This book explores how information and communications technologies are adapted, governed, and reinterpreted in areas where the state has limited reach. This book will be of great interest to students of Socio-Legal Studies, Science and Technology Studies, (Critical) Security Studies and International Relations.

“This enlightening book provides unique insights into the governance of the digital world, and the impact of that digital world on governance of the economy and society.” —B. Guy Peters, Maurice Falk Professor of American Government, Pittsburgh University, USA, and Former President of International Public Policy Association (IPPA) “Well-researched, this book is insightful and constructive. Broadly defining institutions as an ecosystem of relationships, readers gain new perspectives on hard problems. A fast, worthwhile read!” —Vinton Cerf, Internet pioneer, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google “Governance for the Digital World is a highly welcome contribution to the pursuit of good governance in what till some years ago was labeled unchartered territory in the world we are living in. It is high time to get more insight into the dilemmas, intricacies, predicaments, and, last but not least, the considerable opportunities offered by digital technologies and algorithms in particular. It is of the utmost importance that for that matter this book stresses the notion of the digital commons. Irrespective of the role of state and non-state actors, eventually digital technologies pervade the daily existence of all human beings. So good governance is not a matter of choice but sheer necessity. And, as the authors show in their in-depth analysis, good governance reaches beyond the do’s and don’ts of governments. It is also about the functions and interests of private corporations and small- and midsize businesses, non-governmental organizations, offline and online media, and the citizenry at large. I commend the authors for their inclusive approach to digital governance and self-governance. Their book is at the very heart of today’s pivotal debate on good governance in the digital world.” —Uri Rosenthal, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Former Special Envoy for Cyber Diplomacy, and Chairman Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Netherlands This book explores new frameworks, institutional arrangements, rules, and policies for governance of the digital world. As digitization rapidly intertwines the many dimensions of society, billions of people have witnessed a quiet and seamless integration of the Internet, software, platforms, algorithms, and digital devices into their daily lives, as well as into many forms of governance and decision making in the public and private sectors. The new technologies require new norms and practices to govern the digital world. This is the challenge addressed by this book: How can society create institutions that govern the digital world in a way that is beneficial to society? This book explores answers—still initial and provocative—to this central question. The reflections presented in this book have a theoretical and conceptual nature borrowed from different fields of science to identify the main challenges for the governance of the digital world.

Aneesh Chopra, America's first Chief Technology Officer, tells the story of a new revolution in America. Over the course of our history, America has had a pioneering government matched to the challenges of the day. But over the past twenty years, as our economy and our society have been completely changed by technology, and the private sector has innovated, government has stalled, trapped in models that were designed for the America of the past. Aneesh Chopra, tasked with leading the charge for a more open, tech-savvy government, here shows how we can reshape our government and tackle our most vexing problems, from economic development to affordable healthcare.

This book explores how information and communications technologies are adapted, governed, and reinterpreted in areas where the state has limited reach. The governance and regulation of new technologies, from social media to AI, has never seemed more urgent. Efforts to harness the potential benefits, to encourage innovation and novel applications, yet restrain the known and unknown harmful aspects of these technologies, have posed unprecedented challenges. This book brings together an eclectic collection of cases from around the world – from the favelas in Brazil to the border regions of Ethiopia and Somalia and to markets in Thailand – to tease out the broader arguments and logics about how diverse enabling environments for technology and innovation may evolve and the wide range of public authorities that may be involved in providing governance and security for such innovation, beyond the state. The term ‘the rule of non-law’ refers to the breadth and array of rules, norms, and systems that enable novel technological assemblages and uses. By looking at technologies and the rule of non-law in areas that are often seen as marginal or at the peripheries (from a profit and business perspective), this book reflects new insights back to more Western-dominated mainstream debates about law, technology, and innovation. This book will be of great interest to students of Socio-Legal Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Security Studies, and International Relations.

Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges. Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government. Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.

Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identifies viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. A second set of chapters examines the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratization, social trust and cohesion, ethnic diversity, happiness and human wellbeing, democratic accountability, economic growth and inequality, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. The remaining chapters turn to the perennial issue of which contextual factors and policy approaches—national, local, and international—have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The Quality of Government approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues relating to corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.

Governance discourse centers on an "ideal type" of modern statehood that exhibits full internal and external sovereignty and a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Yet modern statehood is an anomaly, both historically and within the contemporary international system, while the condition of "limited statehood," wherein countries lack the capacity to implement central decisions and monopolize force, is the norm. Limited statehood, argue the authors in this provocative collection, is in fact a fundamental form of governance, immune to the forces of economic and political modernization. Challenging common assumptions about sovereign states and the evolution of modern statehood, particularly the dominant paradigms supported by international relations theorists, development agencies, and international organizations, this volume explores strategies for effective and legitimate governance within a framework of weak and ineffective state institutions. Approaching the problem from the perspectives of political science, history, and law, contributors explore the factors that contribute to successful governance under conditions of limited statehood. These include the involvement of nonstate actors and nonhierarchical modes of political influence. Empirical chapters analyze security governance by nonstate actors, the contribution of public-private partnerships to promote the United Nations Millennium Goals, the role of business in environmental governance, and the problems of Western state-building efforts, among other issues. Recognizing these forms of governance as legitimate, the contributors clarify the complexities of a system the developed world must negotiate in the coming century.

This book examines the role of bureaucracy in modern technologically advanced societies, the traditional models of governance, and the potential of information technology to fundamentally change and improve governance. In the area of public-domain governance, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered public agencies to improve their activities and to strengthen the efficiency of their operations. Technology has enabled optimized transfer of knowledge and information between government agencies, more efficient supervision and control of relationships with citizens, and higher efficiency in law enforcement through better access to information. Throughout the last decades, technology has been used to strengthen the role of state bureaucracies and the relationship between the civil service and the citizens. We have witnessed the transformative powers of ICTs in private-sector enterprises in well-structured technological landscapes, which has produced new ecosystems comprised of software developers, providers, and consumers who provide and consume new products and services in ecosystems that are based on clear technological standards and shared modular generic artefacts, which allow for distributed peer production. ICTs will shape cultural and civic discourse and create products, services and tools, relying on the open toolsets, technologies and exchange of knowledge between peers. This book will be of particular interest to government CIOs, IT/IS managers, researchers, students, and practitioners in technical sciences, public administration, business management, public policy and IS management.

Power and Authority in Internet Governance investigates the hotly contested role of the state in today's digital society. The book asks: Is the state "back" in internet regulation? If so, what forms are state involvement taking, and with what consequences for the future? The volume includes case studies from across the world and addresses a wide range of issues regarding internet infrastructure, data and content. The book pushes the debate beyond a simplistic dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism in order to consider also greater state involvement based on values of democracy and human rights. Seeing internet governance as a complex arena where power is contested among diverse non-state and state actors across local, national, regional and global scales, the book offers a critical and nuanced discussion of how the internet is governed – and how it should be governed. Power and Authority in Internet Governance provides an important resource for researchers across international relations, global governance, science and technology studies and law as well as policymakers and analysts concerned with regulating the global internet.

How to adapt democracy to the accelerating pace of technological change—and why it's critical that we do Successful democracies throughout history—from ancient Athens to Britain on the cusp of the industrial age—have used the technology of their time to gather information for better governance. Our challenge is no different today, but it is more urgent because the accelerating pace of technological change creates potentially enormous dangers as well as benefits. Accelerating Democracy shows how to adapt democracy to new information technologies that can enhance political decision making and enable us to navigate the social rapids ahead. John O. McGinnis demonstrates how these new technologies combine to address a problem as old as democracy itself--how to help citizens better evaluate the consequences of their political choices. As society became more complex in the nineteenth century, social planning became a top-down enterprise delegated to experts and bureaucrats. Today, technology increasingly permits information to bubble up from below and filter through more dispersed and competitive sources. McGinnis explains how to use fast-evolving information technologies to more effectively analyze past public policy, bring unprecedented intensity of scrutiny to current policy proposals, and more accurately predict the results of future policy. But he argues that we can do so only if government keeps pace with technological change. For instance, it must revive federalism to permit different jurisdictions to test different policies so that their results can be evaluated, and it must legalize information markets to permit people to bet on what the consequences of a policy will be even before that policy is implemented. Accelerating Democracy reveals how we can achieve a democracy that is informed by expertise and social-scientific knowledge while shedding the arrogance and insularity of a technocracy.