What is PeaceTech?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Behruz Davletov, Uma Kalkar, Marine Ragnet, and Stefaan Verhulst: “From sensors to detect explosives to geographic data for disaster relief to artificial intelligence verifying misleading online content, data and technology are essential assets for peace efforts. Indeed, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is a direct example of data, data science, and technology as a whole has been mobilized to assist and monitor conflict responses and support peacebuilding.

Yet understanding the ways in which technology can be applied for peace, and what kinds of peace promotion they can serve, as well as their associated risks remain muddled. Thus, a framework for the governance of these peace technologies—#PeaceTech—is needed at an international and transnational level to guide the responsible and purposeful use of technology and data to strengthen peace and justice initiatives.

Today, The GovLab is proud to announce the release of the “PeaceTech Topic Map: A Research Base for an Emerging Field,” an overview of the key themes and challenges of technologies used by and created for peace efforts…(More)”.

Digital Oil

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Eric Monteiro: “Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor and, in doing so, shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing.

For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian continental shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil.

What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative…(More)”.

Shared Models in Networks, Organizations, and Groups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joshua Schwartzstein & Adi Sunderam: “To understand new information, we exchange models or interpretations with others. This paper provides a framework for thinking about such social exchanges of models. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their network that best explains the data, given their prior beliefs. An implication is that interpretations evolve within a network. For many network structures, social learning mutes reactions to data: the exchange of models leaves beliefs closer to priors than they were before. Our results shed light on why disagreements persist as new information arrives, as well as the goal and structure of meetings in organizations…(More)”.

Humanizing Science and Engineering for the Twenty-First Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kaye Husbands Fealing, Aubrey Deveny Incorvaia and Richard Utz: “Solving complex problems is never a purely technical or scientific matter. When science or technology advances, insights and innovations must be carefully communicated to policymakers and the public. Moreover, scientists, engineers, and technologists must draw on subject matter expertise in other domains to understand the full magnitude of the problems they seek to solve. And interdisciplinary awareness is essential to ensure that taxpayer-funded policy and research are efficient and equitable and are accountable to citizens at large—including members of traditionally marginalized communities…(More)”.

Building Trust and Reinforcing Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Democracies are at a critical juncture, under growing internal and external pressures. This publication sheds light on the important public governance challenges countries face today in preserving and strengthening their democracies, including fighting mis- and disinformation; improving government openness, citizen participation and inclusiveness; and embracing global responsibilities and building resilience to foreign influence. It also looks at two cross-cutting themes that will be crucial for robust, effective democracies: transforming public governance for digital democracy and gearing up government to deliver on climate and other environmental challenges. These areas lay out the foundations of the new OECD Reinforcing Democracy Initiative, which has also involved the development of action plans to support governments in responding to these challenges..(More)”.

Missions for governance: Unleashing missions beyond policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Demos Helsinki: “How can governments pursue meaningful industrial policy in the 21st century? How can they incentivise new markets to lead the twin transition? How can they create good jobs for future disadvantaged workers?

Most importantly, can the current setup of government achieve these essential transformations?

In this white paper, we propose a way to think about and implement missions that can unleash them beyond mere policy tools, launching a new type of governance for the 21st century.

The rise of mission-oriented innovation policy (MOIP) has given policymakers a practical approach to enabling and accelerating societal, economic, and technological transformations. The main premise behind its ever-growing dissemination across global policy networks is straightforward: in the face of the challenges posed by the 21st century, traditional innovation policy is broken.

Indeed, between 2010 and 2020, governments did not invest in clean energy as much as they should have; there was slow growth in markets for education, care, and other social services; and even antivirals were underfunded, leading to a slower response to the pandemic….(More)”.

Brain capital: A new vector for democracy strengthening

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Brain Capital Alliance: “Democracies are increasingly under siege. Beyond direct external (e.g., warfare) and internal (e.g., populism, extremism) threats to democratic nations, multiple democracy-weakening factors are converging in our modern world. Brain health challenges, including mental, neurologic, and substance use disorders, social determinants of health, long COVID, undesired effects of technology, mis- and disinformation, and educational, health, and gender disparities, are associated with substantial economic and sociopolitical impediments. Herein, we argue that thriving democracies can distinguish themselves through provision of environments that enable each citizen to achieve their full brain health potential conducive to both personal and societal well-being. Gearing policymaking towards equitable and quality brain health may prove essential to combat brain challenges, promote societal cohesion, and boost economic productivity. We outline emerging policy innovations directed at building “pro-democratic brain health” across individual, communal, national, and international levels. While extensive research is warranted to further validate these approaches, brain health-directed policymaking harbors potential as a novel concept for democracy strengthening….(More)”.

Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chinmayi Sharma: “Google, iPhones, the national power grid, surgical operating rooms, baby monitors, surveillance technology, and wastewater management systems all run on open-source software. Open-source software, or software that is free and publicly available, powers our day-to-day lives. As a resource, it defies economic logic; it is built by developers, many of whom are volunteers, who build projects with the altruistic intention of donating them to the digital commons. Developers use it because it saves time and money and promotes innovation. Its benefits have led to its ubiquity and indispensability. Today, over 97% of all software uses open source. Without it, our critical infrastructure would crumble. The risk of that happening is more real than ever.

In December 2021, the Log4Shell vulnerability demonstrated that the issue of open-source security can no longer be ignored. One vulnerability found in a game of Minecraft threatened to take down systems worldwide—from the Belgian government to Google. The scope of the damage is unmatched; with open source, a vulnerability in one product can be used against every other entity that uses the same code. Open source’s benefits are also its burden. No one wants to pay for a resource they can get an unlimited supply of for free. Open source is not, however, truly unlimited. The open-source community is buckling under the weight of supporting over three-fourths of the world’s code. Rather than share the load, its primary beneficiaries, companies that build software, add to it. By failing to take basic precautionary measures in using open-source code, they make its exploitation nearly inevitable—when it happens, they free-ride on the already overwhelmed community to fix it. This doom cycle leaves everyone worse off because it leaves our critical infrastructure dangerously vulnerable.

Since it began, open source has worked behind the scenes to make society better. Today, its struggles are going unnoticed and unaddressed. The private sector isn’t willing to help—the few who are cannot carry the burden alone. So far, government interventions have been lacking. Secure open source requires much more. To start, it is time we treated open source as the critical infrastructure it is…(More)”.

Behavioral Economics and the Energy Crisis in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Carlos Scartascini: “European nations, stunned by Russia’s aggression, have mostly rallied in support of Ukraine, sending weapons and welcoming millions of refugees. But European citizens are paying dearly for it. Apart from the costs in direct assistance, the energy conflict with Russia had sent prices of gas soaring to eight times their 10-year average by the end of September and helped push inflation to around 10%. With a partial embargo of Russian oil going into effect in December and cold weather coming, many Europeans now fear an icy, bitter and poorer winter of 2023.

European governments hope to take the edge off by enacting price regulations, providing energy subsidies for households, and crucially curbing energy demand. Germany’s government, for example, imposed limits on heating in public offices and buildings to 19 degrees Celsius (66.2 Fahrenheit). France has introduced a raft of voluntary measures ranging from asking public officials to travel by train rather than car, suggesting that municipalities swap old lamps for LEDs and designing incentives to get people to car share…

As we know from years of experiments at the IDB in using behavioral economics to achieve policy goals, however, rules and recommendations are not enough. Trust in fellow citizens and in the government are also crucial when calling for a shared sacrifice. That means not appealing to fear, which can lead to deeper divisions in society, energy hoarding, resignation and indifference. Rather, it means appealing to social norms of morality and community.

In using behavioral economics to boost tax compliance in Argentina, for example, we found that sending messages that revealed how fellow citizens were paying their taxes significantly improved tax collection. Revealing how the government was using tax funds to improve people’s lives provided an additional boost to the effort. Posters and television ads in Europe showing people wearing sweaters, turning down their thermostats, insulating their homes and putting up solar panels might similarly instill a sense of common purpose. And signals that governments are trying to relieve hardship might help instill in citizens the need for sacrifice…(More)”.

GDP is getting a makeover — what it means for economies, health and the planet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ehsan Masood: “The numbers are heading in the wrong direction. If the world continues on its current track, it will fall well short of achieving almost all of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that the United Nations set to protect the environment and end poverty and inequality by 2030.

The projected grade for:

Eliminating hunger: F.

Ensuring healthy lives for all: F.

Protecting and sustainably using ocean resources: F.

The trends were there before 2020, but then problems increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and the worsening effects of climate change. The world is in “a new uncertainty complex”, says economist Pedro Conceição, lead author of the United Nations Human Development Report.

One measure of this is the drastic change in the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines educational outcomes, income and life expectancy into a single composite indicator. After 2019, the index has fallen for two successive years for the first time since its creation in 1990. “I don’t think this is a one-off, or a blip. I think this could be a new reality,” Conceição says.

UN secretary-general António Guterres is worried. “We need an urgent rescue effort for the SDGs,” he wrote in the foreword to the latest progress report, published in July. Over the past year, Guterres and the heads of big UN agencies, such as the Statistics Division and the UN Development Programme, have been assessing what’s gone wrong and what needs to be done. They’re converging on the idea that it’s time to stop using gross domestic product (GDP) as the world’s main measure of prosperity, and to complement it with a dashboard of indicators, possibly ones linked to the SDGs. If this happens, it would be the biggest shift in how economies are measured since nations first started using GDP in 1953, almost 70 years ago.

Guterres’s is the latest in a crescendo of voices calling for GDP to be dropped as the world’s primary go-to indicator, and for a dashboard of metrics instead. In 2008, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy endorsed such a call from a team of economists, including Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.

And in August, the White House announced a 15-year plan to develop a new summary statistic that would show how changes to natural assets — the natural wealth on which economies depend — affect GDP. The idea, according to the project’s main architect, economist Eli Fenichel at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is to help society to determine whether today’s consumption is being accomplished without compromising the future opportunities that nature provides. “GDP only gives a partial and — for many common uses — an incomplete, picture of economic progress,” Fenichel says.

The fact that Guterres has made this a priority, amid so many major crises, is a sign that “going beyond GDP has been picked up at the highest level”, says Stefan Schweinfest, the director of the UN Statistics Division, based in New York City…(More)”.