Can citizen deliberation address the climate crisis? Not if it is disconnected from politics and policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by John Boswell, Rikki Dean and Graham Smith: “..Modelled on the deliberative democratic ideal, much of the attention on climate assemblies focuses on their internal features. The emphasis is on their novelty in providing respite from the partisan bickering of politics-as-usual, instead creating space for the respectful free and fair exchange of reasons.

On these grounds, the Global Citizens’ Assembly in 2021 and experimental ‘wave’ of climate assemblies across European countries are promising. Participating citizens have demonstrated they can grapple with complex information, deliberate respectfully, and come to a well thought-through set of recommendations that are – every time – more progressive than current climate policies.

But, before we get carried away with this enthusiasm, it is important to focus on a fundamental point usually glossed over. Assemblies are too often talked about in magical terms, as if by their moral weight alone citizen recommendations will win the day through the forceless force of their arguments. But this expectation is naive.

Designing for impact requires much more attention to the nitty-gritty of how policy actually gets made. That means taking seriously the technical uncertainties and complexities associated with policy interventions, and confronting the political challenges and trade-offs required in balancing priorities in the shadow of powerful interests.

In a recent study, we have examined the first six national climate assemblies – in Ireland, France, the UK, Scotland, Germany and Denmark – to see how they tried to achieve impact. Our novel approach is to take the focus away from their (very similar) ‘internal design characteristics’ – such as random selection – and instead put it on their ‘integrative design characteristics’…(More)”.

Bridging Data Gaps Can Help Tackle the Climate Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bo Li and Bert Kroese: “A famous physicist once said: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it”.

Nearly 140 years later, this maxim remains true and is particularly poignant for policymakers tasked with addressing climate mitigation and adaptation.

That’s because they face major information gaps that impede their ability to understand the impact of policies—from measures to incentivize cuts in emissions, to regulations that reduce physical risks and boost resilience to climate shocks. And without comprehensive and internationally comparable data to monitor progress, it’s impossible to know what works, and where course corrections are needed.

This underscores the importance of the support of G20 leaders for a new Data Gaps Initiative to make official statistics more detailed, and timely. It calls for better data to understand climate change, together with indicators that cover income and wealth, financial innovation and inclusion, access to private and administrative data, and data sharing. In short, official statistics need to be broader, more detailed, and timely.

The sector where change is needed the most is energy, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for around three-quarters of the total.

Economies must expand their renewable energy sources and curb fossil fuel use, but while there’s been a gradual shift in that direction, the pace is still not sufficient. And not only is there a lack of policy ambition in many cases, there also is a lack of comprehensive and internationally comparable data to monitor progress.

To accelerate cuts to emissions, policymakers need detailed statistics to monitor the path of the energy transition and assist them in devising effective mitigation measures that can deliver the fastest and least disruptive pathway toward net zero emissions…(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)”.

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)”.

Calls to “save democracy” won’t work if there is little agreement on what democracy is

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nicholas T. Davis, Kirby Goidel and Keith Gaddie: “One of the most consistent findings in academic research is the existence of something called the principle-implementation gap. People can agree that an idea is perfectly reasonable but will largely reject any meaningful action designed to achieve it. It happens with government spending. People want government to create public goods such as law enforcement, healthcare, and national defense, but oppose new (or additional) taxes. It happens with climate change. The public largely accepts the idea that human-caused climate change is occurring but is unwilling to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. And it happens with racial equality. People decry racism, but they reject policies that reduce inequality. It also happens, it turns out, with democracy. People claim to love democracy, but willingly sacrifice democratic norms in pursuit of partisan political ends.

A recent New York Times/Siena Poll illustrates this point. Most Americans (71 percent) said they believed American democracy was endangered, but there was little agreement on the nature of the threat or the appropriate corrective action. In response to an open-end question, the most frequently identified threat (mentioned by only 14 percent of respondents) was corruption, not the undermining of democratic norms or the rule of law by former President Donald Trump and the almost 300 Republican candidates running for public office in this year’s midterm elections who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.…

Despite much weeping and gnashing of teeth about the “crisis of democracy,” a singular, widely shared understand of democracy is not on the ballot. Or, if it is on the ballot, it appears to be losing.

Why don’t right-wing populist threats against democracy inspire, mobilize, or persuade a public that professes to believe in democracy?

Our new book, Democracy’s Meanings: How the Public Thinks About Democracy and Why It Matters, suggests at least two reasons. First, according to open-ended responses, citizens mostly view democracy through the lens of “freedom” and “elections.” The United States is having an election this fall. It may be less free and less fair in some places than others, but, overall, the electoral apparatus in the United States hasn’t cracked apart – at least in the minds of ordinary voters who don’t pay much attention to the news or care much about the intricacies of electoral law….(More)”.

How citizen science can help realize the full potential of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Haishan Fu, Craig Hammer, and Edward Anderson: “Citizen science, a critical pillar of Open Science, advocates for greater citizen involvement in knowledge generation, research goals, and outcomes. By engaging citizens directly in data collection, drone imaging, and crowdsourcing into project design, we provide policymakers and citizens with valuable data and information they need to make informed and effective decisions.   

Furthermore, abiding by the principles of citizen science, we can help communities establish a new social contract around data stewardship, grounded in the principles of value, trust, and equity, as proposed by the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives. The report puts forward a vision of data governance that is multistakeholder and collaborative. It explicitly builds data production, protection, exchange, and use into planning and decision-making, and integrates participants from civil society, private sectors, and importantly, the public into the data life cycle and into the governance structures of the system. 

As the experience of the Resilience Academy shows, increasing our commitment to citizen science by inviting public engagement before, during, and after development projects can help engage a wider swath of the public with the Bank’s Open Data Initiative.   

The Tanzania-based project empowers students to adapt low-cost, low-complexity tools and open methods to collect and manage data from their changing environments. Resilience Academy students also participate in solving real-world challenges in their community, such as mapping flood- and rockfall-prone zones, surveying tourism and infrastructure needs, and other areas currently lacking critical data. 

This “learning by doing” approach equips young people with the long-term tools, knowledge, and skills they need to address the world’s most pressing urban challenges and ensure resilient urban development. This project is demonstrating the many co-benefits that come from hands-on learning, job creation, and data management-related skills. 

Incorporating citizen science into open data agendas and project design, however, will necessitate some changes to how the World Bank and other multilateral development agencies approach development projects….(More)”.

Tech-Fuelled Inequality Could Catalyze Populism 2.0

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kyle Hiebert: “Geopolitical crises, looming climate chaos and the relentless expansion of surveillance capitalism are driving the development of the technologies of tomorrow — artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, green energy, big data, advanced robotics, virtual and augmented reality, nanotechnology, quantum computing, the Internet of Things and more.

Each of these tools holds tremendous potential to improve lives and help solve the world’s biggest problems. But technological change always produces winners and losers by giving rise to new concentrations of power and novel forms of inequality. For example, a study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 50 and 70 percent of lost wages in America from 1980 to 2016 stemmed from automation — far more than from aggressive offshoring or the withering of labour unions.

However, automation has brought about new occupations as well, evidenced by the absence of mass joblessness in the United States over the same period. Despite the lost wages, the US unemployment rate from 1993 to 2019 stayed around or below seven percent when excluding a four-year recovery following the exogenous shock of the 2008 financial crisis. Productivity has also increased by nearly 62 percent since 1979. But the wages of American workers have failed to keep pace, rising only 17.5 percent, signalling a deep disconnect in recent history between new technologies being adopted and the average worker being better off as a result.

Similar circumstances across the democratic world have provoked severe political consequences over the past decade. Disaffected populations caught on the wrong side of economic transformations and alienated by the accompanying social changes spurred by globalization have aligned themselves with populists pitching simplistic solutions to complex problems. Polarization has skyrocketed; international cooperation has frayed.

As the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution accelerates in coming years, upending how economies and societies operate, a new form of populism rooted in tech-fuelled disparities may eventually consume democratic nations. To avoid this outcome, governments must get serious about harnessing new technologies to make the democratic process more agile and responsive to voters’ frustrations…(More)”

The role and power of re-patterning in systems change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Griffith University Yunus Centre: “In simple terms, patterns are interconnected behaviours, relationships and structures that together make up a picture of what ‘common practice’ looks like and how it is ultimately experienced by people interacting with and in a system.

If we take Public Services in the twenty-first century here are some examples.

Public Service organisations have most often been formed around concepts such as universal access, service delivery, social safety nets, and public provision of critical infrastructure. Built into these elements are patterns, like:

Patterns of relationships: based on objectivity, universalism, professional relationships.

Patterns of resourcing: focused on rationing, efficiency, programmatic resource flows.

Patterns of power: centred on professional expertise, needs assessments, deserving access to spaces and services.

On the surface, these are not necessarily negative and there have doubtless been many successes enabling broad access to services and infrastructure.

It’s also true though that there remain many who have not benefited, who have missed out on access or opportunity, and who have actually been harmed by and within the system.

What is needed is a foundation for public systems that moves away from goals of access to more and better servicing of communities, and towards goals around learning how we can promote patterns of thriving, aspiration, success and ‘wellbeing’…(More)”.

A graphic that shows an organic shape much like mycelium representing how everyday behaviours, mindsets, structures, practices, interactions, values are interconnected and fractal. It shows how we only SEE a tiny bit of this on the surface but most of it is invisible.
The organic patterns of systems. The Yunus Centre Griffith and Auckland Co-Design Lab 2022

Responsible AI licenses: a practical tool for implementing the OECD Principles for Trustworthy AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis: “Recent socio-ethical concerns on the development, use, and commercialization of AI-related products and services have led to the emergence of new types of licenses devoted to promoting the responsible use of AI systems: Responsible AI Licenses, or RAILs.

RAILs are AI-specific licenses that include restrictions on how the licensee can use the AI feature due to the licensor’s concerns about the technical capabilities and limitations of the AI feature. This approach concerns the two existing types of these licenses. The RAIL license can be used for ML models, source code, applications and services, and data. When these licenses allow free access and flexible downstream distribution of the licensed AI feature, they are OpenRAIL

Author: Danish Contractor, co-author of the BigScience OpenRAIL-M and chair of the RAIL Initiative

The RAIL Initiative was created in 2019 to encourage the industry to adopt use restrictions in licenses as a way to mitigate the risks of misuse and potential harm caused by AI systems…(More)”.

Data and displacement: Ethical and practical issues in data-driven humanitarian assistance for IDPs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Vicki Squire: “Ten years since the so-called “data revolution” (Pearn et al, 2022), the rise of “innovation” and the proliferation of “data solutions” has rendered the assessment of changing data practices within the humanitarian sector ever more urgent. New data acquisition modalities have provoked a range of controversies across multiple contexts and sites (e.g. Human Rights Watch, 2021, 2022a, 2022b). Moreover, a range of concerns have been raised about data sharing (e.g. Fast, 2022) and the inequities embedded within humanitarian data (e.g. Data Values, 2022).

With this in mind, the Data and Displacement project set out to explore the practical and ethical implications of data-driven humanitarian assistance in two contexts characterised by high levels of internal displacement: north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan. Our interdisciplinary research team includes academics from each of the regions under analysis, as well as practitioners from the International Organization for Migration. From the start, the research was designed to centre the lived experiences of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), while also shedding light on the production and use of humanitarian data from multiple perspectives.

We conducted primary research during 2021-2022. Our research combines dataset analysis and visualisation techniques with a thematic analysis of 174 semi-structured qualitative interviews. In total we interviewed 182 people: 42 international data experts, donors, and humanitarian practitioners from a range of governmental and non-governmental organisations; 40 stakeholders and practitioners working with IDPs across north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan (20 in each region); and 100 IDPs in camp-like settings (50 in each region). Our findings point to a disconnect between international humanitarian standards and practices on the ground, the need to revisit existing ethical guidelines such informed consent, and the importance of investing in data literacies…(More)”.