This study explores the macro education policy design on the vocational education system for the new generation of migrant workers in China. The content system of vocational education, the...

To be successful, policy must anticipate a broad range of constituents. Yet, all too often, technology policy is written with primarily mainstream populations in mind. In this article, drawing on Value Sensitive Design and discount evaluation methods, we introduce a new method—Diverse Voices—for strengthening pre-publication technology policy documents from the perspective of underrepresented groups. Cost effective and high impact, the Diverse Voices method intervenes by soliciting input from “experiential” expert panels. We first describe the method. Then (...) we report on two case studies demonstrating its use: one with a white paper on augmented reality technology with expert panels on people with disabilities, people who were formerly or currently incarcerated, and women; and the other with a strategy document on automated driving vehicle technologies with expert panels on youth, non-car drivers, and extremely low-income people. In both case studies, panels identified significant shortcomings in the pre-publication documents which, if addressed, would mitigate some of the disparate impact of the proposed policy recommendations on these particular stakeholder groups. Our discussion includes reflection on the method, evidence for its success, its limitations, and future directions. (shrink)

This article is the first in a two-part review of policy design for human embryo research in Canada. In this article we explain how this area of research is circumscribed by law promulgated by the federal Parliament (the Assisted Human Reproduction Act ) and by guidelines issued by the Tri-Agencies (the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans and Updated Guidelines for Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Research ). In so doing, we provide the first comprehensive (...) account of the rules currently governing human embryo research in Canada. In this article we also provide a chronological description of relevant policy initiatives and outcomes related to these policy instruments over the past 20 years, with particular attention to public involvement in policy design. This sets the stage for the second article (scheduled to appear in vol. 6 issue 3) in which we critically analyse the history of policy design for human embryo research in Canada, applying a typology of modes of public consultation developed by Eric Montpetit. Our goal is to carefully explain the various episodes of policy development and their corresponding outcomes, in order to more effectively address emerging questions about the legitimacy of future policy initiatives for human embryo research in Canada. (shrink)

This article is the second in a two-part review of policy design for human embryo research in Canada. In the first article in 6(1) of the JBI, we explain how this area of research is circumscribed by law promulgated by the federal Parliament and by guidelines adopted by the Tri-Agencies, and we provide a chronological description of relevant policy initiatives and outcomes related to these two policy instruments, with particular attention to the repeated efforts at public (...) consultation. This second article analyses the history of policy design for human embryo research in Canada, applying a typology of modes of public consultation developed by Eric Montpetit to better understand the various episodes of policy design and their corresponding outcomes. On this basis, we suggest that the degree to which the views of Canadian residents and citizens on human embryo research have been solicited as part of the policy-making process has diminished significantly over time. We also suggest that this diminished participation is likely to continue given the presence of powerful interest groups and policy communities “speaking for” Canadians. This raises interesting questions about the legitimacy of future policy initiatives for human embryo research in Canada. (shrink)

According to the logic of collective action, mere awareness of the causes of environmental degradation will not motivate rational agents to reduce pollution. Yet some government policies aim to enlist citizens in schemes of voluntary cooperation, drawing on an ethos of collective responsibility. Are such policies doomed to failure? This book provides a novel application of rational choice theory to a large-scale survey of environmental attitudes in The Netherlands. Its main findings are that rational citizens are motivated to cooperate towards (...) a less polluted environment to a large extent, but that their willingness to assume responsibility depends on the social context of the collective action problem they face. This empirical study is an important volume in the development of a more consistent foundation for rational choice theory in policy analysis, which seeks to clarify major theoretical issues concerning the role of moral commitment, self-interest and reciprocity in environmental behaviour. (shrink)

When it comes to assessing the status of the welfare state or the necessity of political reforms, in many countries the middle class serves as a major point of reference. In such debates, the middle class and the welfare state typically constitute an ambivalent relationship as the middle class is both financing and benefiting from the systems of social security. The middle class is therefore a particularly important target group to secure the functioning of social policies and the long-term stability (...) of welfare institutions. At the same time, however, the socio-structural boundaries, the interests and the normative meaning of “the middle class” are not objectively given but find their way into political discourses and decisions through specific ways of perception and interpretation. As regards the design of social policies, “the middle class” can therefore be expected to serve as a major landmark for political orientation while at the same time it is open to a variety of meanings. Starting from here, the chapter investigates for the case of Germany how, firstly, “the middle class” becomes a meaningful discursive category in public debates and, secondly, how these discourses leave their marks in the design of social policies. By building on newspaper articles, we aim at identifying the discursive practices of constructing “the middle class” which then function as a major yardstick in political processes, both as an explicit target of welfare policies and as an implicit point of reference for negotiating “appropriate” policy designs. (shrink)

In this commentary, I suggest expanding the deliberative aspects of critical care policy development in two ways. First, critical-care policy development should expand the scope of deliberation by leaving fewer issues up to expertise or private choice. For instance. it should allow deliberation about the relevance of age, disability, social position, and psychological well-being to allocation decisions. Second, it should broaden both the set of costs considered and the set of stakeholders represented in the deliberative process. In particular, (...) it should consider efforts to reduce the cost of end-of-life care and to redirect resources away from the provision of costly interventions, and should expand the set of individuals included in deliberation to include stakeholders outside the health-care system. (shrink)

The value sensitive design (VSD) approach to designing transformative technologies for human values is taken as the object of study in this chapter. VSD has traditionally been conceptualized as another type of technology or instrumentally as a tool. The various parts of VSD’s principled approach would then aim to discern the various policy requirements that any given technological artifact under consideration would implicate. Yet, little to no consideration has been given to how laws, regulations, policies and social norms (...) engage within VSD practices. Similarly, how the interactive nature of the VSD approach can, in turn, influence those directives. This is exacerbated when we consider machine ethics policy that have global consequences outside their development spheres. What constructs and models will position AI designers to engage in policy concerns? How can the design of AI policy be integrated with technical design? How might VSD be used to develop AI policy? How might law, regulations, social norms, and other kinds of policy regarding AI systems be engaged within value sensitive design? This chapter takes the VSD as its starting point and aims to determine how laws, regulations and policies come to influence how value trade-offs can be managed within VSD practices. It shows that the iterative and interactional nature of VSD both permits and encourages existing policies to be integrated both early on and throughout the design process. The chapter concludes with some potential future research programs. (shrink)

Digital technology has enormous potential for infusing growth in an economy. With the exponential growth of digitalisation and the emergence of digital platforms, there are growing concerns related to the regulation of such ecosystems. Peculiar features of digital platforms facilitate winner takes all and thus, give rise to dominant entities, which are able to control the stakeholders and competition in that digital ecosystem. The government and regulators need to take a cautious approach to the regulation of dynamic digital markets as (...) they are still in the evolutionary phase. Digital public goods and digital infrastructure have become key enablers in public service delivery in India in recent times. While the provision of digital infrastructure for service delivery is being applied to other sectors, one needs to be circumspect in applying this beyond public service delivery approaches. The chapter analyses two key sectors in cyber space viz. digital payments and digital commerce to analyse the application of emerging digital public infrastructure principles in these areas. The chapter further discusses various initiatives in India regarding digital public infrastructure and analyses the challenges in applying this approach to the e-commerce marketplace. It identifies challenges in applying this to digital e-commerce and examines regulating digital e-commerce through competition law principles. The study evaluates the approach to the regulation of digital e-commerce through a competition law framework and postulates that dynamic competition law principles can very well be evolved to regulate and ensure competition in the digital marketplace. Further, the chapter proposes that prerequisites like a well-designed big data regulatory regime and cyber law along with a proactive regulatory regime need to be established. (shrink)

The diversity of knowledge surrounding behavioural insights (BI) means in the policy sciences, although visible, remains under-theorized with scant comparative and generalizable explorations of the procedural prerequisites for their effective design, both as stand-alone tools and as part of dedicated policy 'toolkits'. While comparative analyses of the content of BI tools has proliferated, the knowledge gap about the procedural needs of BI policy design is growing recognizably, as the range of BI responses grows in practice (...) necessitating specific capabilities, processes and institutional frameworks to be in place for their design. This Element draws on the literature on policy design and innovation adoption to explore the administrative, institutional and capacity endowments of governments for the successful and appropriate integration of BI in existing policy frameworks. Further, we present three illustrative cases with respect to their experience of essential procedural endowments facilitating for the effective integration of BI in policy design. (shrink)

Making agri-food systems in Europe more sustainable often requires systemic change. Transformative rather than incremental change is difficult if agri-food systems are locked into unsustainable practices by a range of institutional, cultural, social and financial factors that create mutually reinforcing barriers to change. Institutionalised public policies tend to further stabilise the established system through multiple feedback effects, bolstering unsustainable path dependencies. Co-design has been discussed as an innovative approach to developing operational options in agri-food systems. However, co-design methods (...) have rarely been applied to develop policy options. This paper presents the experiences with a policy co-design process for the envisioned sustainability transformation of conventional pork production in Brandenburg, Germany. Combining an agri-food system perspective with the policy co-design literature, we developed (1) a process template for a participatory policy co-design process to overcome barriers and lock-ins along the three levels of policy mixes: objectives, instruments and calibration; and (2) a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of this process and its output. The successful implementation of the policy co-creation process in the case study constitutes a proof of concept. An unexpected limitation was that full specification of instrument calibrations was not realistic. In policy processes, this is typically part of hard negotiation processes. The systematic analysis of the participatory development of policy options along the three levels of policy mixes confirms and refines the possible role of co-design approaches for public policies in the transformation of agri-food systems. (shrink)

Experimental design is one aspect of a scientific method. A well-designed, properly conducted experiment aims to control variables in order to isolate and manipulate causal effects and thereby maximize internal validity, support causal inferences, and guarantee reliable results. Traditionally employed in the natural sciences, experimental design has become an important part of research in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental methods are also endorsed as the most reliable guides to policy effectiveness. Through a discussion of some of (...) the central concepts associated with experimental design, including controlled variation and randomization, this chapter will provide a summary of key ethical issues that tend to arise in experimental contexts. In addition, by exploring assumptions about the nature of causation and by analyzing features of causal relationships, systems, and inferences in social contexts, this chapter will summarize the ways in which experimental design can undermine the integrity of not only social and behavioral research but policies implemented on the basis of such research. (shrink)

In recent decades, and in particular since the shift towards independent central banks, there has been no explicit coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. In the Eurozone, this lack of coordination represents an important flaw, especially since the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Complementing monetary union with a transfer union represents one possible solution. This paper argues that the negative impact of post-2008 and post-Covid-19 unconventional monetary policy on income inequalities provides a second reason to coordinate (...) fiscal and monetary policy. Among various institutional arrangements to implement such coordination, the paper defends the idea that the European Central Bank should be sensitive to distributive considerations when formulating its monetary policy. Such an arrangement would help both to contain the distributive side-effects of monetary policy and to at least partially remedy the flaw at the heart of the Eurozone as long as an outright transfer union remains unfeasible. (shrink)

This study aims to design an agricultural digitalization policy model to improve agricultural performance in Indonesia, focusing on Sambas Regency, West Kalimantan. Utilizing the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP), the research analyzes key factors, actors, objectives, and strategies influencing agricultural digitalization. The findings reveal that farmers' characteristics and perceptions, along with the role of facilitators, regulations, and digital infrastructure, are crucial factors. The Ministry of Agriculture emerges as the most influential actor while increasing agricultural productivity and farmers' income (...) are identified as primary objectives. The development of integrated agricultural digitalization from upstream to downstream is prioritized as the key strategy, supported by government-provided big data, optimized extension worker roles, and the creation of digital markets for agricultural services and products. This research provides valuable insights for policymakers in formulating effective strategies to drive digital transformation in Indonesia's agricultural sector, emphasizing the need for a holistic, multi-stakeholder approach to realize the benefits of agricultural digitalization for farmers, businesses, and society at large. (shrink)

Politicians and engineers are increasingly realizing that values are important in the development of technological artefacts. What is often overlooked is that different conceptualizations of these abstract values lead to different design-requirements. For example, designing social media platforms for deliberative democracy sets us up for technical work on completely different types of architectures and mechanisms than designing for so-called liquid or direct forms of democracy. Thinking about Democracy is not enough, we need to design for the proper conceptualization (...) of these values. As we see it, we cannot responsibly engineer and innovate and shape technology in accordance with our moral values without engaging in systematic and continuous conceptual engineering: This is not only an academic, or theoretical issue, it is also not simply an issue for public policy or politics, or regulators, it has become a central problem for engineering and the world of technology. In this paper, we present a framework for doing the necessary conceptual work in the context of requirement engineering. We draw on the literature on conceptual engineering to lay out a methodology to (1) assess different conceptions and (2) to develop new conceptions. Moreover, we integrate this methodology with extant approaches in the philosophy of technology which aim at designing technological artefacts ethically. In the final section we apply this integrated framework to freedom in the context of social media networks. (shrink)

Disparities exist in the health, livelihood, and opportunities for the 46-60 million people living in America’s rural communities. Rural communities across the United States need a new energy and focus concentrated around health and health care that allows for the designing capturing, and spreading of existing and new innovations. This paper aims to provide a framework for policy solutions to build a healthier rural America describing both the current state of rural health policy and the policies and practices (...) in states that could be used as a national model for positive change. (shrink)

This chapter discusses whistleblowing of bribery practices in the Indonesian Directorate General of Taxation. Earlier studies reveal that written regulations and policies providing whistleblowers protection programs, and threatening punishment for those who retaliate against whistleblowers, are not effective. This chapter investigates social and cultural variables such as attitude toward whistleblowing, group pressure and perceived behavioral controls that may encourage individuals to report bribery. Unless bribery is understood within an organizational context, the relevant regulations, policies and systems may not be used (...) at all or they may not be used properly to combat bribery. A framework investigating main issues is proposed: to what extent do variables such as attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control influence individuals to report bribery; to what extent do the variables influence individuals in selecting reporting channels; and what are the main variables that influence the intention of individuals to report bribery in the DGT? Answers to these questions will be useful when designing whistleblowing regulations and policies to combat bribery (and support whistleblowers) in the high context culture of Indonesia. (shrink)

Drawing on behavioral economics, nudges (policy interventions based on choice architecture) have the capacity to strategically shape policymaking, subtly guiding individual behavior by adjusting their decision environment. Applied to enhance vaccinations, boost retirement savings, or promote healthy habits, these interventions align with consensus-defined well-being. As governments adopt nudges, scholars have explored their role in fostering virtues. This paper argues that nudges have the potential to efficiently contribute to virtuous development by instilling and sustaining habits, respecting individual choice, and ensuring (...) deliberation. It introduces the concept of virtue nudges, emphasizing the alignment of habits with virtues for targeted behavioral change and the formation of morally virtuous habits. (shrink)

Nudge and boost are two competing approaches to applying the psychology of reasoning and decision making to improve policy. Whereas nudges rely on manipulation of choice architecture to steer people towards better choices, the objective of boosts is to develop good decision-making competences. Proponents of both approaches claim capacity to enhance social welfare through better individual decisions. We suggest that such efforts should involve a more careful analysis of how individual and social welfare are related in the policy (...) context. First, individual rationality is not always sufficient or necessary for improving collective outcomes. Second, collective outcomes of complex social interactions among individuals are largely ignored by the focus of both nudge and boost on individual decisions. We suggest that the design of mechanisms and social norms can sometimes lead to better collective outcomes than nudge and boost, and present conditions under which the three approaches (nudge, boost, and design) can be expected to enhance social welfare. (shrink)

Early intervention aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a (...) corpus of EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development. (shrink)

We articulate and defend the Emotional Alignment Design Policy, according to which artificial entities should be designed to elicit emotional reactions from users that appropriately reflect the entities’ capacities and moral status, or lack thereof. This principle can be violated in two ways: by designing an artificial system that elicits stronger or weaker emotional reactions than its capacities and moral status warrant (overshooting or undershooting), or by designing a system that elicits the wrong type of emotional reaction (hitting (...) the wrong target). Although the Emotional Alignment Design Policy is presumably attractive, practical implementation faces several challenges, including: how to respect user autonomy while promoting appropriate responses; navigating expert and public disagreement and uncertainty about facts and values; what to do if emotional alignment seems to require creating or destroying entities with moral status; and the extent to which designs should conform to, versus attempt to alter, user assumptions and attitudes. (shrink)

This discussion paper critically examines how power, policy, and autonomy intersect within perioperative nursing practice. In surgical environments engineered for precision and control, perioperative nurses operate in spaces that simultaneously depend on their expertise and suppress their professional voice. Drawing on feminist theory, relational ethics, and organizational sociology, this paper interrogates the structural, spatial, and symbolic forces that subordinate perioperative nursing. Hospital design, procedural norms, and entrenched hierarchies are shown to reinforce the containment of nursing authority. Power dynamics (...) manifest through gendered labor expectations, professional gatekeeping, and policy constraints, all of which limit nurses' capacity for advocacy, leadership, and autonomous decision‐making. Issues such as moral distress, workplace aggression, and educational marginalization are reframed as systemic, rather than individual challenges—embedded within a broader architecture of exclusion. Through comparative analysis and reform models, the discussion re‐articulates perioperative autonomy as a strategic reclamation of professional agency, grounded in interdisciplinary respect and structural inclusion. Ultimately, this paper argues that authentic transformation in surgical settings requires a cultural shift: one that repositions perioperative nurses not as assistants to innovation, but as architects of surgical care and co‐authors of policy and practice. (shrink)

Empirical evidence clearly shows that child poverty is a growing concern in the industrialized world and that the well-being of children is deeply affected by growing up in poverty in at least two ways. On the one hand, a low socioeconomic status jeopardizes the access to goods and services that are necessary for the current well-being of children. On the other hand, growing up in poverty also, in various ways, negatively affects the well-being in later life. On the basis of (...) the capability approach, we will show that the systematic protection and advancement of the wellbeing of children, and hence the reduction of child poverty, is a key task of social justice, which should therefore guide policy design and implementation. However, we will also discuss the special composition of the well-being of children and point out how it poses difficulties for state action in this regard. In particular, we will argue that the importance of love and affection for a child’s well-being limits considerably the possible political measures to provide fair life chances to all children. This again reflects the insight that poverty should not be reduced to economic inequality. (shrink)

Throughout their history, methodologies like Design for Values have taken trust as an important value in relation to technology. At first, this referred exclusively to the idea that technology influences human trust relationships, and that technology developers should take interpersonal trust into consideration as a value to be optimised and balanced. More recently, it has become common in policy and technology design circles to hold that technologies themselves are possible objects of trust and distrust, and that autonomous (...) technologies such as AI should be designed to be trustworthy. However, the value of trust in technology can be problematic in various ways: some philosophers have warned that trusting technology is impossible, misleading, or even dangerous. In this chapter, after an introduction of conceptions of trust, we set out a moderate view on which trustworthiness can reasonably be attributed to technology. Making technologies trustworthy has limitations because trustworthiness and trust are only loosely related, and because trust is not an unconditional good. We examine three core examples here, namely trust in the context of social media platforms, neurotechnology and “trustworthy” generative AI. Looking at these examples, we argue for a rich conception of trust in, and through, technology, that is open to interdisciplinary treatment, and thus open for empirical and technical exploration. (shrink)

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator's interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties. Despite these difficulties and despite ID's defeat in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), ID creationists' continuing efforts to promote the teaching of ID in public school science classrooms threaten both science education and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution. I (...) examine the ID movement's failure to provide either a methodology or a functional epistemology to support their supernaturalism, a deficiency that consequently leaves them without epistemic support for their creationist claims. My examination focuses primarily on ID supporter Francis Beckwith, whose published defenses of teaching ID, as well as his other relevant publications concerning education, law, and public policy, have been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. Beckwith's work exhibits the epistemological deficiencies of the supernaturally grounded views of his ID associates and of supernaturalists in general. I preface my examination of Beckwith's arguments with (1) philosopher of science Susan Haack's clarification of the established naturalistic methodology and epistemology of science and (2) discussions of the views of Beckwith's ID associates Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Finally, I critique the religious exclusionism that Beckwith shares with his ID associates and the implications of his exclusionism for public policy. (shrink)

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a design methodology developed by Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn (2003) that brings in moral deliberations in an early stage of a design process. It assumes that neither technology itself is value neutral, nor shifts the value-ladennes to the sole usage of technology. This paper adds to emerging literature onVSD for autonomous weapons systems development and discusses extant literature on values in autonomous systems development in general and in autonomous weapons development in (...) particular. I identify opportunities, such as public debates, and threats, such as the classified nature of the design process, for VSD in autonomous weapons development. This paper contributes to academic debates about the non-neutrality of technology by pointing out that values have been and can be explicitly designed into autonomous systems. It is informative for policy makers and designers who are tasked with developing actual autonomous weapons or policies around such systems, as they learn about an established design methodology that is sensitive to societal concerns and industry needs and that can be applied to autonomous weapons systems. (shrink)

Public health policies designed to improve individual and population health may involve coercion. These coercive policies require ethical justification, and yet it is unclear in the public health ethics literature which ethical concepts might justify coercion, and what their limitations are in applying across contexts. In this paper, we analyse a number of concepts from Western bioethics, including the harm principle, paternalism, the public interest, and a duty of easy rescue. We find them plausible justifications for coercion in theory, but (...) when applied to case studies, including HIV testing in Malawi, vaccine mandates in South Africa, and prohibitions of antibiotic use in livestock in the EU, their limitations become clear. We argue that the context-specificity of ethical justifications for coercion has been overlooked, and there is more work needed to identify context-relevant ethical justifications for coercive policies in various settings and for various populations, rather than relying on universalising Western bioethical justifications across all contexts. (shrink)

Generative AI systems using GANs and diffusion models are reshaping artistic practice and policy. This article focuses on the United States and asks: How do recent federal and state policy instruments governing generative AI in artistic expression align with public discourse in mainstream news and Reddit between July 2024 and June 2025? We synthesize U.S. developments on authorship, fair use/transformative use, personality rights, and deepfakes, incorporate new case law and U.S. Copyright Office reports, and offer a compact comparative (...) note on the EU AI Act. Using TF-IDF keywording and VADER sentiment on 287 news items and 3921 Reddit posts, we map convergences (broad support for provenance/labeling; concern for image/voice cloning) and divergences (co-authorship and training-data compensation). We argue that narrowly tailored provenance requirements and clearer standards for AI-assisted authorship would reduce uncertainty without chilling legitimate artistic practice. Limitations, include English-language scope, platform bias, and the use of bag-of-words semantics. Our findings motivate policy designs that reconcile legal safeguards with creative experimentation. (shrink)

Over the last decade, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been defined first as a concept whereby companies decide voluntarily to contribute to a better society and cleaner environment and, second, as a process by which companies manage their relationship␣with stakeholders (European Commission, 2001. Nowadays, CSR has become a priority issue on governments’ agendas. This has changed governments’ capacity to act and impact on social and environmental issues in their relationship with companies, but has also affected the framework in which CSR (...) public policies are designed: governments are incorporating multi-stakeholder strategies. This article analyzes the CSR public policies in European advanced democracies, and more specifically the EU-15 countries, and provides explanatory keys on how governments have understood, designed and implemented their CSR public policies. The analysis has entailed the classification of CSR public policies taking into consideration the actor to which the governments’ policies were addressed. This approach to the analysis of CSR public policies in the EU-15 countries leads us to observe coinciding lines of action among the different countries analyzed, which has enabled us to propose a ‹four ideal’ typology model for governmental action on CSR in Europe: Partnership, Business in the Community, Sustainability, and Citizenship, and Agora. The main contribution of this article is to propose an analytical framework to analyze CSR public policies, which provide a perspective on the relationships between governments, businesses, and civil society stakeholders, and enable us to incorporate the analysis of CSR public policies into a broader approach focused on social governance. (shrink)

Wicked problems are tricky to solve because of their many interconnected components and a lack of any single optimal solution. At the science–policy interface, all problems can look wicked: research exposes the complexity that is relevant to designing, executing and implementing policy fit for ambitious human needs. Expertise in philosophical research can help to navigate that complexity.

Priority-setting policy-makers often face moral and political pressure to balance the conflicting motivations of efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment. Using the conflict between these motivations as a case study can enrich the understanding of institutional design in developed democracies. This essay presents a cognitive-psychological account of the conflict between efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment in health care priority-setting. It then describes three sets of institutional arrangements—in Australia, England/Wales, and Germany, respectively—that contend with this conflict in interestingly different ways. The analysis yields at (...) least three implications for institutional design in developed democracies: (1) indeterminacy at the level of moral psychology can increase the probability of indeterminacy at the level of institutional design; (2) situational constraints in effect require priority-setting policy-makers to adopt normative-moral pluralism; and (3) the U.S. health care system may be in an anti-priority-setting equilibrium. (shrink)

In this chapter, I taxonomize constitutional provisions that reference political parties thematically according to their function. Constitutional provisions that refer to political parties fall into six categories: (a) basic function, (b) the right to form political parties, (c) militant democracy, (d) access to public resources, (e) legislative design, and (f) the separation of party and state. I examine these provisions to answer two questions: (1) How do constitutions rely on political parties to discharge their regulative function? (2) Can we (...) develop a constitutive account of the role of political parties in constitutional democracies? Provisions on the basic function of political parties serve the constitutive function of codifying their roles in integrating and mobilizing citizens, interest aggregation, formulating public policy, simplifying political participation, structuring the popular vote and enabling political competition, representation, and accountability. The right to form political parties furthers the same functions in a regulative sense. Constitutional provisions regarding legislative design further the goals of structuring the popular vote and enabling political competition, accountability, recruiting leaders for public office, government selection, and enabling the enactment of legislation. Constitutional design also reveals an acute concern with the negative risks posed by political parties. Militant democracy provisions serve the constitutive function of conveying the nature of the existential risk that might pose a threat to the constitutional order, and the regulative function of checking that risk. The provisions on the separation of party and state check the risk that parties can capture the state by prohibiting party membership for the courts and security services. (shrink)

When it comes to behavioral change, economic design and behavioral science are complements, not substitutes. Chater & Loewenstein give examples from policy design. In this commentary, I use examples, often from my own research, to show how behavioral insights inform the design of the rules that govern market transactions.

Today design of Urban block as the basic element of Urban fabric is getting more and more important. In this chapter, in which its method is mainly based on local field studies in Iran and Berlin, I will try in brief to describe and analyze the production of urban blocks. The study discusses morphologically four types of urban blocks in Iran from distant past to the present, considering the influence of West, after Modernism, and policy for the future. (...) It also discusses an experience of BerlinRenewingUrban block and the Integration of three existing buildings and the independence of the new buildings. (shrink)

The child was 2 years, 8 months old and weighed 25 pounds, one-fifth the weight of her mother, for whom she was to be the bone marrow donor. The mother had suffered a relapse of acute myelogenous leukemia; her physicians recommended a bone marrow transplant. The child was the closest human leukocyte antigen match and thus the best donor candidate for her mother's transplant.

In this article, we develop the concept of Transparency by Design that serves as practical guidance in helping promote the beneficial functions of transparency while mitigating its challenges in automated-decision making environments. With the rise of artificial intelligence and the ability of AI systems to make automated and self-learned decisions, a call for transparency of how such systems reach decisions has echoed within academic and policy circles. The term transparency, however, relates to multiple concepts, fulfills many functions, and (...) holds different promises that struggle to be realized in concrete applications. Indeed, the complexity of transparency for ADM shows tension between transparency as a normative ideal and its translation to practical application. To address this tension, we first conduct a review of transparency, analyzing its challenges and limitations concerning automated decision-making practices. We then look at the lessons learned from the development of Privacy by Design, as a basis for developing the Transparency by Design principles. Finally, we propose a set of nine principles to cover relevant contextual, technical, informational, and stakeholder-sensitive considerations. Transparency by Design is a model that helps organizations design transparent AI systems, by integrating these principles in a step-by-step manner and as an ex-ante value, not as an afterthought. (shrink)

Engaging the public in decision-making processes is commonly accepted as an effective strategy for a better policy making, a better policy support and for narrowing the gap between government and the public. In today’s digitised society, participation via online media is becoming more important. But is this so-called e-participation being used optimally? Or is a better design possible? In my opinion, the answer to these questions is a ‘yes’. Despite numerous efforts in engaging the public with (...) class='Hi'>policy deliberation, the actual amount of participants remains low. In this article, I have used the YUTPA model (Nevejan 2009 ) to analyse some existing e-participation projects. Additionally, I derived ten characteristics of ‘play’ to make proposals for a more designerly e-participation approach. (shrink)

Even though public awareness about privacy risks in the Internet is increasing, in the evolution of the Internet to the Internet of Things these risks are likely to become more relevant due to the large amount of data collected and processed by the “Things”. The business drivers for exploring ways to monetize such data are one of the challenges identified in this paper for the protection of Privacy in the IoT. Beyond the protection of privacy, this paper highlights the need (...) for new approaches, which grant a more active role to the users of the IoT and which address other potential issues such as the Digital Divide or safety risks. A key facet in ethical design is the transparency of the technology and services in how that technology handles data, as well as providing choice for the user. This paper presents a new approach for users’ interaction with the IoT, which is based on the concept of Ethical Design implemented through a policy-based framework. In the proposed framework, users are provided with wider controls over personal data or the IoT services by selecting specific sets of policies, which can be tailored according to users’ capabilities and to the contexts where they operate. The potential deployment of the framework in a typical IoT context is described with the identification of the main stakeholders and the processes that should be put in place. (shrink)

Government agencies and nonprofit organizations have increasingly turned to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate public policy interventions. Random assignment is widely understood to be fair when there is equipoise; however, some scholars and practitioners argue that random assignment is also permissible when an intervention is reasonably expected to be superior to other trial arms. For example, some argue that random assignment to such an intervention is fair when the intervention is scarce, for it is sometimes fair to use (...) a lottery to allocate scarce goods. We investigate the permissibility of randomization in public policy RCTs when there is no equipoise, identifying two sets of conditions under which it is fair to allocate access to a superior intervention via random assignment. We also reject oft-made claims that alternative study designs, including stepped-wedge designs and uneven randomization, offer fair ways to allocate beneficial interventions. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom holds that U.S. political institutions are inhospitable to industrial policy. The authors call the conventional wisdom into question by making four claims: the activities targeted by industrial policy are increasingly governed by decentralized production networks rather than markets or hierarchies, “network failures” are therefore no less threatening to industrial dynamism than market or organizational failures, the spatial and organizational decentralization of production have simultaneously increased the demand and broadened the support for American industrial policy, (...) and political decentralization is therefore likely to improve the functioning of industrial policies designed to combat network failures. (shrink)