” rather than an “outcome” or “metric,” they aim to generate knowledge that can be shared across the whole field and unlock impact beyond the work on individual grants.
The Siegel approach centers on co-designing and iteratively refining questions with grantees to address evolving strategic priorities, using rapid iteration and stakeholder engagement to generate insights that inform both grantee efforts and the foundation’s decision-making.
Their approach was piloted in 2020, and refined and operationalized the years that followed. As of 2024, it was applied across the vast majority of their grantmaking portfolio. Laura Maher, Chief of Staff and Director of External Engagement at Siegel Family Endowment, notes: “Before our Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach we spent roughly 90% of our time on the grant writing process and 10% checking in with grantees, and now that’s balancing out more.”
Image of the Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking Process from the Siegel Family Endowment
Earlier this year, the DATA4Philanthropy team conducted two in-depth discussions with Siegel’s Knowledge and Impact team to discuss their Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach and what they learned thus far from applying their new methodology. While the Siegel team notes that there is still much to be learned, there are several takeaways that can be applied to others looking to initiate a questions-led approach.
Below we provide 10 emerging lessons from these discussions…(More)”.
A World of Unintended Consequences
Essay by Edward Tenner: “One of the great, underappreciated facts about our technology-driven age is that unintended consequences tend to outnumber intended ones. As much as we would like to believe that we are in control, scholars who have studied catastrophic failures have shown that humility is ultimately the only justifiable attitude…
Here’s a story about a revolution that never happened. Nearly 90 years ago, a 26-year-old newly credentialed Harvard sociology PhD and future American Philosophical Society member, Robert K. Merton, published a paper in the American Sociological Review that would become one of the most frequently cited in his discipline: “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.”While the language of the paper was modest, it offered an obvious but revolutionary insight: many or most phenomena in the social world are unintended – for better or worse. Today, even management gurus like Tom Peters acknowledge that, “Unintended consequences outnumber intended consequences. … Strategies rarely unfold as we imagined. Intended consequences are rare.”
Merton had promised a monograph on the history and analysis of the problem, with its “vast scope and manifold implications.” Somewhere along the way, however, he abandoned the project, perhaps because it risked becoming a book about everything. Moreover, his apparent retreat may have discouraged other social scientists from attempting it, revealing one of the paradoxes of the subject’s study: because it is so universal and important, it may be best suited for case studies rather than grand theories.
Ironically, while unintentionality-centered analysis might have produced a Copernican revolution in social science, it is more likely that it would have unleashed adverse unintended consequences for any scholar attempting it – just as Thomas Kuhn’s idea of scientific paradigms embroiled him in decades of controversies. Besides, there are also ideological barriers to the study of unintended consequences. For every enthusiast there seems to be a hater, and dwelling on the unintended consequences of an opponent’s policies invites retaliation in kind.
This was economist Albert O. Hirschman’s point in his own critique of the theme. Hirschman himself had formidable credentials as a student of unintended consequences. One of his most celebrated and controversial ideas, the “hiding hand,” was a spin-off of Adam Smith’s famous metaphor for the market (the invisible hand). In Development Projects Observed, Hirschman noted that many successful programs might never have been launched had all the difficulties been known; but once a commitment was made, human ingenuity prevailed, and new and unforeseen solutions were found. The Sydney Opera House, for example, exceeded its budget by 1,300%, but it turned out to be a bargain once it became Australia’s unofficial icon…(More)”
Interoperability and Openness Between Different Governance Models: The Dynamics of Mastodon/Threads and Wikipedia/Google
Article by Aline Blankertz & Svea Windwehr: “Governments, businesses and civil society representatives, among others, call for “alternatives” to compete with and possibly replace big tech platforms. These alternatives are usually characterized by different governance approaches like being not-for-profit, open, free, decentralized and/or community-based. We find that strengthening alternative governance models needs to account for the dynamic effects of operating in a digital ecosystem shaped by ad-driven platforms. Specifically, we explore in this article: 1) how interoperability between the microblogging platforms Threads (by Meta) and Mastodon (a not-for-profit service running on a federated open-source protocol) may foster competition, but also create a risk of converging governance in terms of e.g. content moderation and privacy practices; 2) how openness of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia allows Google Search to appropriate most of the value created by their vertical interaction and how the Wikimedia Foundation seeks to reduce that imbalance; 3) which types of interventions might be suitable to support alternatives without forcing them to emulate big tech governance, including asymmetric interoperability, digital taxes and regulatory restraints on commercial platforms…(More)”.
Playing for science: Designing science games
Paper by Claudio M Radaelli: “How can science have more impact on policy decisions? The P-Cube Project has approached this question by creating five pedagogical computer games based on missions given to a policy entrepreneur (the player) advocating for science-informed policy decisions. The player explores simplified strategies for policy change rooted in a small number of variables, thus making it possible to learn without a prior background in political science or public administration. The games evolved from the intuition that, instead of making additional efforts to explain science to decision-makers, we should directly empower would-be scientists (our primary audience for the games), post-graduates in public policy and administration, and activists for science. The two design principles of the games revolve around learning about how policy decisions are made (a learning-about-content principle) and reflection. Indeed, the presence of science in the policy process raises ethical and normative decisions, especially when we consider controversial strategies like civil disobedience and alliances with industry. To be on the side of science does not mean to be outside society and politics. I show the motivation, principles, scripts and pilots of the science games, reflecting on how they can be used and for what reasons…(More)”
Entering the Vortex
Essay by Nils Gilman: “A strange and unsettling weather pattern is forming over the landscape of scholarly research. For decades, the climate of academic inquiry was shaped by a prevailing high-pressure system, a consensus grounded in the vision articulated by Vannevar Bush in “Science: The Endless Frontier” (1945). That era was characterized by robust federal investment, a faith in the university as the engine of basic research, and a compact that traded public funding for scientific autonomy and the promise of long-term societal benefit. It was a climate conducive to the slow, deliberate, and often unpredictable growth of knowledge, nurtured by a diverse ecosystem of human researchers — the vital “seed stock” of intellectual discovery.
But that high-pressure system is collapsing. A brutal, unyielding cold front of academic defunding has swept across the nation, a consequence of shifting political priorities, populist resentment, and a calculated assault on the university as an institution perceived as hostile to certain political agendas. This is not merely a belt-tightening exercise; it is, for all intents and purposes, the dismantling of Vannevar Bush’s Compact, the end of the era of “big government”-funded Wissenschaft. Funding streams for basic research are dwindling, grant applications face increasingly long odds, and the financial precarity of academic careers deters the brightest minds. The human capital necessary for sustained, fundamental inquiry is beginning to wither.
Simultaneously, a warm, moisture-laden airmass is rapidly advancing: the astonishing rise of AI-based research tools. Powered by vast datasets and sophisticated algorithms, these tools promise to revolutionize every stage of the research process – from literature review and data analysis to hypothesis generation and the drafting of scholarly texts. As a recent New Yorker piece on AI and the humanities suggests, these AI engines can already generate deep research and coherent texts on virtually any subject, seemingly within moments. They offer the prospect of unprecedented efficiency, speed, and scale in the production of scholarly output.
The collision of these two epochal weather systems — the brutal cold front of academic defunding and the warm, expansive airmass of AI-based research tools — is creating an atmospheric instability unlike anything the world of scholarship has ever witnessed. Along the front where these forces meet, a series of powerful and unpredictable tornados are beginning to touch down, reshaping the terrain of knowledge production in real-time…(More)”.
Digital Public Infrastructure Could Make a Better Internet
Essay by Akash Kapur: “…The advent of AI has intensified geopolitical rivalries, and with them the risks of fragmentation, exclusion, and hyper-concentration that are already so prevalent. The prospects of a “Splinternet” have never appeared more real. The old dream of a global digital commons seems increasingly quaint; we are living amid what Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, calls “technofeudalism.”
DPI suggests it doesn’t have to be this way. The approach’s emphasis on loosening chokeholds, fostering collaboration, and reclaiming space from monopolies represents an effort to recuperate some of the internet’s original promise. At its most aspirational, DPI offers the potential for a new digital social contract: a rebalancing of public and private interests, a reorientation of the network so that it advances broad social goals even while fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. How fitting it would be if this new model were to emerge not from the entrenched powers that have so long guided the network, but from a handful of nations long confined to the periphery—now determined to take their seats at the table of global technology…(More)”.
Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science
Report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Our current information ecosystem makes it easier for misinformation about science to spread and harder for people to figure out what is scientifically accurate. Proactive solutions are needed to address misinformation about science, an issue of public concern given its potential to cause harm at individual, community, and societal levels. Improving access to high-quality scientific information can fill information voids that exist for topics of interest to people, reducing the likelihood of exposure to and uptake of misinformation about science. Misinformation is commonly perceived as a matter of bad actors maliciously misleading the public, but misinformation about science arises both intentionally and inadvertently and from a wide range of sources…(More)”.
Bad Public Policy: Malignity, Volatility and the Inherent Vices of Policymaking
Book by Policy studies assume the existence of baseline parameters – such as honest governments doing their best to create public value, publics responding in good faith, and both parties relying on a policy-making process which aligns with the public interest. In such circumstances, policy goals are expected to be produced through mechanisms in which the public can articulate its preferences and policy-makers are expected to listen to what has been said in determining their governments’ courses of action. While these conditions are found in some governments, there is evidence from around the world that much policy-making occurs without these pre-conditions and processes. Unlike situations which produce what can be thought of as ‘good’ public policy, ‘bad’ public policy is a more common outcome. How this happens and what makes for bad public policy are the subjects of this Element…(More)”.