Centre for Digital Governance
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Digital technologies have substantial environmental impacts. The EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA) requires the largest platforms and search engines to regularly assess “systemic risks” to various social interests – including public health, physical wellbeing, security, and fundamental rights – and to reasonably and proportionately mitigate these risks. Climate change and other escalating environmental crises severely threaten these interests. Accordingly, this policy brief argues that the DSA requires these companies to take reasonable measures to reduce their environmental impacts.
This should notably include following best practices to minimise energy and water usage, including “sustainability by design” obligations to pursue less energy- and resource-intensive technologies, design choices, and business practices wherever possible. It should also include measures addressing platforms’ indirect environmental impacts, such as the facilitation of environmentally-damaging behaviour by third-party businesses. Since the DSA’s risk mitigation obligations apply specifically to the largest platforms – which exercise significant influence over broader technological and commercial ecosystems – regulatory pressure on these companies to take such measures could have outsized environmental benefits.
This policy brief by Rachel Griffin, PhD candidate at Sciences Po Law School, offers a legal analysis of the DSA’s relevance to environmental policy and explains why environmental risks are within its scope. It then outlines appropriate measures to mitigate platforms’ direct and indirect environmental impacts. It concludes with recommendations for platform companies, regulators, and civil society on how to realise the Digital Services Act’s potential to help secure a more sustainable tech industry.
The EU Digital Service Acts signals a move away from self-regulation towards co-regulation of social media platforms within the European Union. To address online harms and rising platform power the DSA clarifies responsibilities of platforms and outlines a new technology regulatory framework to increase oversight. One key oversight instrument constitutes Article 40 of the DSA, which lays out data access for vetted researchers, who add value to regulators and the broader public as creators of knowledge, educators, advisors, innovators, and watchdogs. Currently, the EU Commission and national governments make important decisions regarding Digital Service Coordinators (DSCs) that play a key role in implementation. Based on expertise on European public administration and political science we lay out key challenges and success factors of DSCs that will play a role in promoting successful cooperation between DSCs and researchers. We provide three recommendations: First, we recommend to strengthen transfer of scientific knowledge into policy-making by processing publicly accessible publications within public administrative bodies. To this end, capacities of DSCs need to be increased. In addition, we also point towards the database of vetted researchers collected by the Board of DSCs as important resource in order to strengthen knowledge transfer. Second, the DSC network requires agile institutions with fast response time in order to enable researchers to play a constructive role in implementation. This also includes institutional procedures between DSCs and the Intermediary Body and Data Protection Agencies. To avoid delay in implementation agile institution-building needs to start now. Finally, institutional safeguards will help to avoid strategic choice of companies of the DSC of establishment. At the same time, the Irish DSC's capacity should be strengthened compared to other national DSCs since most large intermediary services providers have their European headquarters in Ireland.
Interoperability is a core component for any successful governmental digitalization initiative. Though there are numerous ways to build and enable this interoperability, it is possible to identify commonly occurring building blocks. This short report identifies these building blocks, maps them to relevant and common policy goals, and presents a reference architecture model for a digital government interoperability platform. To identify the relevant components of this architecture, desk research was conducted to identify common policy goals associated with interoperability, a workshop was conducted and a comprehensive systematic and comparative study was conducted that analyzed digital government interoperability platforms in twenty countries. The results of this report represent one of the most comprehensive studies to date on digital government interoperability and should, therefore, be of high interest for governmental practitioners, industry, and academics involved with interoperability studies and initiatives.
There is an increased interest amongst governments and public sector organisations about how to best integrate artificial intelligence into their day-to-day business processes. Yet, a large majority of technical know how is concentrated within the private sector, requiring most public sector organisations to rely on public procurement for AI systems. While many governments may have experience with traditional forms of public technological procurement, this paper argues that the public procurement of AI is different and new insight is needed to understand this differentiation and procure AI better. This paper offers an initial contribution to the public administration and management literature by describing this difference, and identifying the challenges associated with the public procurement of AI. In order to achieve this contribution, the research studied guidelines in four European countries (Estonia, Netherlands, Serbia, and the United Kingdom) to generate insight into the challenges faced, and potential solutions to these challenges, during the public procurement of AI process.
Smart cities have traditionally been studied from a technocentric perspective. However,such technological conceptualizations of smart cities are no longer adequate in today’s society. This policy brief discusses another alternative, human centric smart cities. Human centric smart cities are cities that practice smart governance, are collaborative, focused on user needs, supportive of innovation, and are ultimately oriented towards the development of wellbeing and the creation of public valuefor its citizens. In human centric smart cities, the use, implementation, and development of technology is guided by these foundations. The policy brief draws on insightgenerated from an international symposium organized for the City of Berlin on the future of smart cities. The brief itself is structured around four core aspects: human centricity, inter-sectoral collaboration, data governance, and administrative capacity. The brief ends by providing initial recommendations on how to start thinking about and implementing new human centric smart city strategies.
Key Points:
• In human centric smart cities, adopting a public valueor happiness orientedapproach to development will be critical.
• The notion of innovation and service development inside human centric smartcities is changing, driven primarily by a shift in the structure of smart city ecosystems.
• New human centric smart city data governance strategies must be in line withthe creation of public value, data sovereignty, and the maintenance offundamental rights and freedoms such as those related to privacy andfreedom of expression.
• The change towards more collaborative, open, and human centric smart citieswill require new governance strategies and new administrative capacities.
The process of digitalising government is rapidly gaining speed, resulting in a pressing need for increased inter-governmental integration and challenging the traditional silo structures of government. This has sparked the adoption of inter-governmental collaborative working arrangements and efforts to develop joint standards and solutions; yet little is known about how exactly this manifests itself in the context of ambitious digitalisation projects. This report provides new empirical evidence on the challenges and dynamics of collaboration within and between public organisations in order to drive digital transformation. The report begins with a literature review on collaborative management with a particular focus on collaboration in the context of government digitalisation. This literature serves as a basis for developing a set of five propositions regarding how intergovernmental collaborative digitalisation projects can be best designed and managed. Following the conceptual framework of the TROPICO project deliverable 6.3 developed by Rackwitz et al. (2020), the report investigates the interplay between system context, collaboration challenges and dynamics (i.e. complexity, risk and power imbalances), public management interventions (i.e. institutional design and leadership) as well as outcomes. Emphasis is placed upon the role of institutional design and leadership in order to cope with the challenges inherent to collaborative governance approaches. The framework and related propositions are then verified through the use of empirical findings from ten comparative case studies from five European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom). The case studies, presented in detail in TROPICO deliverable 6.3, examine the development of national government-wide online portals, as well as the implementation of municipal Smart City initiatives. The cases show that the system dynamics and challenges of digitalisation projects, such as size and scope, tend to generate resource-intensive and demanding working conditions. Creating hybrid structures that incorporate both network and hierarchical approaches has been a common approach to handling these conditions and balancing the demands of inter-departmental collaboration with the inherent accountabilities and existing working cultures of public organisations. At the steering level, a central coordinator with collaborative leadership skills was found to be key to driving the projects forward and achieving outcomes. Participatory, network-style approaches at the working group level were successful in balancing the demands of all collaborative partners and encouraging wide-scale engagement. In addition, opting for wide-scale inclusion, setting ground rules and clear processes as well as a focus on trust and social capital development proved essential. While most leadership approaches still maintain elements of transactional leadership in managing projects, collaborative leadership approaches such as bringing stakeholders together, mediating problems, and guiding and steering the process were used in many instances to handle the complexities inherent in the project objectives. In the conclusion of the report, contributions are discussed, followed by an outline for future research avenues.
While the coronavirus spreads, governments are attempting to reduce contagion rates at the expense of negative economic effects. Market expectations plummeted, foreshadowing the risk of a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. Governments provide huge financial aid programmes to mitigate the economic shocks. To achieve higher effectiveness with such policy measures, it is key to identify the industries that are most in need of support. In this study, we introduce a data-mining approach to measure industry-specific risks related to COVID-19. We examine company risk reports filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This alternative data set can complement more traditional economic indicators in times of the fast-evolving crisis as it allows for a real-time analysis of risk assessments. Preliminary findings suggest that the companies' awareness towards corona-related business risks is ahead of the overall stock market developments. Our approach allows to distinguish the industries by their risk awareness towards COVID-19. Based on natural language processing, we identify corona-related risk topics and their perceived relevance for different industries. The preliminary findings are summarised as an up-to-date online index. The CoRisk-Index tracks the industry-specific risk assessments related to the crisis, as it spreads through the economy. The tracking tool is updated weekly. It could provide relevant empirical data to inform models on the economic effects of the crisis. Such complementary empirical information could ultimately help policymakers to effectively target financial support in order to mitigate the economic shocks of the crisis.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A large body of literature claims that ICT and digitalisation have triggered broad organisational and cultural changes in public organisations. These changes have led many to conclude that a new era has begun that is characterised by collaboration within intra-and intersectoral networks and this has become a key paradigm for public sector governance and innovation. Yet, empirical evidence of a shift towards “Networked Governance” remains limited, and few have explored further the linkages between digitalisation and collaboration in the public sector. Work Package 6 of the TROPICO project addresses this void by providing a meta-analysis of the design, coordination, and implementation of national digitalisation strategies in eight European countries with different administrative traditions (Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and UK). By coding the countries’ first significant and most recent strategies, we examine whether there is evidence supporting the argument of a paradigmatic shift with respect to public sector governance and collaboration. The final analysis is based on 8496 codes and on an additional questionnaire filled out by the relevant TROPICO partners’ country teams. Based on our results we cannot conclude that a Networked Governance is emerging in the era of digital government, but rather find confirmation that all reform paradigms are present in governments’ digitalisation efforts. In fact, the way in which digital transformation of the public sector is put forward in the strategies may strengthen hierarchical patterns of command and control. Findings further indicate that over time collaboration has changed regarding scope and motives, while its intensity has remained relatively weak. Moreover, administrative traditions do not serve as explanatory approach for country variations in the context of digitalisation strategies. Rather, divergences are explained by the different geneses and purposes of the documents. However, we observe similarities in the perceived success factors: a common vision, cultural change, accessibility, leadership and trust are main recurring themes. Furthermore, we find no conclusive evidence that governance paradigms and collaborative arrangements in the digitalisation strategies influencethe performance of digital government. Lastly, in the conclusion of the report, we address some recommendations to practitioners for designing and implementing digitalisation strategies