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Digital Technologies for Governance
Abstract
The use of digital technologies in governance processes has been adopted by both public and private sectors. Digital tools can be applied to promote governance and expand public service delivery and public policy capacities. Artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance increasingly dictate public sector governance decisions. This chapter explores how digital technologies have been used by public administration to implement public policies and services. It also discusses how the use of digital tools for governance entails a new set of risks for governments and firms.
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In December 2019, a new virus (initially called 'Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV' and later renamed to SARS-CoV-2) causing severe acute respiratory syndrome (coronavirus disease COVID-19) emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, and rapidly spread to other parts of China and other countries around the world, despite China's massive efforts to contain the disease within Hubei. As with the original SARS-CoV epidemic of 2002/2003 and with seasonal influenza, geographic information systems and methods, including, among other application possibilities, online real- or near-real-time mapping of disease cases and of social media reactions to disease spread, predictive risk mapping using population travel data, and tracing and mapping super-spreader trajectories and contacts across space and time, are proving indispensable for timely and effective epidemic monitoring and response. This paper offers pointers to, and describes, a range of practical online/mobile GIS and mapping dashboards and applications for tracking the 2019/2020 coronavirus epidemic and associated events as they unfold around the world. Some of these dashboards and applications are receiving data updates in near-real-time (at the time of writing), and one of them is meant for individual users (in China) to check if the app user has had any close contact with a person confirmed or suspected to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the recent past. We also discuss additional ways GIS can support the fight against infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics.
In recent years work on policy design and instrument choice has advanced towards a better understanding of the nature of policy mixes, their dimensions, and the trade-offs between choices of tools, as well as the identification of basic design criteria such as coherence, consistency and congruence among policy elements. However, most of this work has ignored the temporal dimension of mixes or has studied this only as an important contextual variable affecting instrument choices, for example, highlighting the manner in which tools and mixes often evolve in unexpected or unintended ways as they age. This ignores the important issue of the intentional sequencing of tools as part of a mix design, either in terms of controlling spillovers which emerge as implementation proceeds, ratcheting up (or down) specific tool effects like stringency of implementation and public consultation as time passes. This article reviews existing work on the unintentional sequencing of policy activity as well as the lessons which can be derived from the few works existing on the subject of intentional sequencing. In so doing, it helps define a research agenda on the subject with the expectation that this research can improve the resilience and robustness of policies over time.
This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action is organized. These technologies reduce the transaction costs for massive collaboration dramatically and thus facilitate new forms of collaboration that we could call “open governance”: new innovative forms of collective action aimed at solving complex public policy issues, contributing to public knowledge, or replacing traditional forms of public service provision. These innovative open and collaborative organizational forms in cities seem to point toward not only a wide variety of digitally connected actors but also to a fundamentally different and more invisible role of government in these arrangements. We argue that the recently emerging paradigm of New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne, 2010) also fails to capture the dynamics of open governance since it does not acknowledge the emergent—pop-up—character of the new collaborations; neither does it present an understanding of massive individualized collaboration in cities. This paper aims to theoretically and empirically explore the core elements and the underlying socio-technical developments of this new Open Governance (OG) paradigm and compare and contrast OG with existing governance paradigms. Based on illustrative real-life cases, we will argue that we need a new paradigm that is better capable of explaining these emerging innovative forms of governing cities. We will argue that this requires an understanding of governance as a platform that facilitates an urban ecosystem. By connecting new insights from studies on digital governance to the debate about governance paradigms, this paper results in a set crucial empirical and normative questions about governance of cities and also in guidelines for urban governance that builds upon the rich, emerging interactions in cities that are facilitated by new technologies.
Institutions are strategies, norms, and rules embodied in public policies and/or social conventions. They reflect and establish expectations about who can do what, where, and how, and are often employed for resolving collective action dilemmas and other kinds of governance challenges. Given their salience, social science scholars have dedicated substantial effort to developing analytical approaches for understanding the design, function, and performance of institutions. Particularly valuable are approaches that generalize across institutional types and are versatile enough to be paired with multiple concepts, theories, and methods. This paper focuses on one such approach, called the Institutional Grammar. The Institutional Grammar is an approach for assessing the structure and content of institutions. It received limited attention immediately following its introduction. In recent years, however, numerous journal articles have been published that highlight the promise of the Institutional Grammar for supporting rigorous analyses of institutional design and associated outcomes within the context of various theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches. This article (i) reintroduces parts of the Institutional Grammar; (ii) summarizes the theoretical, methodological, and empirical foci of all journal articles published to date that address it; and (iii) presents an agenda for advancing the study of institutions using the Institutional Grammar.
A growing literature is taking an institutionalist and governance perspective on how algorithms shape society based on unprecedented capacities for managing social complexity. Algorithmic governance altogether emerges as a novel and distinctive kind of societal steering. It appears to transcend established categories and modes of governance—and thus seems to call for new ways of thinking about how social relations can be regulated and ordered. However, as this paper argues, despite its novel way of realizing outcomes of collective steering and coordination, it can nevertheless be grasped with an old and fundamental figure in political philosophy: that of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Comparing algorithmic governance with this figure serves to highlight their similarities as socio-political arrangements, and specifically to clarify how algorithmic governance parallels the apolitical traits of the Leviathan—it eliminates the political as it requires compliance and forgoing contestation to best fulfill its role and to produce satisfying outcomes.
Digital transformation approaches outside the public sector are changing citizens' expectations of governments' ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. In response to the changing expectations and triggered by supranational agreements, governments are changing their mode of operation to improve public service delivery , be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability, or citizen satisfaction. However, beyond the availability of consultancy reports, there is little systematic insight into the way that public administrators themselves are currently defining digital transformation in their own day-today practices, how they are approaching digital transformation projects, and what their expected outcomes are. We provide an empirically-based definition of digital transformation derived from expert interviews and develop a conceptual framework with reasons for, processes to, and expected outcomes of digital transformation in the public sector.
The recent explosion in ICT and digital data has led organizations, both private and public, to efficient decision-making. Nowadays organizations can store huge amounts of data, which can be accessible at any time. Big Data governance refers to the management of huge volumes of an organization’s data, exploiting it in the organization’s decision-making using different analytical tools. Big Data emergence provides great convenience, but it also brings challenges. Nevertheless, for Big Data governance, data has to be prepared in a timely manner, keeping in view the consistency and reliability of the data, and being able to trust its source and the meaningfulness of the result. Hence, a framework for Big Data governance would have many advantages. There are Big Data governance frameworks, which guide the management of Big Data. However, there are also limitations associated with these frameworks. Therefore, this study aims to explore the existing Big Data governance frameworks and their shortcomings, and propose a new framework. The proposed framework consists of eight components. As a framework validation, the proposed framework has been compared with the ISO 8000 data governance framework.
The article discusses the governance of the digital as the new challenge posed by technological innovation. It then introduces a new distinction between soft ethics , which applies after legal compliance with legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, and hard ethics , which precedes and contributes to shape legislation. It concludes by developing an analysis of the role of digital ethics with respect to digital regulation and digital governance.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges’.
From “alternative facts” to “fake news,” in recent years the influence of misinformation on political life has become amplified in unprecedented ways through electronic communications and social media. While misinformation and spin are age-old tactics in policy making, and poor information and poorly informed opinion a constant challenge for policy analysts, both the volume of erroneous evidence and the difficulties encountered in differentiating subjectively constructed opinion from objectively verified policy inputs have increased significantly. The resulting amalgamation of unsubstantiated and verifiable data and well and poorly informed opinion raises many questions for a policy science which emerged in an earlier, less problematic era. This article examines these developments and their provenance and asks whether, and how, existing policy making models and practices developed and advocated during an earlier era of a sharper duality between fact and fiction have grappled with the new world of “truthiness,” and whether these models require serious revision in light of the impact of social media and other forces affecting contemporary policy discourses and processes.
Western liberal capitalist democracy is in trouble. In many democratic countries, for the first time since the second world war, nationalism, populism and the strong leader who can sort out the problems have re-emerged in force. Some democracies seem to be reverting to forms of autocracy which many thought they had left behind. ICT is a contributory factor to this trend. Contrary to the techno-optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s which forecast the emergence of more and stronger democracy underpinned by technological developments, technology increasingly appears as more of a threat to, rather than a support of, democracy. Technology-enabled problems include fake news, hacking of e-mail servers, hate sites, Twitter storms and filter bubbles into which different political groups retreat to reinforce their prejudices. This paper proposes a rethink of how technology can be deployed in defence of democracy and democratic values. We argue that it has long been recognised that the administrative state and its deep bureaucratic structures provide a degree of democratic resilience and that this resilience can be enhanced by appropriate use of ICT. We propose that prioritising ICT interoperability rather than ICT integration in public administration can enhance the separation of powers in the modern state and strengthen the ability of a polity to resist authoritarianism. This is not proposed as a solution to all of the problems facing contemporary democracy, but it can nonetheless contribute towards countering the increasingly negative impact of technology on politics. We argue that there is an urgent need to move beyond what has often been wishful thinking about e-government and edemocracy as transformative tools and consider how technology might be used for conserving and protecting the best of what we have already have.
Faced with growing policy complexity and environmental uncertainty, policymakers are increasingly concerned with ensuring that policy processes retain functionality amidst shock and uncertainty. In this paper, we seek to address the ways in which robustness – or the capability of policies to maintain functionality and effectiveness in policy goal attainment – can be designed into policies, institutions or systems. We suggest that robust policy designs can be characterized by diversity, modularity and redundancy, whereas robust policy design processes require the presence of polycentric decisional process, political capacity and technical capacity. In identifying these design elements of policy robustness, we argue that robustness is a property that can be designed to ensure that policies continue to deliver, over time, its intended functions, purposes and objectives, even under negative circumstances.
Public administration scholarship has to a significant degree neglected technological change. The age of the algorithm and ‘big data’ is throwing up new challenges for public leadership, which are already being confronted by public leaders in different jurisdictions. Algorithms may be perceived as presenting new kinds of ‘wicked problems’ for public authorities. The article offers a tentative overview of the kind of algorithmic challenges facing public leaders in an environment where the discursive context is shaped by corporate technology companies. Public value theory is assessed as an analytical framework to examine how public leaders are seeking to address the ethical and public value issues affecting governance and regulation, drawing on recent UK experience in particular. The article suggests that this is a fruitful area for future research.
Public sector organizations are increasingly interested in using data science and artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in high-uncertainty environments. The long-term success of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector relies on effectively embedding it into delivery solutions for policy implementation. However, governments cannot do this integration of AI into public service delivery on their own. The UK Government Industrial Strategy is clear that delivering on the AI grand challenge requires collaboration between universities and the public and private sectors. This cross-sectoral collaborative approach is the norm in applied AI centres of excellence around the world. Despite their popularity, cross-sector collaborations entail serious management challenges that hinder their success. In this article we discuss the opportunities for and challenges of AI for the public sector. Finally, we propose a series of strategies to successfully manage these cross-sectoral collaborations.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations’.
Over the last few years the sharing economy has been changing the way that people share and conduct transactions in digital spaces. This research phenomenon has drawn scholars from a large number of disparate fields and disciplines into an emerging research area. Given the variety of perspectives represented, there is a great need to collect and connect what has been done, and to identify some common themes, which will serve as a basis for future discussions on the crucial roles played by digital platforms in the sharing economy. Drawing on a collection of 435 publications on the sharing economy and related terms, we identify some trends in the literature and underlying research interests. Specifically, we organize the literature around the concept of platform mediation, and draw a set of essential affordances of sharing economy technologies from the reviewed literature. We present the notion of platform centralization/decentralization as an effective organizing principle for the variety of perspectives on the sharing economy, and also evaluate scholars' treatment of technology itself. Finally, we identify important gaps in the existing literature on the relationship between digital platforms and sharing economy, and provide directions for future investigations.
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
In this article, we examine the reconstruction and commodification of the national space through digital technologies by using the case of Estonian e-residency. E-residency or ‘virtual residency’ is an initiative of the Estonian government which gives foreigners global access to Estonian e-services via state-issued digital identity. We explore the ways in which the ideas of the ‘virtual state’ and ‘virtual residency’ have been employed for purposes of nation branding and national reputation management, and how the different logics of nation branding and nation building combined in the concept of e-residency have been negotiated in the national context. The study draws on a qualitative textual analysis of the official website of e-residency directed at foreign audiences and the national media coverage of the project addressing domestic publics. The analysis indicates that while the imagery constructed around the notions of the ‘virtual state’ and ‘virtual residency’ makes it possible to turn the national space into a commodity, presented outwards as a globally extensible and open transnational space, domestically it makes it possible to appeal to ‘intact national space’ and to legitimise e-residency as a ‘socio-culturally safe’, digitally mediated internationalisation of the society. This article forms part of the Theorizing Media in Nation Branding Special Issue.
This book deals with ongoing processes of European cooperation and integration, processes that may have a potential to change the political organization of Europe. Based on ideas from ‘the new institutionalism’ the book offers a systematic perspective on institutional change and in particular the role of institutions in relation to four central and durable issues in the study of political life. These are: (1) the mediation between unity and diversity: what ties a society together and what keeps it apart. (2) The relations between citizens and their helpers: why the democratic deficit in the European Union can not be eliminated solely by making mechanisms of direct citizens participation and representation more efficient. Needed are also institutions that make direct participation redundant because they routinely work with integrity, generating expected and desired outcomes. (3) The relation between democratic design and historical drift: To what degree democracies are able to design and reform key institutions of governance so that their structures reflect popular will, understanding and control. (4) The co-existence of old and new political orders: How elements of a new order may supplement rather than replace elements of the old order, generating a ‘mixed order’ based on partly inconsistent principles and rules.
The relationship between management and digital technology: experts present a new agenda for the practice of management.
Digital technology has profoundly affected the ways that businesses design and produce goods, manage internal communication, and connect with customers. But the next phase of the digital revolution raises a new set of questions about the relationship between technology and the practice of management. Managers in the digital era must consider how big data can inform hiring decisions, whether new communication technologies are empowering workers or unleashing organizational chaos, what role algorithms will play in corporate strategy, and even how to give performance feedback to a robot. This collection of short, pithy essays from MIT Sloan Management Review, written by both practitioners and academic experts, explores technology's foundational impact on management.
Much of the conversation around these topics centers on the evolving relationship between humans and cognitive technologies, and the essays reflect this—considering, for example, not only how to manage a bot but how cognitive systems will enhance business decision making, how AI delivers value, and the ethics of algorithms.
ContributorsAjay Agrawal, Robert D. Austin, David H. Autor, Andrew Burgert, Paul R. Daugherty, Thomas H. Davenport, R. Edward Freeman, Joshua S. Gans, Avi Goldfarb, Lynda Gratton, Reid Hoffman, Bala Iyer, Gerald C. Kane, Frieda Klotz, Rita Gunther McGrath, Paul Michelman, Andrew W. Moore, Nicola Morini-Bianzino, Tim O'Reilly, Bidhan L. Parmar, Ginni Rometty, Bernd Schmitt, Alex Tapscott, Don Tapscott, Monideepa Tarafdar, Catherine J. Turco, George Westerman, H. James Wilson, Andrew S. Winston
The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things—connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances—there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. This book argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and it offers new cyber-policy solutions. The book makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.
Digital technologies can be valuable tools to create better public services that benefit society as a whole. Governance is the way to align digital public services with the interests of society. In this article, we discuss principles and elements of governance of digital public services.
The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings).
en This article analyzes the digital transformation process of public services in the Brazilian federal government. Based on a survey with 85 federal organizations, 1,740 public services are examined according to different factors that explain why a certain public service is digitalized. We discuss the transition from an e‐government to a digital policy, listing the limits related to agent preferences in public policies. The article discusses digital transformation in governments as a process of institutional change in public organizations, taking into account the role of agents, the contexts of choices, and the factors that explain the decision to digitize public services.
Abstract
es Este artículo analiza el proceso de transformación digital de los servicios públicos en el gobierno federal brasileño. Sobre la base de una encuesta con 85 organizaciones federales, se examinaron 1,740 servicios públicos en función de diferentes factores que explican por qué se digitaliza un determinado servicio público. Discutimos la transición de un gobierno electrónico a una política pública en materia digital, enumerando los límites relacionados con las preferencias de los agentes en las políticas públicas. El artículo analiza el proceso de transformación digital en los gobiernos como un proceso de cambio institucional de las organizaciones públicas, tomando en cuenta el papel de los agentes, los contextos de elección y los factores que explican la decisión de digitalizar los servicios públicos.
Abstract
zh 本文分析了巴西联邦政府公共服务的数字转型进程。基于一项针对85个联邦组织的调查，根据用于诠释为何公共服务被数字化的不同因素，检验了1,740项公共服务。我们探讨了电子政府向数字政策的过渡，列出了公共政策中与政府机构偏好相关的限制。本文就政府中数字转型作为公共机构中的制度变化进程进行了探讨，同时考量了政府机构的作用、选择背景、以及用于解释公共服务数字化决策的不同因素。
This chapter first explains the types of machine learning systems used in the public sector, detailing the processes and tasks that they aim to support. It then looks at three levels of government—the macro, meso, and the street-level—to map out, analyse, and evaluate how machine learning in the public sector more broadly is framed and standardized across government. It concludes that, while the use of machine learning in the public sector is mostly discussed with regard to its ‘transformative effect’ versus ‘the dynamic conservatism’ characteristic of public bureaucracies that embrace new technological developments, it also raises several concerns about the skills, capacities, processes, and practices that governments currently employ, the forms of which can have value-laden, political consequences.
Norms are useful because they represent agreed or expected behaviors. This paper discusses how technical and policy norms, formulated by multistakeholder bodies, can be used to enhance the governance of cyberspace and contribute to achieve cyber stability, which represents an ideal state where “all actors are free to enjoy the benefits of cyberspace without fear.”
The Internet of Things (IoT) global arena is massive and growing exponentially. Those in the emerging digital world have recently witnessed the proliferation and impact of IoT-enabled devices. The IoT has provided new opportunities in the technology arena while bringing several challenges to an increased level of concern. This research has both practical and theoretical impetus since IoT is still in its infancy, and yet it is considered by many as the most important technology initiative of today. This study includes a systematic review and synthesis of IoT related literature and the development of a theoretical framework and conceptual model. The review of the literature reveals that the number of applications that make use of the IoT has increased dramatically and spans areas from business and manufacturing to home, health care, and knowledge management. Although IoT can create invaluable data in every industry, it does not occur without its challenges. The theoretical framework developed identifies IoT priority areas and challenges, providing a guide for those leading IoT initiatives and revealing opportunities for future IoT research.
Errors and biases are earning algorithms increasingly malignant reputations in society. A central challenge is that algorithms must bridge the gap between high-level policy and on-the-ground decisions, making inferences in novel situations where the policy or training data do not readily apply. In this paper, we draw on the theory of street-level bureaucracies, how human bureaucrats such as police and judges interpret policy to make on-the-ground decisions. We present by analogy a theory of street-level algorithms, the algorithms that bridge the gaps between policy and decisions about people in a socio-technical system. We argue that unlike street-level bureaucrats, who reflexively refine their decision criteria as they reason through a novel situation, street-level algorithms at best refine their criteria only after the decision is made. This loop-and-a-half delay results in illogical decisions when handling new or extenuating circumstances. This theory suggests designs for street-level algorithms that draw on historical design patterns for street-level bureaucracies, including mechanisms for self-policing and recourse in the case of error.
The premise of this article is that when comparing governance systems, a greater focus on the complexity of the environment facing nation states would provide a step forward. National regimes should not be compared in a vacuum but rather with respect to the governance challenges they are likely to face in an unpredictable world. It is necessary to recognize the adaptive complexity of the systems generating those challenges and yet how they also providing the ingredients for emergent solutions. It is argued that exploring interactive capacity rather than formal structures will provide a stronger indication of whether governance challenges are likely to be met. It is concluded that different types of national regimes could, in principle, deliver effective interactive governance capacity in different ways, but each can generate tipping points that could lead to failure.
The adoption of e-governing practices has revolutionised the administrative machinery of governments worldwide by improving efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Researchers and administrators often aim to identify emerging research fronts and the timeline of the evolution to forecast and implement technology. In this work, we systematically investigate the trajectory of the global evolution and emerging research fronts as well as the prospects for e-governance using citation network analysis. The growth curve fitted to the number of articles published per year shows that the research activities are still in the ascendant phase. We visualise the global main path of the citation network and investigate the patterns to trace the knowledge diffusion path, major milestones, and emerging research fronts. The cluster analysis identifies the major topics of research as administration and information system management, e-governance framework design, efficiency or quality evaluation, and the application of social networks and open data leading to e-democracy. The adoption of open data and social networking for user interactions with government that leads to participatory governance are the emerging research trends. We also identify research that can have a future impact based on network parameters. The results contribute to the literature by setting the focus of future research, and assisting administrators in selecting suitable models and methodologies, and manufacturers with the development of required technical devices suitable for the upcoming phase of symbiosis.
Extant literature has increased our understanding of specific aspects of digital transformation, however we lack a comprehensive portrait of its nature and implications. Through a review of 282 works, we inductively build a framework of digital transformation articulated across eight building blocks. Our framework foregrounds digital transformation as a process where digital technologies create disruptions triggering strategic responses from organizations that seek to alter their value creation paths while managing the structural changes and organizational barriers that affect the positive and negative outcomes of this process. Building on this framework, we elaborate a research agenda that proposes [1] examining the role of dynamic capabilities, and [2] accounting for ethical issues as important avenues for future strategic IS research on digital transformation.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the “natural” conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence. We propose that this process is best understood through the history of colonialism. Thus, data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit. Data colonialism paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.
The governance paradigm has provided a dominant way of thinking about how to govern and found reflection in practice with the increased use of partnerships, networks and markets to deliver public services and programmes. The emergence of populism as a political force, however, calls into question the thinking behind the governance paradigm and some of its favoured tools for governing. Populism sees the task of governing in very different terms to that of the advocates and practitioners of governance. This article explores the populist challenge to governance. It shows that gaps in its analysis of a changed environment left the governance paradigm potentially open to populist attack. It explores how the governance paradigm might adapt to survive by developing either a more technical or a political dynamic to its presentation.
What should states in the developing world do and how should they do it? How have states in the developing world addressed the challenges of promoting development, order, and inclusion? States in the developing world are supposed to build economies, control violence, and include the population. How they do so depends on historical origins and context as well as policy decisions. This volume presents a comprehensive theory of state capacity, what it consists of, and how it may be measured. With historical empirical illustrations it suggests that historical origins and political decisions help drive the capacity of states to meet their goals.
Decision-making is at the heart of governing and governance, and is a more challenging task compared to just a few decades ago as a result of increasing social complexity and globalization. In this book, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre propose a new framework for the comparative analysis of governance, arguing that government remains a central actor in governance. By articulating the functionalist dimension of governance they show how goal setting, resource mobilization, decision-making, implementation and feedback can be performed by a combination of different types of actors. Even so, effective governance requires a leading role for government. The framework is also applied to a taxonomy of governance arrangements and national styles of governing. Comparative Governance advances our knowledge about governance failure and how forms of governance may change. It also significantly strengthens the theory of governance, showing how governance can be studied conceptually as well as empirically.
Partisan consultancies like Cambridge Analytica that use data analytics to sway the electorate rely on social network users’ participation in their own psychological manipulation.
Managing Digital Governance provides public administrators with a comprehensive, integrated framework and specific techniques for making the most of digital innovation to advance public values. The book focuses on the core issues that public administrators face when using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to produce and deliver public service, and to facilitate democratic governance, including efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and accountability. Offering insight into effectively managing growing complexity and fragmentation in digital technology, this book provides practical management strategies to address external and internal challenges of digital governance. External challenges include digital inclusiveness, open government, and citizen-centric government; internal ones include information and knowledge management, risk management for digital security and privacy, and performance management of information technologies. Unique in its firm grounding in public administration and management literature and its synergistic combination of theory and practice, Managing Digital Governance identifies future trends and ways to develop corresponding capacity while offering enduring lessons and time-tested digital governance management strategies. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in public administration, management, and governance who aspire to become leaders equipped to leverage digital technologies to advance public governance.
AI-based systems are “black boxes,” resulting in massive information asymmetries between the developers of such systems and consumers and policymakers. In order to bridge this information gap, this article proposes a conceptual framework for thinking about governance for AI.
Due to innovations in digital technologies, organizations that used to practice their business in discrete industries now confront radically transformed environments with new competitors from other industries. To understand this phenomenon of digital business convergence, I adopt the theory of strategic action fields from the literature on social movements and organizations. I use elements of this theory to analyze the actions of organizations in contested fields instead of taking a vertical, horizontal, or single-industry perspective. Specifically, I look at how organizations use different types of mobilizabilities (political, social, and technological) to influence the emergence and evolution of contested fields. This paper raises research questions about digital business convergence, suggests ways to investigate those questions, and provides a conceptual framework to study organizations’ strategies and behaviors from a strategic action field perspective.