Participatory Data Governance: How Small Changes Can Lead to Greater Inclusion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kate Richards and Martina Barbero: “What the majority of participatory data governance approaches have in common is strong collaboration between public authorities and civil society organizations and representatives of communities that have been historically marginalized and excluded or who are at risk of being marginalized. This leads to better data and evidence for policy-making. For instance, a partnership between the Canadian government and First Nations communities led Statistics Canada to better understand the factors that exacerbate exclusion and capture the lived experiences of these communities. 

These practices are pivotal for increasing inclusion and accountability in data beyond the data collection stage. In fact, while inclusion at the data collection phase remains extremely important, participatory data governance approaches can be adopted at any stage of the data lifecycle.

  • Before data collection starts: Building relationships with communities at risk of being marginalized helps clarify “what to count” and how to embed the needs and aspirations of vulnerable populations in new data collection approaches. The National Department of Statistics in Colombia’s (DANE) multi-year work with Indigenous communities enabled the statistical office to change their population survey approach, leading to more inclusive data policies. 
  • After data is collected: Collaborating with civil society organizations enables public authorities to assess how and through which channels data should be shared with target communities. When the government of Buenos Aires wanted to provide information to increase access to sexual and reproductive health services, it worked with civil society to gather feedback and develop a platform that would be useful and accessible to the target population.
  • At the stage of data use: Participatory approaches for data inclusion also support greater data use, both by public authorities and by external stakeholders. In Medellin, Colombia, the availability of more granular and more inclusive data on teen pregnancy enabled the government to develop better prevention policies and establish personalized services for girls at risk, resulting in a reduction of teen pregnancies by 30%. In Rosario, Argentina, the government’s partnership with associations representing persons with disabilities led to the development of much more accessible and inclusive public portals, which in turn resulted in better access to services for all citizens…(More)”.

One Data Point Can Beat Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Gerd Gigerenzer: “…In my research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, we’ve studied simple algorithms (heuristics) that perform well under volatile conditions. One way to derive these rules is to rely on psychological AI: to investigate how the human brain deals with situations of disruption and change. Back in 1838, for instance, Thomas Brown formulated the Law of Recency, which states that recent experiences come to mind faster than those in the distant past and are often the sole information that guides human decision. Contemporary research indicates that people do not automatically rely on what they recently experienced, but only do so in unstable situations where the distant past is not a reliable guide for the future. In this spirit, my colleagues and I developed and tested the following “brain algorithm”:

Recency heuristic for predicting the flu: Predict that this week’s proportion of flu-related doctor visits will equal those of the most recent data, from one week ago.

Unlike Google’s secret Flu Trends algorithm, this rule is transparent and can be easily applied by everyone. Its logic can be understood. It relies on a single data point only, which can be looked up on the website of the Center for Disease Control. And it dispenses with combing through 50 million search terms and trial-and-error testing of millions of algorithms. But how well does it actually predict the flu?

Three fellow researchers and I tested the recency rule using the same eight years of data on which Google Flu Trends algorithm was tested, that is, weekly observations between March 2007 and August 2015. During that time, the proportion of flu-related visits among all doctor visits ranged between one percent and eight percent, with an average of 1.8 percent visits per week (Figure 1). This means that if every week you were to make the simple but false prediction that there are zero flu-related doctor visits, you would have a mean absolute error of 1.8 percentage points over four years. Google Flu Trends predicted much better than that, with a mean error of 0.38 percentage points (Figure 2). The recency heuristic had a mean error of only 0.20 percentage points, which is even better. If we exclude the period where the swine flu happened, that is before the first update of Google Flu Trends, the result remains essentially the same (0.38 and 0.19, respectively)….(More)”.

Academic freedom and democracy in African countries: the first study to track the connection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Liisa Laakso: “There is growing interest in the state of academic freedom worldwide. A 1997 Unesco document defines it as the right of scholars to teach, discuss, research, publish, express opinions about systems and participate in academic bodies. Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education and knowledge.

Yet there is surprisingly little empirical research on the actual impact of academic freedom. Comparable measurements have also been scarce. It was only in 2020 that a worldwide index of academic freedom was launched by the Varieties of Democracy database, V-Dem, in collaboration with the Scholars at Risk Network….

My research has been on the political science discipline in African universities and its role in political developments on the continent. As part of this project, I have investigated the impact of academic freedom in the post-Cold War democratic transitions in Africa.

A study I published with the Tunisian economist Hajer Kratou showed that academic freedom has a significant positive effect on democracy, when democracy is measured by indicators such as the quality of elections and executive accountability.

However, the time factor is significant. Countries with high levels of academic freedom before and at the time of their democratic transition showed high levels of democracy even 5, 10 and 15 years later. In contrast, the political situation was more likely to deteriorate in countries where academic freedom was restricted at the time of transition. The impact of academic freedom was greatest in low-income countries….(More)”

Data for Peace and Humanitarian Response? The Case of the Ukraine-Russia War

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Behruz Davletov, Uma Kalkar, Salwa Mansuri, Marine Ragnet, and Stefaan Verhulst at Data & Policy: “Since the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine on 24 February 2022, more than 4,889 (28,081 according to the Ukrainian government) civilians have been killed and over 7 million people have been displaced. The conflict has had a significant impact on civilians, particularly women and children. In response to the crisis, local and international organizations have sought to provide immediate humanitarian assistance, and initiated numerous initiatives to monitor violations and work toward peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

As in other areas of society, data and data science have become important to tailor, conduct, and monitor emergency responses in conflict zones. Data has also become crucial to support humanitarian action and peacebuilding. For example, data collected from satellite, GPS, and drone technologies can be used to map a conflict’s evolution, understand the needs of civilians, evaluate migration patterns, analyze discourses coming from both sides, and track the delivery of assistance.

This article focuses on the role that data has played in crisis response and peacebuilding related to the Russian-Ukrainian war so as to demonstrate how data can be used for peace. We consider a variety of publicly available evidence to examine various aspects of how data is playing a role in the ongoing conflict, mainly from a humanitarian response perspective. In particular, we consider the following aspects and taxonomy of data usage:

  • Prediction: Data is used to monitor and plan for likely events and risks both prior to and during the conflict;
  • Narratives: Data plays a critical role in both constructing and countering misinformation and disinformation;
  • Infrastructure Damage: Data can be used to track and respond to infrastructure damage, as well as to associated human rights violations and migration flows;
  • Human Rights Violations and Abuses: Data is used to identify and report human rights abuses, and to help construct a legal basis for justice;
  • Migration Flows: Large-scale population flows, both within Ukraine and toward neighboring countries, are one of the defining features of the conflict. Data is being used to monitor these flows, and to target humanitarian assistance;
  • Humanitarian Response: In addition to the above, data is also being used for a wide variety of humanitarian purposes, including ensuring basic and medical supplies, and addressing the resulting mental health crisis….(More)”.

Transforming public policy with engaged scholarship: better together

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Alana Cattapan & Tobin LeBlanc Haley: “The expertise of people with lived experience is receiving increased attention within policy making arenas. Yet consultation processes have, for the most part, been led by public servants, with limited resources provided for supporting the community engagement vital to the inclusion of lived experience experts in policy making. What would policy decisions look like if the voices of the communities who live with the consequences of these decisions were prioritised not only in consultation processes, but in determining priorities and policy processes from the outset? This is one of the questions we explore in our recent article published in the special issue on Transformational Change in Public Policy.

As community-engaged policy researchers, along with Leah Levac, Laura Pin, Ethel Tungohan and Sarah Marie Wiebe, our attention has been focused on how to engage meaningfully and work together with the communities impacted by our research, the very communities often systematically excluded from policy processes. Across our different research programmes, we work together with people experiencing precarious housing and homelessness, migrant workers, northern and Indigenous women, First Nations, and trans and gender diverse people. The lessons we have learned in our research with these communities are useful for our work and for these communities, as well as for policy makers and other actors wanting to engage meaningfully with community stakeholders.

Our new article, “Transforming Public Policy with Engaged Scholarship: Better Together,” describes these lessons, showing how engaged scholarship can inform the meaningful inclusion of people with lived expertise in public policy making. We draw on Marianne Beaulieu, Mylaine Breton and Astrid Brouselle’s work to focus on four principles of engaged scholarship. The principles we focus on include prioritising community needs, practicing reciprocity, recognising multiple ways of knowing, and crossing disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. Using five vignettes from our own research, we link these principles to our practice, highlighting how policy makers can do the same. In one vignette, co-author Sarah Marie Wiebe describes how her research with people in Aamjiwnaang in Canada was made possible through the sustained time and effort of relationship building and learning about the lived experiences of community members. As she explains in the article, this work included sensing the pollution in the surrounding atmosphere firsthand through participation in a “toxic tour” of the community’s location next to Canada’s Chemical Valley. In another vignette, co-author Ethel Tungohan details how migrant community leaders led a study looking at migrant workers’ housing precarity, enabling more responsive forms of engagement with municipal policy makers who tend to ignore migrant workers’ housing issues….(More)”.

The Decentralized Web: Hope or Hype?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Inga Trauthig: “The heavy financial losses of cryptocurrency holders in recent months have catapulted a relatively niche tech topic into public view. However, many investors originally did not emphasize economic gains as their primary motivation for supporting cryptocurrencies. A different motive was driving them: decentralization.

Cryptocurrencies, together with blockchain, belong to a broader field related to the decentralized Web (DWeb) or Web3, which is, however, characterized by some obscurity. In August 2022, many informed readers are likely to be able to explain bitcoin, but fewer will be able to explain differences between various DWeb services, or how content moderation on a new version of the internet works — or could work in future.

The DWeb currently is a movement of which some parts are heavily tied to blockchain as a revolutionary technology purported to resolve the current ills of the internet. But some in the movement disagree on the dogma of blockchain (together with incentive stimulus and game theory) as the Web’s saviour — while concurring on the basic tenet that the current internet space, Web 2.0, has been corrupted by centralization. In other words, the DWeb is a movement whose members share many ideals but differ in their approaches to achieving them. And, some parts of this movement have much broader reach than others. While bitcoin has swept the globe and managed to draw adherents in the Global North and South, social media DWeb services are still mostly used by the technological cognoscenti.

In effect, at the current stage, successes of a decentralized Web are few and far between. They relate to two main aspirations: first, the empirical (re-)decentralization of the internet, and second, an appeal to make the internet a good place (again). The latter is certainly tempting given that the Web 2.0 is regularly accused of enabling authoritarian movements and actors, or online radicalization…(More)”.

Measuring human rights: facing a necessary challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Eduardo Burkle: “Given the abundance of data available today, many assume the world already has enough accurate metrics on human rights performance. However, the political sensitivity of human rights has proven a significant barrier to access. Governments often avoid producing and sharing this type of information.

States’ compliance with their human rights obligations often receives a lot of attention. But there is still much discussion about how to measure it. At the same time, statistics and data increasingly drive political and bureaucratic decisions. This, in turn, brings some urgency to the task of ensuring the best possible data are available.

Establishing cross-national human rights measures is vital for research, advocacy, and policymaking. It can also have a direct effect on people’s enjoyment of human rights. Good data allow states and actors to evaluate how well their country is performing. It also lets them make comparisons that highlight which policies and institutions are truly effective in promoting human rights.

Good human rights data does more than simply evaluate how well a country is performing – it also identifies which policies and institutions are truly effective in promoting human rights

Such context makes it crucial to arm researchers, journalists, advocates, practitioners, investors, and companies with reliable information when raising human rights issues in their countries, and around the world…(More)”.

The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kerstin Hötte, Melline Somers and Angelos Theodorakopoulos:”New technologies may replace human labour, but can simultaneously create jobs if workers are needed to use these technologies or if new economic activities emerge. At the same time, technology-driven productivity growth may increase disposable income, stimulating a demand-induced employment expansion. Based on a systematic review of the empirical literature on technological change and its impact on employment published in the past four decades, this column suggests that the empirical support for the labour-creating effects of technological change dominates that for labour-replacement…(More)”.

Inside India’s plan to train 3.1 million 21st century civil servants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anirudh Dinesh and Beth Simone Noveck: “Prime Minister Modi established the Government of India’s Capacity Building Commission (CBC) on April 1, 2021 to reimagine how the state can deliver high-quality citizen services. According to the Commission’s chairman, Adil Zainulbhai and its secretary, Hemang Jani, the Commission will work with 93 central government departments and more than 800 training institutions across India to train over three million central government employees.

The competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down

By training employees, especially those who interact with citizens on a daily basis like those in the railways and postal departments, the hope is to impart new ways of working that translate into more effective and trustworthy government and better quality interactions with residents. The Commission has set itself two “north stars” or stretch goals to accomplish, namely to contribute to improving the “ease of living” for citizens and to advance Prime Minister Modi’s vision to make India a $5 trillion economy…

The Capacity Building Commission’s philosophy is that the competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down. Rather, the Commission wants each ministry to answer: What is the single most important thing we need to accomplish and then define the competencies they need to achieve that goal. …

An important first step in creating a capacity building programme is to understand what competencies already exist (or not) in the civil service. We asked both Zainulbhai and Jani about the CBC’s thinking about creating such a baseline of skills. The Commission’s approach, Jani explained to us, is to ask each ministry to look at its training needs from three “lenses:”

  1. Does the ministry have the capacity to deliver on “national priorities”? And are government employees aware of these national priorities?
  2. Does the ministry have the capacity necessary to deliver “citizen-centric” services?
  3. The “technology lens”: Do civil servants not only understand the challenges posed by technology but also appreciate new technologies and the solutions that could come from them?

The Commission also looks at capacity building on three levels:

  1. The individual level: What knowledge, skill and attitude an individual needs.
  2. The organisation level: What rules and procedures might be hindering service delivery.
  3. The institutional level: How to create an enabling environment for employees to upskill themselves resulting in better public services…(More)”

We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jason Collins: “…Behavioral economics today is famous for its increasingly large collection of deviations from rationality, or, as they are often called, ‘biases’. While useful in applied work, it is time to shift our focus from collecting deviations from a model of rationality that we know is not true. Rather, we need to develop new theories of human decision to progress behavioral economics as a science. We need heliocentrism. 

The dominant model of human decision-making across many disciplines, including my own, economics, is the rational-actor model. People make decisions based on their preferences and the constraints that they face. Whether implicitly or explicitly, they typically have the computational power to calculate the best decision and the willpower to carry it out. It’s a fiction but a useful one.

As has become broadly known through the growth of behavioral economics, there are many deviations from this model. (I am going to use the term behavioral economics through this article as a shorthand for the field that undoubtedly extends beyond economics to social psychology, behavioral science, and more.) This list of deviations has grown to the extent that if you visit the Wikipedia page ‘List of Cognitive Biases’ you will now see in excess of 200 biases and ‘effects’. These range from the classics described in the seminal papers of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman through to the obscure.

We are still at the collection-of-deviations stage. There are not 200 human biases. There are 200 deviations from the wrong model…(More)”