Handbook of Public Participation in Impact Assessment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Tanya Burdett and A. John Sinclair: “… provides a clear overview of how to achieve meaningful public participation in impact assessment (IA). It explores conceptual elements, including the democratic core of public participation in IA, as well as practical challenges, such as data sharing, with diverse perspectives from 39 leading academics and practitioners.

Critically examining how different engagement frameworks have evolved over time, this Handbook underlines the ways in which tokenistic approaches and wider planning and approvals structures challenge the implementation of meaningful public participation. Contributing authors discuss the impact of international agreements, legislation and regulatory regimes, and review commonly used professional association frameworks such as the International Association for Public Participation core values for practice. They demonstrate through case studies what meaningful public participation looks like in diverse regional contexts, addressing the intentions of being purposeful, inclusive, transformative and proactive. By emphasising the strength of community engagement, the Handbook argues that public participation in IA can contribute to enhanced democracy and sustainability for all…(More)”.

Mapping Behavioral Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Paolo Belardinelli: “This book provides a new perspective on behavioral public policy. The field of behavioral public policy has been dominated by the concept of ‘nudging’ over the last decade. As this book demonstrates, however, ‘nudging’ is one of many behavioral techniques that practitioners and policymakers can utilize in order to achieve their goals. The book discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative techniques, and demonstrates empirically how the impact of ‘nudging’ and ‘non-nudging’ interventions are often dependent on varying political contexts and the degree of trust that citizens have toward policymakers. In doing so, it addresses the important question of how citizens understand and approve of the use of behavioral techniques by governments. The book will appeal to all those interested in public management, public policy, behavioral psychology, and ‘nudging’. ..(More)”.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Renée DiResta: “…investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
 
By revealing the machinery and dynamics of the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, DiResta vividly illustrates the way propagandists deliberately undermine belief in the fundamental legitimacy of institutions that make society work. This alternate system for shaping public opinion, unexamined until now, is rewriting the relationship between the people and their government in profound ways. It has become a force so shockingly effective that its destructive power seems limitless. Scientific proof is powerless in front of it. Democratic validity is bulldozed by it. Leaders are humiliated by it. But they need not be.
 
With its deep insight into the power of propagandists to drive online crowds into battle—while bearing no responsibility for the consequences—Invisible Rulers not only predicts those consequences but offers ways for leaders to rapidly adapt and fight back…(More)”.

Handbook on Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Regine Paul, Emma Carmel and Jennifer Cobbe: “…explores the relationship between public policy and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across a broad range of geographical, technical, political and policy contexts. It contributes to critical AI studies, focusing on the intersection of the norms, discourses, policies, practices and regulation that shape AI in the public sector.

Expert authors in the field discuss the creation and use of AI technologies, and how public authorities respond to their development, by bringing together emerging scholarly debates about AI technologies with longer-standing insights on public administration, policy, regulation and governance. Contributions in the Handbook mobilize diverse perspectives to critically examine techno-solutionist approaches to public policy and AI, dissect the politico-economic interests underlying AI promotion and analyse implications for sustainable development, fairness and equality. Ultimately, this Handbook questions whether regulatory concepts such as ethical, trustworthy or accountable AI safeguard a democratic future or contribute to a problematic de-politicization of the public sector…(More)”.

 

Superconvergence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jamie Metzl: “…explores how artificial intelligence, genome sequencing, gene editing, and other revolutionary technologies are transforming our lives, world, and future. These accelerating and increasingly interconnected technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, store essential information for millions of years, and save our planet, but they can also―if we are not careful―do immeasurable harm.

The challenge we face is that while our ability to engineer the world around us is advancing exponentially, our processes for understanding the scope, scale, and implications of these changes, and for managing our godlike powers wisely, are only inching forward glacially…(More)”.

The Deliberative Turn in Democratic Theory

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Antonino Palumbo: “Thirty years of developments in deliberative democracy (DD) have consolidated this subfield of democratic theory. The acquired disciplinary prestige has made theorist and practitioners very confident about the ability of DD to address the legitimacy crisis experienced by liberal democracies at present at both theoretical and practical levels. The book advance a critical analysis of these developments that casts doubts on those certainties — current theoretical debates are reproposing old methodological divisions, and are afraid to move beyond the minimalist model of democracy advocated by liberal thinkers; democratic experimentation at the micro-level seems to have no impact at the macro-level, and remain sets of isolated experiences. The book indicates that those defects are mainly due to the liberal minimalist frame of reference within which reflection in democratic theory and practice takes place. Consequently, it suggests to move beyond liberal understandings of democracy as a game in need of external rules, and adopt instead a vision of democracy as a self-correcting metagame…(More)”.

Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Chaim Gingold: “…explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, thinking about the world as a complex system and appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used for modeling. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations.

Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts.

A lavishly visual book, Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity‘s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few…(More)”.

In the Land of the Unreal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Lisa Messeri: “In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race…(More)”.

Little Communes Everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Jay Caspian Kang: “…I was thinking about all this while I read “The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life,” a forthcoming book by the comparative-literature professor Kristin Ross. Ross—who has previously written about the Paris Commune of 1871 and France’s student uprising of May, 1968—focusses particularly on the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a thousand-acre commune created by French farmers and their allies in the late two-thousands, in an effort to block the construction of a new airport, which would have kicked many people off their own land. (The French government had designated the land a zone d’aménagement différé, or a “deferred development area”; the farmers kept the acronym but used it to mean zone à défendre, or “zone to defend.”) For a commune to work, Ross argues, one must have both a physical space to defend against an antagonist and an articulated vision for an alternative organization of human relationships and economy. The “commune form,” as she defines it, is a “political movement that is also the collective elaboration of a desired way of life—the means becoming the end.” Theory, in other words, needs to be put into practice, in an intimate and earnest setting, so that people can test out their ideas about living within the context of an actual place among actual people.

Ross identifies one of the motivating forces behind the creation of the ZAD as alienation, which was “less the loss of some human essence than it was the loss of possibilities: the sense of blockages and impasses brought on by the destruction and fragmentation of the social tissue by capitalism.” Drawing upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Ross refers to “the colonization of everyday life,” each part of our day becoming dominated by economic reasoning. This, she writes, dispossesses us of “our dignity, our social life, our time, the sense of mastery over our lives, the beauty and health of our lived environment, and of the very possibility of working together to invent our future collectively.” Under such conditions, the commune becomes the only alternative…

Physical spaces, whether pools or parks, can be reclaimed through collective action, in much the way that admissions policies at exclusive magnet schools can be protected by a small group of dedicated parents. Small, everyday victories are the only real cure for alienation. What else would work?…(More)”

Making Sense of Wicked Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Andrew J. Hoffman: “While reading Oxford University professor Thomas Hale’s Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time, I kept thinking of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s observation that “we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on Earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to such responsibility, but here we are.”

Countless scientists have referred to climate change as part of a class of issues called “wicked problems,” a term used to describe issues that do not neatly fit the conventional models of analysis. While we may not be suited to solve the wicked problem of climate change and may despair that we will never be, Hale offers an analysis of how we might better understand and therefore address it.

Hale predicates Long Problems on the general observation that some political issues span not only national borders but also time horizons. His central claim is that climate change is a “long problem,” a challenge that “spans more than one human lifetime.” He acknowledges that while “length is not the only meaningful way to understand climate change, … a focus on this one characteristic can fundamentally reshape our understanding of politics” by challenging us to establish policies on longer time horizons and to account for the future in ways we have not previously done. Reenvisioning policy is important because long problems are becoming more prevalent, he argues, for three reasons: our growing technological ability to bump against limits within the environment, our growing understanding of those distant effects, and our increasing willingness to address the needs of the future in the present.

Long problems, Hale asserts, challenge us to “govern across time,” rather than in the short terms of election cycles and quarterly returns. He warns that such challenges become more difficult to address the longer we ignore long-term governance. Indeed, as long problems become more urgent, we become more immediate and short term in our political orientation. Put differently, when we are drowning, we are less concerned with fixing the cause of the flood than we are with surviving. Hale calls this a paradox that “is another of the various cruel ironies of climate change [because] it threatens precisely the political support for longer term governance functions that can best address it.”…(More)”.