Paper by Sally Washington: “The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of good systems for policy and decision-making. An effective policy system depends on robust policy capability. This article articulates key dimensions of policy capability based on the practical experience of policy practitioners from a range of jurisdictions. It briefly draws on the literature on policy making and organizational capability before situating the key components of policy capability as mutually reinforcing parts of a policy capability infrastructure. These include “supply side” components of leadership, policy quality systems, people capability, and effective internal and external engagement, as well as the “demand side” component of the political administrative interface that shapes and is shaped by policy capability in the public service. This framing of policy capability as an infrastructure broadens the definition of policy capability from a narrow focus on people and skills to a systemic approach that includes the range of systems and processes that enable and support good government decision-making. The article argues that the policy capability infrastructure could serve as a useful and generic analytical framework for describing, assessing, and improving policy capability in teams, organizations, or across an entire public service. Policy leaders are invited to test the framework and share their insights and results, including with colleagues in academia. If it works in practice, it might also work in theory…(More)”.
Science in Negotiation
Book by Jessica Espey on “The Role of Scientific Evidence in Shaping the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 2012-2015”: “This book explores the role of scientific evidence within United Nations (UN) deliberation by examining the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), endorsed by Member States in 2015. Using the SDGs as a case study, this book addresses a key gap in our understanding of the role of evidence in contemporary international policy-making. It is structured around three overarching questions: (1) how does scientific evidence influence multilateral policy development within the UN General Assembly? (2) how did evidence shape the goals and targets that constitute the SDGs?; and (3) how did institutional arrangements and non-state actor engagements mediate the evidence-to-policy process in the development of the SDGs? The ultimate intention is to tease out lessons on global policy-making and to understand the influence of different evidence inputs and institutional factors in shaping outcomes.
To understand the value afforded to scientific evidence within multilateral deliberation, a conceptual framework is provided drawing upon literature from policy studies and political science, including recent theories of evidence-informed policy-making and new institutionalism. It posits that the success or failure of evidence informing global political processes rests upon the representation and access of scientific stakeholders, levels of community organisation, the framing and presentation of evidence, and time, including the duration over which evidence and key conceptual ideas are presented. Cutting across the discussion is the fundamental question of whose evidence counts and how expertise is defined? The framework is tested with specific reference to three themes that were prominent during the SDG negotiation process; public health (articulated in SDG 3), urban sustainability (articulated in SDG 11), and data and information systems (which were a cross-cutting theme of the dialogue). Within each, scientific communities had specific demands and through an exploration of key literature, including evidence inputs and UN documentation, as well as through key informant interviews, the translation of these scientific ideas into policy priorities is uncovered…(More)”.
Reconceptualizing Democratic Innovation
Paper by Cristina Flesher Fominaya: “Democratic innovation is one way the multiple crises of democracy can be addressed. The literature on democratic innovation has yet to adequately interrogate the role of social movements, and more specifically the movement of democratic imaginaries, in innovation, nor has it considered the specific mechanisms through which movements translate democratic imaginaries and practices into innovation. This article provides a preliminary roadmap for methodological and conceptual innovation in our understanding of the role of social movements in democratic innovation. It introduces the concept of democratic innovation repertoires and argues that: a) we need to broaden our conceptualization and analysis of democratic innovation to encompass the role of social movements; and b) we need to understand how the relationship between democratic movement imaginaries and the praxis that movements develop in their quest to “save” or strengthen democracy can shape democratic innovation beyond movement arenas after mobilizing “events” have passed…(More)”.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
Paper by Anastasia Kozyreva, et al: “Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy…(More)”.
The Socio-Legal Lab: An Experiential Approach to Research on Law in Action
Guide by Siddharth Peter de Souza and Lisa Hahn: “..interactive workbook for socio-legal research projects. It employs the idea of a “lab” as a space for interactive and experiential learning. As an introductory book, it addresses researchers of all levels who are beginning to explore interdisciplinary research on law and are looking for guidance on how to do so. Likewise, the book can be used by teachers and peer groups to experiment with teaching and thinking about law in action through lab-based learning…
The book covers themes and questions that may arise during a socio-legal research project. This starts with examining what research and interdisciplinarity mean and in which forms they can be practiced. After an overview of the research process, we will discuss how research in action is often unpredictable and messy. Thus, the practical and ethical challenges of doing research will be discussed along with processes of knowledge production and assumptions that we have as researchers.
Conducting a socio-legal research project further requires an overview of the theoretical landscape. We will introduce general debates about the nature, functions, and effects of law in society. Further, common dichotomies in socio-legal research such as “law” and “the social” or “qualitative” and “quantitative” research will be explored, along with suggested ways on how to bridge them.
Turning to the application side of socio-legal research, the book delves deeper into questions of data on law and society, where to collect it and how to deal with it in a reflexive manner. It discusses different methods of qualitative socio-legal research and offers ways in which they can be experienced through exercises and simulations. In the research process, generating research results is followed by publishing and communicating them. We will explore different ways to ensure the outreach and impact of one’s research by communicating results through journals, blogs or social media. Finally, the book also discusses academia as a social space and the value of creating and using networks and peer groups for mutual support.
Overall, the workbook is designed to accompany and inspire researchers on their way through a socio-legal research project and to empower the reader into thinking more creatively about their methods, while at the same time demystifying them…(More)”.
Closing the gap between user experience and policy design
Article by Cecilia Muñoz & Nikki Zeichner: “..Ask the average American to use a government system, whether it’s for a simple task like replacing a Social Security Card or a complicated process like filing taxes, and you’re likely to be met with groans of dismay. We all know that government processes are cumbersome and frustrating; we have grown used to the government struggling to deliver even basic services.
Unacceptable as the situation is, fixing government processes is a difficult task. Behind every exhausting government application form or eligibility screener lurks a complex policy that ultimately leads to what Atlantic staff writer Anne Lowrey calls the time tax, “a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them.”
Policies are complex, in part because they each represent many voices. The people who we call policymakers are key actors in governments and elected officials at every level from city councils to the U.S. Congress. As they seek to solve public problems like child poverty or improving economic mobility, they consult with experts at government agencies, researchers in academia, and advocates working directly with affected communities. They also hear from lobbyists from affected industries. They consider current events and public sentiments. All of these voices and variables, representing different and sometimes conflicting interests, contribute to the policies that become law. And as a result, laws reflect a complex mix of objectives. After a new law is in place, relevant government agencies are responsible for implementing them by creating new programs and services to carry them out. Complex policies then get translated into complex processes and experiences for members of the public. They become long application forms, unclear directions, and too often, barriers that keep people from accessing a benefit.
Policymakers and advocates typically declare victory when a new policy is signed into law; if they think about the implementation details at all, that work mostly happens after the ink is dry. While these policy actors may have deep expertise in a given issue area, or deep understanding of affected communities, they often lack experience designing services in a way that will be easy for the public to navigate…(More)”.
China just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it means.
Article by Zeyi Yang: “It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. Ever since 2014, when China announced a six-year plan to build a system to reward actions that build trust in society and penalize the opposite, it has been one of the most misunderstood things about China in Western discourse. Now, with new documents released in mid-November, there’s an opportunity to correct the record.
For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an instant image: a Black Mirror–esque web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either.
Instead, the system that the central government has been slowly working on is a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values—however vague that last goal in particular sounds. There’s no evidence yet that this system has been abused for widespread social control (though it remains possible that it could be wielded to restrict individual rights).
While local governments have been much more ambitious with their innovative regulations, causing more controversies and public pushback, the countrywide social credit system will still take a long time to materialize. And China is now closer than ever to defining what that system will look like. On November 14, several top government agencies collectively released a draft law on the Establishment of the Social Credit System, the first attempt to systematically codify past experiments on social credit and, theoretically, guide future implementation.
Yet the draft law still left observers with more questions than answers.
“This draft doesn’t reflect a major sea change at all,” says Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow of the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center who has been tracking China’s social credit experiment for years. It’s not a meaningful shift in strategy or objective, he says.
Rather, the law stays close to local rules that Chinese cities like Shanghai have released and enforced in recent years on things like data collection and punishment methods—just giving them a stamp of central approval. It also doesn’t answer lingering questions that scholars have about the limitations of local rules. “This is largely incorporating what has been out there, to the point where it doesn’t really add a whole lot of value,” Daum adds.
So what is China’s current system actually like? Do people really have social credit scores? Is there any truth to the image of artificial-intelligence-powered social control that dominates Western imagination? …(More)”.
A CERN Model for Studying the Information Environment
Article by Alicia Wanless: “After the Second World War, European science was suffering. Scientists were leaving Europe in pursuit of safety and work opportunities, among other reasons. To stem the exodus and unite the community around a vision of science for peace, in 1949, a transatlantic group of scholars proposed the creation of a world-class physics research facility in Europe. The grand vision was for this center to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Their white paper laid the foundation for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which today supports fundamental research in physics across an international community of more than 10,000 scientists from twenty-three member states and more than seventy other nations. Together, researchers at CERN built cutting-edge instruments to observe dozens of subatomic particles for the first time. And along the way they invented the World Wide Web, which was originally conceived as a tool to empower CERN’s distributed teams.
Such large-scale collaboration is once again needed to connect scholars, policymakers, and practitioners internationally and to accelerate research, this time to unlock the mysteries of the information environment. Democracies around the world are grappling with how to safeguard democratic values against online abuse, the proliferation of illiberal and xenophobic narratives, malign interference, and a host of other challenges related to a rapidly evolving information environment. What are the conditions within the information environment that can foster democratic societies and encourage active citizen participation? Sadly, the evidence needed to guide policymaking and social action in this domain is sorely lacking.
Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE). By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation…(More)”.
OECD Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age
OECD Report: “The digital age provides great opportunities to transform how public services are designed and delivered. The OECD Good Practice Principles for Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age provide a clear, actionable and comprehensive set of objectives for the high-quality digital transformation of public services. Reflecting insights gathered from across OECD member countries, these nine principles are arranged under three pillars of “Build accessible, ethical and equitable public services that prioritise user needs, rather than government needs”; “Deliver with impact, at scale and with pace”; and “Be accountable and transparent in the design and delivery of public services to reinforce and strengthen public trust”. The principles are advisory rather than prescriptive, allowing for local interpretation and implementation. They should also be considered in conjunction with wider OECD work to equip governments in harnessing the potential of digital technology and data to improve outcomes for all…(More)”.
New Interoperable Europe Act to deliver more efficient public services through improved cooperation between national administrations on data exchanges and IT solutions
Press Release: “The Commission has adopted the Interoperable Europe Act proposal and its accompanying Communication to strengthen cross-border interoperability and cooperation in the public sector across the EU. The Act will support the creation of a network of sovereign and interconnected digital public administrations and will accelerate the digital transformation of Europe’s public sector. It will help the EU and its Member States to deliver better public services to citizens and businesses, and as such, it is an essential step to achieve Europe’s digital targets for 2030 and support trusted data flows. It will also help save costs, and cross-border interoperability can lead to cost-savings between €5.5 and €6.3 million for citizens and between €5.7 and €19.2 billion for businesses dealing with public administrations…
The Interoperable Europe Act introduces:
- A structured EU cooperation where public administrations, supported by public and private actors, come together in the framework of projects co-owned by Member States, as well as regions and cities.
- Mandatory assessments to evaluate the impact of changes in information technology (IT) systems on cross-border interoperability in the EU.
- The sharing and reuse of solutions, often open source, powered by an ‘Interoperable Europe Portal’ – a one-stop-shop for solutions and community cooperation.
- Innovation and support measures, including regulatory sandboxes for policy experimentation, GovTech projects to develop and scale up solutions for reuse, and training support…(More)”.