Our digital age is characterized by both a generalized access to data and an increased call for participation of the public and other stakeholders and communities in policy design and decision-making. This context raises new challenges for political decision-makers and analysts in providing these actors with new means and moral duties for decision support, including in the area of environmental policy. The concept of "policy analytics" was introduced in 2013 as an attempt to develop a framework, tools, and methods to address these challenges. This conceptual initiative prompted numerous research teams to develop empirical applications of this framework and to reflect on their own decision-support practice at the science-policy interface in various environmental domains around the world. During a workshop in Paris in 2018, participants shared and discussed their experiences of these applications and practices. In this paper, we present and analyze a set of applications to identify a series of key properties that underpin a policy analytics approach, in order to provide the conceptual foundation for policy analytics to address current policy design and decision-making challenges. The induced properties are demandorientedness, performativity, normative transparency, and data meaningfulness. We show how these properties materialized through these six case studies, and we explain why we consider them key to effective policy analytics applications, particularly in environmental policy design and decision-making on environmental issues. This clarification of the policy analytics concept eventually enables us to highlight research frontiers to further improve the concept.
There is a growing debate amongst academics and practitioners on whether interventions made, thus far, towards Responsible AI have been enough to engage with the root causes of AI problems. Failure to effect meaningful changes in this system could see these initiatives not reach their potential and lead to the concept becoming another buzzword for companies to use in their marketing campaigns. Systems thinking is often touted as a methodology to manage and effect change; however, there is little practical advice available for decision-makers to include systems thinking insights to work towards Responsible AI. Using the notion of ‘leverage zones’ adapted from the systems thinking literature, we suggest a novel approach to plan for and experiment with potential initiatives and interventions. This paper presents a conceptual framework called the Five Ps to help practitioners construct and identify holistic interventions that may work towards Responsible AI, from lower-order interventions such as short-term fixes, tweaking algorithms and updating parameters, through to higher-order interventions such as redefining the system’s foundational structures that govern those parameters, or challenging the underlying purpose upon which those structures are built and developed in the first place. Finally, we reflect on the framework as a scaffold for transdisciplinary question-asking to improve outcomes towards Responsible AI.
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