Cities and global governance: State failure or a new global order?

International society, so long the resolution to problems of collective political order, now appears to be failing in its capacity to deal with transnational challenges such as climate change, global security and financial instability. Indeed, the structure of international society itself has become a significant obstacle to such pressing issues of global governance. One striking response has been the reemergence of cities as important actors on the international stage in recent decades. This article will show how these two issues are intrinsically linked. Cities have taken on new governance roles in the gaps left by hamstrung nation-states, and their contribution to an emerging global governance architecture will be a significant feature of the international relations of the twenty-first century. But do the new governance activities of cities represent a failure on the part of states, as some scholars have argued? Or are they a part of an emerging form of global order, in which the relationship between states, cities and other actors is being recalibrated? This article argues that the remarkable renaissance of cities in recent decades has been a result of a shift in the structure of international society, and assesses the causal drivers of this shift. It goes on to draw out some of the implications of the recalibration of the relationship between the city and the state for how we understand the emerging form of global order

POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies

Algorithmic fairness aims to address the economic, moral, social, and political impact that digital systems have on populations through solutions that can be applied by service providers. Fairness frameworks do so, in part, by mapping these problems to a narrow definition and assuming the service providers can be trusted to deploy countermeasures. Not surprisingly, these decisions limit fairness frameworks' ability to capture a variety of harms caused by systems. We characterize fairness limitations using concepts from requirements engineering and from social sciences. We show that the focus on algorithms' inputs and outputs misses harms that arise from systems interacting with the world; that the focus on bias and discrimination omits broader harms on populations and their environments; and that relying on service providers excludes scenarios where they are not cooperative or intentionally adversarial. We propose Protective Optimization Technologies (POTs). POTs provide means for affected parties to address the negative impacts of systems in the environment, expanding avenues for political contestation. POTs intervene from outside the system, do not require service providers to cooperate, and can serve to correct, shift, or expose harms that systems impose on populations and their environments. We illustrate the potential and limitations of POTs in two case studies: countering road congestion caused by traffic-beating applications, and recalibrating credit scoring for loan applicants.Comment: Appears in Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* 2020). Bogdan Kulynych and Rebekah Overdorf contributed equally to this work. Version v1/v2 by Seda G\"urses, Rebekah Overdorf, and Ero Balsa was presented at HotPETS 2018 and at PiMLAI 201

Ethically governing artificial intelligence in the field of scientific research and innovation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a double-edged sword for scientific research. While, on one hand, the incredible potential of AI and the different techniques and technologies for using it make it a product coveted by all scientific research centres and organisations and science funding agencies. On the other, the highly negative impacts that its irresponsible and self-interested use is causing, or could cause, make it a controversial tool, attracting strong criticism from those involved in the different sectors of research. This study aims to delve into the current and virtual uses of AI in scientific research and innovation in order to provide guidelines for developing and implementing a governance system to promote ethical and responsible research and innovation in the field of AI

TOWARD AGRICULTURAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: APPLYING LESSONS FROM CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Many business firms both in the U.S. and abroad are practicing corporate environmental management. They are committed to improving the efficiency of material use, energy use and water use; to recycle; to make safer products and processes and to reduce their overall impact on the environment. In pursuing corporate environmental management, some businesses have found that the presumed tradeoff between profits and environmental quality does not always apply. Instead, by innovating and redesigning their products, processes, corporate culture, and organizational strategy, these firms have been able to improve environmental performance and add to profits. These improved profits are sometimes referred to as "innovation offsets" because they result from technological changes to reduce pollution which also reduce production costs (and/or improve productivity) and thereby "offset" the costs of compliance. The necessary technological innovation is pursued when firms take a dynamic investment perspective rather than presume a static tradeoff between profits and environmental quality.Environmental Economics and Policy,

The Appleization of finance: Charting incumbent finance’s embrace of FinTech

The rise of financial technology (FinTech) engenders novel business models through integrating financial services and information and communication technologies (ICT). Digital currencies and payments, data mining, and other FinTech applications threaten to radically overhaul the financial sector. This article argues that, while we are becoming aware of how technology giants such as Apple Inc. are making inroads into financial services, we need to become more sensitive to how financial incumbents mimick ICT firms while aiming to neutralize the FinTech challenge. Practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance through a process we dub Appleization. We illustrate how incumbents aim to remain indispensable amidst rapid digitization. Mimicking tech strategies, financial incumbents resort to transforming legacy ICT systems into integrated platforms, cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems where startups are ‘free’ to compete whilst effectively being locked into the incumbent's orbit. We illustrate this by comparing Apple’s business features (locking-in developers, customers and state into a hybrid business model based on a synergy between hardware, software and data-driven platform components) with emerging practices in the financial industry. Our analogy suggests that the Appleization of finance might radically transform, yet not undercut the oligopolistic position of financial incumbents

The Place of Covert Policing in Democratic Societies: An Empirical Study of the U.S. and Germany

My study of undercover policing explores the ways in which democratic legal systems change when they legalize highly contested police practices that have long been quietly tolerated and accorded minimal scrutiny. Undercover policing is a prime of example of such a practice. It has long been subject to remarkably little legislative oversight and systematic regulation in the United States and Western Europe. It exists in a twilight of legality—a necessary evil, but one inviting anxieties about its legitimacy and consonance with the rule of law. Under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, Germany (along with other Western European countries) has attempted to regulate covert operations in a more systematic fashion. The German experience examined in my article suggests how difficult it is to tame and legitimate a constantly changing and normatively contested practice such as undercover policing. The article contrasts German attempts to create an explicit legal basis for this power –and a comprehensive regulatory system – with American willingness to leave covert practices largely unregulated. The article focuses on the consequences of these divergent approaches for the legitimacy of covert practices. German legal and administrative reforms succeeded in improving legitimacy along some dimensions while undermining it along others, and, indeed, introducing new bases on which the legitimacy of undercover police work is subject to challenge. In the United States, by contrast, law enforcement agencies have succeeded in defusing a variety of reform initiatives through internal reforms, with little legislative or judicial supervision. As a result, many problems of legitimacy persist – with little visibility. American challenges to the legitimacy of covert tactics now focus less on criminal cases than on the use of such tactics in domestic intelligence investigation. My analysis of German covert policing rests on 89 field interviews that I conducted between 2002 and 2004 with state and federal police officials, undercover agents, training and supervisory officials, control officers, prosecutors, and judges in fifteen of the sixteen German states. I also compared evidence from interviews with a variety of written sources, including ministry guidelines, training materials, prosecutors’ memoranda, judicial opinions, scholarly criticism, and news stories. The open-ended, qualitative field interviews are at the heart of the project. They help to uncover the principles animating otherwise shadowy German covert operations. And they illustrate the dilemmas inherent in the practices; the obstacles to reform; and the different tradeoffs which the American and German regulatory systems have made in securing the legitimacy of these practices

‘This town’s a different town today’:: Policing and regulating the night-time economy

This article considers recent policing and regulatory responses to the night-time economy in England and Wales. Drawing upon the findings of a broader two-year qualitative investigation of local and national developments in alcohol policy, it identifies a dramatic acceleration of statutory activity, with 12 new or revised powers, and several more in prospect, introduced by the Labour Government within its first decade in office. Interview data and documentary sources are used to explore the degree to which the introduction of such powers, often accompanied by forceful rhetoric and high profile police action, has translated into a sustained expansion of control. Many of the new powers are spatially directed, as well as being focused upon the actions of distinct individuals or businesses, yet the willingness and capacity to apply powers to offending individuals in comparison to businesses is often variable and asymmetrical. The practice of negotiating order in the night-time economy is riddled with tensions and ambiguities that reflect the ad hoc nature and rapid escalation of the regulatory architecture. Night-time urban security governance is understood as the outcome of subtle organizational and interpersonal power-plays. Social orders, normative schemas and apportionments of blame thus arise as a byproduct of patterned (structural) relations