Thinking About the Commons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carol M. Rose at the International Journal of the Commons: “This article, originally a speech in the conference, Leçons de Droit Comparé sur les Communs, Sciences-Po, Paris, explores current developments in theoretical thinking about the commons. It keys off contemporary reconsiderations of Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” and Elinor Ostrom’s response to Hardin in Governing the Commons and later work.

Ostrom was among the best-known critics of Hardin’s idea of a “tragedy,” but Ostrom’s own work has also raised some questions in more recent commons literature. One key question is the very uncertain relationship between community-based resource control and democratic rights. A second key question revolves around the understanding of commons on the one hand as limited common regimes, central to Ostrom’s work, or as open access, as espoused by more recent advocates of widespread access to information and communications networks….(More)”.

Seeing Transparency More Clearly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Pozen: “In recent years, transparency has been proposed as the solution to, and the cause of, a remarkable range of public problems. The proliferation of seemingly contradictory claims about transparency becomes less puzzling, this essay argues, when one appreciates that transparency is not, in itself, a coherent normative ideal. Nor does it have a straightforward instrumental relationship to any primary goals of governance. To gain greater purchase on how transparency policies operate, scholars must therefore move beyond abstract assumptions and drill down into the specific legal, institutional, historical, political, and cultural contexts in which these policies are crafted and implemented. The field of transparency studies, in other words, is due for a “sociological turn.”…(More)”.

The Psychological Basis of Motivation to Take Part in Online Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Liz Dowthwaite et al: “Increasing motivation to contribute to online citizen science projects can improve user experience and is critical in retaining and attracting users. Drawing on previous studies of motivation, this paper suggests self-determination theory as a framework for explaining the psychological constructs behind participation in Citizen Science. Through examining existing studies of motivation for 6 Zooniverse projects through this lens, the paper suggests how appealing to basic psychological needs could increase participation in online citizen science, considering current practices and directions for future developments and research….(More)”.

Policy Entrepreneurs and Dynamic Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Mintrom: “Policy entrepreneurs are energetic actors who engage in collaborative efforts in and around government to promote policy innovations. Interest in policy entrepreneurs has grown over recent years. Increasingly, they are recognized as a unique class of political actors, who display common attributes, deploy common strategies, and can propel dynamic shifts in societal practices.

This Element assesses the current state of knowledge on policy entrepreneurs, their actions, and their impacts. It explains how various global forces are creating new demand for policy entrepreneurship, and suggests directions for future research on policy entrepreneurs and their efforts to drive dynamic change….(More)”.

The fuzzy concept of collaborative governance: A systematic review of the state of the art

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Agnes Batory and Sara Svensson: “Collaborative approaches to policy-making are high on the agenda for most European governments and are key to European Commission activities with respect to the transformation of public administration in the European Union (EU) (Hammerschmid et al., 2016; European Commission, 2016). A long line of politicians has stated the need for government units to overcome organizational cleavages and reach out to citizens and stakeholders in order to address difficult policy problems and deliver public services more efficiently. Collaborative approaches to policy-making have also been advocated as a way to close the seemingly growing gap between government and citizens and thus to alleviate normative problems commonly besetting Western democracies in the last decades. Collaborative governance has received considerable attention from public administration scholars and is the subject of a burgeoning body of academic literature in policy studies, public management and democratic theory. However, the rapid uptake of collaborative governance and related concepts, such as coordination, cooperation, joined-up governance, network governance (e.g., Robinson 2006) and interactive governance (Michels, 2011), led to a rather amorphous, diffused discussion, rather than a coherent narrative. Attempts to structure the debate have so far exclusively focused on the academic literature in English. This article aims to facilitate the synthesis and consolidation of work undertaken so far in a way that is more culturally sensitive and more open to developments taking place in the world of practice.

More specifically, this article first seeks to map the current state of the art. It pinpoints key dimensions of variation in how collaborative governance is defined in the academic literature through a qualitative analysis of influential scholarly work and provides a systematic literature review of a corpus of over 700 article abstracts. The analysis shows that scholarly articles differ in their conceptualisation of collaborative governance along at least five dimensions, which concern the public-private (governmental-non-governmental) divide; agency; organisational aspects; scope and locus within the policy process; and normative assumptions. Second, the paper extends this analysis to incorporate some preliminary findings on relevant ‘grey’ literature on collaborative governance in Europe – which seems to be in closer touch with developments of high relevance for practice – in order to indicate whether and to what extent the scholarly and the practitioner-oriented literature overlap or differ in orientation and subjects covered. Finally, the paper takes stock of the national connotations of the term in different European languages, which aims to mitigate the Anglo-Saxon bias in the literature. For the second and third objectives, the paper relies on responses from teams of academic public administration experts in ten EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries. The methodological approach for each of these steps is described in the respective sections of the paper. The penultimate section provides a synthesis of the results, including recommendations for reconceptualization and future research….(More)”.

Ten ways to optimise evidence-based policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter Bragge: “Applying knowledge to problems has occupied the minds of great philosophers, scientists and other thinkers for centuries. In more modern times, the challenge of connecting knowledge to practice has been addressed through fields such as evidence-based medicine which have conceptualised optimal healthcare as integration of best available research evidence, clinical experience and patients’ values. Similar principles apply to evidence-based public policy, and literature in this field has been growing since the turn of the century.

The exponential rise in knowledge availability has greatly enhanced the ‘supply’ side of the evidence-into-practice equation – however substantial gaps between evidence and practice remain. Policymakers are therefore increasingly looking to academia to optimise evidence-informed policy. This article presents ten considerations for optimising evidence-based policy, drawn from experience in delivering applied behaviour change research to government….(More)”.

Data as oil, infrastructure or asset? Three metaphors of data as economic value

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jan Michael Nolin at the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society: “Principled discussions on the economic value of data are frequently pursued through metaphors. This study aims to explore three influential metaphors for talking about the economic value of data: data are the new oil, data as infrastructure and data as an asset.

With the help of conceptual metaphor theory, various meanings surrounding the three metaphors are explored. Meanings clarified or hidden through various metaphors are identified. Specific emphasis is placed on the economic value of ownership of data.

In discussions on data as economic resource, the three different metaphors are used for separate purposes. The most used metaphor, data are the new oil, communicates that ownership of data could lead to great wealth. However, with data as infrastructure data have no intrinsic value. Therefore, profits generated from data resources belong to those processing the data, not those owning it. The data as an asset metaphor can be used to convince organizational leadership that they own data of great value….(More)”.

Public value creation in digital government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue by Panos Panagiotopoulos, BramKlievink, and AntonioCordella: “Public value theory offers innovative ways to plan, design, and implement digital government initiatives. The theory has gained the attention of researchers due to its powerful proposition that shifts the focus of public sector management from internal efficiency to value creation processes that occur outside the organization.

While public value creation has become the expectation that digital government initiatives have to fulfil, there is lack of theoretical clarity on what public value means and on how digital technologies can contribute to its creation. The special issue presents a collection of six papers that provide new insights on how digital technologies support public value creation. Building on their contributions, the editorial note conceptualizes the realm of public value creation by highlighting: (1) the integrated nature of public value creation supported by digital government implementations rather than enhancing the values provided by individual technologies or innovations, (2) how the outcome of public value creation is reflected in the combined consumption of the various services enabled by technologies and (3) how public value creation is enabled by organizational capabilities and configurations….(More)”.

Big Data, Algorithms and Health Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Julia M. Puaschunder: “The most recent decade featured a data revolution in the healthcare sector in screening, monitoring and coordination of aid. Big data analytics have revolutionarized the medical profession. The health sector relys on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics as never before. The opportunities of unprecedented access to healthcare, rational precision and human resemblance but also targeted aid in decentralized aid grids are obvious innovations that will lead to most sophisticated neutral healthcare in the future. Yet big data driven medical care also bears risks of privacy infringements and ethical concerns of social stratification and discrimination. Today’s genetic human screening, constant big data information amalgamation as well as social credit scores pegged to access to healthcare also create the most pressing legal and ethical challenges of our time.Julia M. PuaschunderThe most recent decade featured a data revolution in the healthcare sector in screening, monitoring and coordination of aid. Big data analytics have revolutionarized the medical profession. The health sector relys on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics as never before. The opportunities of unprecedented access to healthcare, rational precision and human resemblance but also targeted aid in decentralized aid grids are obvious innovations that will lead to most sophisticated neutral healthcare in the future. Yet big data driven medical care also bears risks of privacy infringements and ethical concerns of social stratification and discrimination. Today’s genetic human screening, constant big data information amalgamation as well as social credit scores pegged to access to healthcare also create the most pressing legal and ethical challenges of our time.

The call for developing a legal, policy and ethical framework for using AI, big data, robotics and algorithms in healthcare has therefore reached unprecedented momentum. Problematic appear compatibility glitches in the AI-human interaction as well as a natural AI preponderance outperforming humans. Only if the benefits of AI are reaped in a master-slave-like legal frame, the risks associated with these novel superior technologies can be curbed. Liability control but also big data privacy protection appear important to secure the rights of vulnerable patient populations. Big data mapping and social credit scoring must be met with clear anti-discrimination and anti-social stratification ethics. Lastly, the value of genuine human care must be stressed and precious humanness in the artifical age conserved alongside coupling the benefits of AI, robotics and big data with global common goals of sustainability and inclusive growth.

The report aims at helping a broad spectrum of stakeholders understand the impact of AI, big data, algorithms and health data based on information about key opportunities and risks but also future market challenges and policy developments for orchestrating the concerted pursuit of improving healthcare excellence. Stateshuman and diplomates are invited to consider three trends in the wake of the AI (r)evolution:

Artificial Intelligence recently gained citizenship in robots becoming citizens: With attributing quasi-human rights to AI, ethical questions arise of a stratified citizenship. Robots and algorithms may only be citizens for their protection and upholding social norms towards human-like creatures that should be considered slave-like for economic and liability purposes without gaining civil privileges such as voting, property rights and holding public offices.

Big data and computational power imply unprecedented opportunities for: crowd understanding, trends prediction and healthcare control. Risks include data breaches, privacy infringements, stigmatization and discrimination. Big data protection should be enacted through technological advancement, self-determined privacy attention fostered by e-education as well as discrimination alleviation by only releasing targeted information and regulated individual data mining capacities.

The European Union should consider establishing a fifth trade freedom of data by law and economic incentives: in order to bundle AI and big data gains large scale. Europe holds the unique potential of offering data supremacy in state-controlled universal healthcare big data wealth that is less fractionate than the US health landscape and more Western-focused than Asian healthcare. Europe could therefore lead the world on big data derived healthcare insights but should also step up to imbuing humane societal imperatives on these most cutting-edge innovations of our time….(More)”.

A Constitutional Right to Public Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chad G. Marzen: “In the wake of the 2013 United States Supreme Court decision of McBurney v. Young (569 U.S. 221), this Article calls for policymakers at the federal and state levels to ensure governmental records remain open and accessible to the public. It urges policymakers to call not only for strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act and the various state public records law, but to pursue an amendment to the United States Constitution providing a right to public information.

This Article proposes a draft of such an amendment:

The right to public information, being a necessary and vital part of democracy, shall be a fundamental right of the people. The right of the people to inspect and/or copy records of government, and to be provided notice of and attend public meetings of government, shall not unreasonably be restricted.

This Article analyzes the benefits of the amendment and concludes the enshrining of the right to public information in both the United States Constitution as well as various state constitutions will ensure greater access of public records and documents to the general public, consistent with the democratic value of open, transparent government….(More)”.