Paper by Rebecca Wells, Candice Howarth & Lina I. Brand-Correa: “In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes….(More)”.
Carbonwashing: A New Type of Carbon Data-Related ESG Greenwashing
Paper by Soh Young In and Kim Schumacher: “Despite the increased attention and capital incentives around corporate sustainability, the development of sustainability reporting standards and monitoring systems has been progressing at a slow pace. As a result, companies have misaligned incentives to deliberately or selectively communicate information not matched with actual environmental impacts or make largely unsubstantiated promises around future ambitions. These incidents are broadly called “greenwashing,” but there is no clear consensus on its definition and taxonomy. We pay particular attention to the threat of greenwashing concerning carbon emission reductions by coining a new term, “carbonwashing.” Since carbon mitigation is the universal goal, the corporate carbon performance data supply chain is relatively more advanced than that of the entire sustainability data landscape. Nonetheless, the threat of carbonwashing persists, even far more severe than general greenwashing due to the financial values attached to corporate carbon performance. This paper contextualizes sustainable finance-related carbonwashing via an outline of the communication as well as the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of carbon emission mitigation performance. Moreover, it proposes several actionable policy recommendations on how industry stakeholders and government regulators can reduce carbonwashing risks…(More)”.
Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science
Paper by Rink Hoekstra and Simine Vazire: “The replication crisis in the social, behavioural, and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility, or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research…
A recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour laments the fact that academia prefers clear and polished stories over honest but less clear-cut ones, with “research projects [presented] as conclusive narratives that leave no room for ambiguity or for conflicting or inconclusive results” (p. 1). Although honesty and clarity are not mutually exclusive, the pressure resulting from this probably impacts the quality and validity of our scientific work. Most journals still seem to favor clear stories, despite an arguably larger risk of these having validity issues. This presents a real dilemma for authors – especially those who do not have the luxury of a tenured position – who would like to put intellectual humility front and center: In order to increase the odds of getting a publication, they are encouraged to present their stories as better than they actually are. Being more honest or humble likely has a negative effect on their CVs. In the following, we’ll present a constructive solution for this apparent stalemate, which reverses the reward structure in such a way that authors are encouraged to write papers that “tell it like it is”….(More)”.
Nudgeability: Mapping Conditions of Susceptibility to Nudge Influence
Paper by Denise de Ridder, Floor Kroese, and Laurens van Gestel: “Nudges are behavioral interventions to subtly steer citizens’ choices toward “desirable” options. An important topic of debate concerns the legitimacy of nudging as a policy instrument, and there is a focus on issues relating to nudge transparency, the role of preexisting preferences people may have, and the premise that nudges primarily affect people when they are in “irrational” modes of thinking. Empirical insights into how these factors affect the extent to which people are susceptible to nudge influence (i.e., “nudgeable”) are lacking in the debate. This article introduces the new concept of nudgeability and makes a first attempt to synthesize the evidence on when people are responsive to nudges. We find that nudge effects do not hinge on transparency or modes of thinking but that personal preferences moderate effects such that people cannot be nudged into something they do not want. We conclude that, in view of these findings, concerns about nudging legitimacy should be softened and that future research should attend to these and other conditions of nudgeability….(More)”.
Process Science: The Interdisciplinary Study of Continuous Change
Paper by Jan vom Brocke et al: “The only constant in our world is change. Why is there not a field of science that explicitly studies continuous change? We propose the establishment of process science, a field that studies processes: coherent series of changes, both man-made and naturally occurring, that unfold over time and occur at various levels. Process science is concerned with understanding and influencing change. It entails discovering and understanding processes as well as designing interventions to shape them into desired directions. Process science is based on four key principles; it (1) puts processes at the center of attention, (2) investigates processes scientifically, (3) embraces perspectives of multiple disciplines, and (4) aims to create impact by actively shaping the unfolding of processes. The ubiquitous availability of digital trace data, combined with advanced data analytics capabilities, offer new and unprecedented opportunities to study processes through multiple data sources, which makes process science very timely….(More)”.
Public health and expert failure
Paper by Roger Koppl: “In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safeguard against expert failure. Monopoly power of experts increases the chance of expert failure. The risk of expert failure also is greater when scientific advice is provided by only one or a few disciplines. A national government can simulate a competitive market for expert advice by structuring the scientific advice it receives to ensure the production of multiple perspectives from multiple disciplines. I apply these general principles to the United Kingdom’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)….(More)”.
Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence
Paper by Isabelle Adam and Mihály Fazekas: “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT tools’ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. The tools reviewed are digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, distributed ledger technology, and artificial intelligence. We scrutinise the evidence both on ICTs’ anticorruption effectiveness and misuse for corruption. Drawing on the commonalities across technologies, we find that ICT can support anti-corruption by impacting public scrutiny in numerous ways: enabling reporting on corruption, promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating citizen participation and government-citizen interactions. However, ICT can also provide new corruption opportunities through the dark web, cryptocurrencies, or the misuse of technologies such as centralised databases. The introduction of ICT tools does not automatically translate into anti-corruption outcomes; rather, impact hinges on the matching between ICT tools and the local context, including support for and skills in using technology….(More)”
Media and Social Capital
Paper by Filipe R. Campante, Ruben Durante & Andrea Tesei: “We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal trust, in its benign and destructive manifestations. The impact of media technologies hinges on their content (“information” vs “entertainment”), their effectiveness in fostering coordination, and the networks they create, as well as individual characteristics and media consumption choices….(More)”
Harms of AI
Paper by Daron Acemoglu: “This essay discusses several potential economic, political and social costs of the current path of AI technologies. I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity; and damaging political discourse, democracy’s most fundamental lifeblood. Although there is no conclusive evidence suggesting that these costs are imminent or substantial, it may be useful to understand them before they are fully realized and become harder or even impossible to reverse, precisely because of AI’s promising and wide-reaching potential. I also suggest that these costs are not inherent to the nature of AI technologies, but are related to how they are being used and developed at the moment – to empower corporations and governments against workers and citizens. As a result, efforts to limit and reverse these costs may need to rely on regulation and policies to redirect AI research. Attempts to contain them just by promoting competition may be insufficient….(More)”.
Can Gamification be Used for Spatial Energy Data Collection?
Paper by Ernst Gebetsroither-Geringer et al regarding “Experiences Gained from the Development of the HotCity Game to Collect Urban Waste Heat Sources”: Availability of reliable data is one of the most important elements for fact-based decisions. Urban planning and spatial energy planning often suffers from a lack of availability of good, validated and up-to-date data sets. Furthermore, integrated spatial and energy planning needs to incorporate new spatially distributed energy sources and understand how these sources can be used in the future to meet climate protection targets. These new energy sources can be, for example, waste heat from industrial food production, local industrial/commercial enterprises, data centers, or urban infrastructure such as tunnels and metro stations. The utilization of such waste heat sources in heating networks has been demonstrated several times, however, their proper identification in an urban environment can be challenging, especially for smaller and unconventional sources (Schmidt, 2020).
Gamification as an innovative way to collect the needed data was investigated within a national funded research project called “HotCity”. Gamification builds on the use of game mechanics in contexts that are, by nature, unrelated to the game (Deterding, 2011). Within the project the HotCity-App was developed enabling users to spatially report and evaluate different sources of waste heat. The gamification of data collection was also intended to raise awareness of waste heat and energy use on the one hand, and to facilitate the collection of data from small energy sources on the other. For the first time, the game framework is secured using a blockchain and mapped by means of a token system. The HotCity-App was tested in the Austrian cities Vienna and Graz as a proof of concept to analyse if and how the gamification approach can deliver valid results….(More)”