Governance and Service Delivery: Practical Applications of Social Accountability Across Sectors


Book edited by Derick W. Brinkerhoff, Jana C. Hertz, and Anna Wetterberg: “…Historically, donors and academics have sought to clarify what makes sectoral projects effective and sustainable contributors to development. Among the key factors identified have been (1) the role and capabilities of the state and (2) the relationships between the state and citizens, phenomena often lumped together under the broad rubric of “governance.” Given the importance of a functioning state and positive interactions with citizens, donors have treated governance as a sector in its own right, with projects ranging from public sector management reform, to civil society strengthening, to democratization (Brinkerhoff, 2008). The link between governance and sectoral service delivery was highlighted in the World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report, which focused on accountability structures and processes (World Bank, 2004).

Since then, sectoral specialists’ awareness that governance interventions can contribute to service delivery improvements has increased substantially, and there is growing recognition that both technical and governance elements are necessary facets of strengthening public services. However, expanded awareness has not reliably translated into effective integration of governance into sectoral programs and projects in, for example, health, education, water, agriculture, or community development. The bureaucratic realities of donor programming offer a partial explanation…. Beyond bureaucratic barriers, though, lie ongoing gaps in practical knowledge of how best to combine attention to governance with sector-specific technical investments. What interventions make sense, and what results can reasonably be expected? What conditions support or limit both improved governance and better service delivery? How can citizens interact with public officials and service providers to express their needs, improve services, and increase responsiveness? Various models and compilations of best practices have been developed, but debates remain, and answers to these questions are far from settled. This volume investigates these questions and contributes to building understanding that will enhance both knowledge and practice. In this book, we examine six recent projects, funded mostly by the United States Agency for International Development and implemented by RTI International, that pursued several different paths to engaging citizens, public officials, and service providers on issues related to accountability and sectoral services…(More)”

Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making


(Open Access) book edited by Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss: “Presenting rigorous and original research, this volume offers key insights into the historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces at play in the creation of world-class ICT innovations in Kenya. Following the arrival of fiber-optic cables in 2009, Digital Kenya examines why the initial entrepreneurial spirit and digital revolution has begun to falter despite support from motivated entrepreneurs, international investors, policy experts and others. Written by engaged scholars and professionals in the field, the book offers 15 eye-opening chapters and 14 one-on-one conversations with entrepreneurs and investors to ask why establishing ICT start-ups on a continental and global scale remains a challenge on the “Silicon Savannah”. The authors present evidence-based recommendations to help Kenya to continue producing globally impactful  ICT innovations that improve the lives of those still waiting on the side-lines, and to inspire other nations to do the same….(More)”

Playing politics: exposing the flaws of nudge thinking


Book Review by Pat Kane in The New Scientist: “The cover of this book echoes its core anxiety. A giant foot presses down on a sullen, Michael Jackson-like figure – a besuited citizen coolly holding off its massive weight. This is a sinister image to associate with a volume (and its author, Cass Sunstein) that should be able to proclaim a decade of success in the government’s use of “behavioural science”, or nudge theory. But doubts are brewing about its long-term effectiveness in changing public behaviour – as well as about its selective account of evolved human nature.

influence

Nudging has had a strong and illustrious run at the highest level. Outgoing US President Barack Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron both set up behavioural science units at the heart of their administrations (Sunstein was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012).

Sunstein insists that the powers that be cannot avoid nudging us. Every shop floor plan, every new office design, every commercial marketing campaign, every public information campaign, is an “architecting of choices”. As anyone who ever tried to leave IKEA quickly will suspect, that endless, furniture-strewn path to the exit is no accident.

Nudges “steer people in particular directions, but also allow them to go their own way”. They are entreaties to change our habits, to accept old or new norms, but they presume thatwe are ultimately free to refuse the request.

However, our freedom is easily constrained by “cognitive biases”. Our brains, say the nudgers, are lazy, energy-conserving mechanisms, often overwhelmed by information. So a good way to ensure that people pay into their pensions, for example, is to set payment as a “default” in employment contracts, so the employee has to actively untick the box. Defaults of all kinds exploit our preference for inertia and the status quo in order to increase future security….

Sunstein makes useful distinctions between nudges and the other things governments and enterprises can do. Nudges are not “mandates” (laws, regulations, punishments). A mandate would be, for example, a rigorous and well-administered carbon tax, secured through a democratic or representative process. A “nudge” puts smiley faces on your energy bill, and compares your usage to that of the eco-efficient Joneses next door (nudgers like to game our herd-like social impulses).

In a fascinating survey section, which asks Americans and others what they actually think about being the subjects of the “architecting” of their choices, Sunstein discovers that “if people are told that they are being nudged, they will react adversely and resist”.

This is why nudge thinking may be faltering – its understanding of human nature unnecessarily (and perhaps expediently) downgrades our powers of conscious thought….(More)

See The Ethics of Influence: Government in the age of behavioral science Cass R. Sunstein, Cambridge University Press

The internet is crowdsourcing ways to drain the fake news swamp


 at CNET: “Fighting the scourge of fake news online is one of the unexpected new crusades emerging from the fallout of Donald Trump’s upset presidential election win last week. Not surprisingly, the internet has no shortage of ideas for how to get its own house in order.

Eli Pariser, author of the seminal book “The Filter Bubble”that pre-saged some of the consequences of online platforms that tend to sequester users into non-overlapping ideological silos, is leading an inspired brainstorming effort via this open Google Doc.

Pariser put out the public call to collaborate via Twitter on Thursday and within 24 hours 21 pages worth of bullet-pointed suggestions has already piled up in the doc….

Suggestions ranged from the common call for news aggregators and social media platforms to hire more human editors, to launching more media literacy programs or creating “credibility scores” for shared content and/or users who share or report fake news.

Many of the suggestions are aimed at Facebook, which has taken a heavy heaping of criticism since the election and a recent report that found the top fake election news stories saw more engagement on Facebook than the top real election stories….

In addition to the crowdsourced brainstorming approach, plenty of others are chiming in with possible solutions. Author, blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis teamed up with entrepreneur and investor John Borthwick of Betaworks to lay out 15 concrete ideas for addressing fake news on Medium ….The Trust Project at Santa Clara University is working to develop solutions to attack fake news that include systems for author verification and citations….(More)

Government for a Digital Economy


Chapter by Zoe Baird in America’s National Security Architecture: Rebuilding the Foundation: “The private sector is transforming at record speed for the digital economy. As recently as 2008, when America elected President Obama, most large companies had separate IT departments, which were seen as just that—departments—separate from the heart of the business. Now, as wireless networks connect the planet, and entire companies exist in the cloud, digital technology is no longer viewed as another arrow in the corporate quiver, but rather the very foundation upon which all functions are built. This, then, is the mark of the digital era: in order to remain successful, modern enterprises must both leverage digital technology and develop a culture that values its significance within the organization.

For the federal government to help all Americans thrive in this new economy, and for the government to be an engine of growth, it too must enter the digital era. On a basic level, we need to improve the government’s digital infrastructure and use technology to deliver government services better. But a government for the digital economy needs to take bold steps to embed these actions as part of a large and comprehensive transformation in how it goes about the business of governing. We should not only call on the “IT department” to provide tools, we must completely change the way we think about how a digital age government learns about the world, makes policy, and operates against its objectives.

Government today does not reflect the fundamental attributes of the digital age. It moves slowly at a time when information travels around the globe at literally the speed of light. It takes many years to develop and implement comprehensive policy in a world characterized increasingly by experimentation and iterative midcourse adjustments. It remains departmentally balkanized and hierarchical in an era of networks and collaborative problem solving. It assumes that it possesses the expertise necessary to make decisions while most of the knowledge resides at the edges. It is bogged down in legacy structures and policy regimes that do not take advantage of digital tools, and worse, create unnecessary barriers that hold progress back. Moreover, it is viewed by its citizens as opaque and complex in an era when openness and access are attributes of legitimacy….(More)”

Digital Government: Leveraging Innovation to Improve Public Sector Performance and Outcomes for Citizens


Book edited by Svenja Falk, Andrea Römmele, Andrea and Michael Silverman: “This book focuses on the implementation of digital strategies in the public sectors in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India and Germany. The case studies presented examine different digital projects by looking at their impact as well as their alignment with their national governments’ digital strategies. The contributors assess the current state of digital government, analyze the contribution of digital technologies in achieving outcomes for citizens, discuss ways to measure digitalization and address the question of how governments oversee the legal and regulatory obligations of information technology. The book argues that most countries formulate good strategies for digital government, but do not effectively prescribe and implement corresponding policies and programs. Showing specific programs that deliver results can help policy makers, knowledge specialists and public-sector researchers to develop best practices for future national strategies….(More)”

Beyond nudging: it’s time for a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy


Katherine Curchin at LSE Blog: “…behavioural scientists are calling for a second generation of behaviourally-informed policy. In some policy areas, nudges simply aren’t enough. Behavioural research shows stronger action is required to attack the underlying cause of problems. For example, many scholars have argued that behavioural insights provide a rationale for regulation to protect consumers from manipulation by private sector companies. But what might a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy look like?

Behavioural insights could provide a justification to change the trajectory of income support policy. Since the 1990s policy attention has focused on the moral character of benefits recipients. Inspired by Lawrence Mead’s paternalist philosophy, governments have tried to increase the resolve of the unemployed to work their way out of poverty. More and more behavioural requirements have been attached to benefits to motivate people to fulfil their obligations to society.

But behavioural research now suggests that these harsh policies are misguided. Behavioural science supports the idea that people often make poor decisions and do things which are not in their long term interests.  But the weakness of individuals’ moral constitution isn’t so much the problem as the unequal distribution of opportunities in society. There are circumstances in which humans are unlikely to flourish no matter how motivated they are.

Normal human psychological limitations – our limited cognitive capacity, limited attention and limited self-control – interact with environment to produce the behaviour that advocates of harsh welfare regimes attribute to permissive welfare. In their book Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that the experience of deprivation creates a mindset that makes it harder to process information, pay attention, make good decisions, plan for the future, and resist temptations.

Importantly, behavioural scientists have demonstrated that this mindset can be temporarily created in the laboratory by placing subjects in artificial situations which induce the feeling of not having enough. As a consequence, experimental subjects from middle-class backgrounds suddenly display the short-term thinking and irrational decision making often attributed to a culture of poverty.

Tying inadequate income support to a list of behavioural conditions will most punish those who are suffering most. Empirical studies of welfare conditionality have found that benefit claimants often do not comprehend the complicated rules that apply to them. Some are being punished for lack of understanding rather than deliberate non-compliance.

Behavioural insights can be used to mount a case for a more generous, less punitive approach to income support. The starting point is to acknowledge that some of Mead’s psychological assumptions have turned out to be wrong. The nature of the cognitive machinery humans share imposes limits on how self-disciplined and conscientious we can reasonably expect people living in adverse circumstances to be. We have placed too much emphasis on personal responsibility in recent decades. Why should people internalize the consequences of their behaviour when this behaviour is to a large extent the product of their environment?…(More)”

Data Ethics – The New Competitive Advantage


Book by Gry Hasselbalch and Pernille Tranberg: “…describes over 50 cases of mainly private companies working with data ethics to varying degrees

Respect for privacy and the right to control one’s own data are becoming key parameters to gain a competitive edge in today’s business world. Companies, organisations and authorities which view data ethics as a social responsibility,giving it the same importance as environmental awareness and respect for human rights,are tomorrow’s winners. Digital trust is paramount to digital growth and prosperity.
This book combines broad trend analyses with case studies to examine companies which use data ethics to varying degrees. The authors make the case that citizens and consumers are no longer just concerned about a lack of control over their data, but they also have begun to act. In addition, they describe alternative business models, advances in technology and a new European data protection regulation, all of which combine to foster a growing market for data-ethical products and services….(More).

The Age of Sharing


The Age of Sharing
Book by Nicholas A. John: “Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behavior; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing embodies positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meaningshave changed in the digital age.

But the word ‘sharing’ also camouflages commercial or even exploitative relations.Websites say they share data with advertisers, although in reality they sell it, while parts of the sharing economy look a great deal like rental services. Ultimately, it is argued, practices described as sharing and critiques of those practices have common roots. Consequently, the metaphor of sharing now constructs significant swathes of our social practices and provides the grounds for critiquing them; it is a mode of participation in the capitalist order as well as a way of resisting it.

Drawing on nineteenth-century literature, Alcoholics Anonymous, the American counterculture, reality TV, hackers, Airbnb, Facebook and more, The Age of Sharing offers a rich account of a complex contemporary keyword. It will appeal to students and scholars of the Internet, digital culture and linguistics….(More)”

The case against democracy


 in the New Yorker: “Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. …In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”…(More)”