Europe's Global Gateway: A New Instrument of Geopolitics

In December 2021, the EU member states agreed on the Global Gateway strategy to mobilize public and private funds of up to €300 billion between 2021 and 2027, to invest in digital, climate and energy, transport, health, education, and research fields. With a geographical focus on Africa, Global Gateway links infrastructure investment projects with condition principles - including democratic values, good governance, and transparency - and catalyzes private investment into EU development financing. Against this backdrop, this study explores why EU member states agreed on this new geopolitical instrument. This piece posits that the confluence of three factors enabled the creation of Global Gateway. First, the EU established this new instrument to counter China's role as a global infrastructure lender in Africa. Second, Global Gateway was possible through the shift to private investment in multilateral development financing. Equally important for the establishment of Global Gateway was the European Commission's transformational leadership as an entrepreneurial agent in designing this geopolitical strategy of the EU's power projection. The conclusion outlines future research avenues and enables readers to consider the wider prospects and caveats of the Global Gateway strategy

Explaining coherence in international regime complexes: How the World Bank shapes the field of multilateral development finance

The landscape of multilateral development finance has changed dramatically in the past decades. At Bretton Woods, delegates envisioned the World Bank as the focal organization mobilizing financial support for national development strategies. Today, this issue area is populated by no less than 27 multilateral development banks including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank created under Chinese leadership. This paper shows that, despite this institutional proliferation, the development finance regime remains largely coherent and core governance features designed at Bretton Woods continue to shape the emerging regime complex. We develop a historical institutionalist argument for why newly created institutions are likely to imitate extant institutions. We suggest that states add new institutions not only in response to deficiencies in extant institutions but also to increase their control and reputation. We analyze three causal pathways - path-dependence, orchestration, and independent learning - that contribute to a coherent regime complex. We show that focal international organizations can use their position to prevent incoherence

The Limits of Transparency:Expert Knowledge and Meaningful Accountability in Central Banking

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability - that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of 'epistemic communities' and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise

Global Democracy in Decline? How Rising Authoritarianism Limits Democratic Control over International Institutions

Over the past decade, rising authoritarian regimes have begun to challenge the liberal international order. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the field of multilateral development finance, where China and its coalition partners from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa have created two new multilateral development banks. This article argues that China and its partners have used the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to increase their power and to restrict democratic control mechanisms. By comparing formal mechanisms of democratic control in both organizations to the World Bank, this article shows that civil society access, transparency, and accountability are lower at the AIIB and NDB than they are at the World Bank

Scraping By? Europe's law and policy on social media research access

This chapter discusses the legal aspects of researchers' access to social media data, focusing in particular on recent developments in European law. We see law as playing both an enabling and a restrictive role in facilitating platform data access. Identifying a number of shortcomings in current legislation, we argue for the creation of a sound legal framework for scholarly data research. The new Digital Services Act makes some promising first steps towards regulating programmatic data access through APIs, but many obstacles and ambiguities remain. Furthermore, a clear vision on the legal status of public interest scraping projects is still lacking. In the teeth of private ordering by global platform companies, as new gatekeepers in academic research, ensuring fair and rights-sensitive data access must be a priority for the (European) legislator

Probleme und Potenziale des NetzDG - ein Reader mit fünf HBI-Expertisen

Das NetzDG ist seit Januar 2018 vollständig in Kraft und zielt u. a. auf die Bekämpfung von Hassrede und anderer strafbarer Inhalte auf sozialen Plattformen einer gewissen Größe ab. Das Gesetz sieht Berichtspflichten sowie die Pflicht eines effektiven Beschwerdemanagements vor und ist sowohl in der Wissenschaft als auch in der Praxis auf einige Kritik gestoßen. Das Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) hat die Gelegenheiten genutzt, für die Konzeptions- über die Implementierungs- bis hin zur Reformphase des NetzDG wissenschaftlichen Input zu geben. Mit Wolfgang Schulz und Matthias C. Kettemann waren zwei Institutsmitglieder als Sachverständige in verschiedenen Phasen der parlamentarischen Befassung mit dem Gesetz geladen. Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier versammelt fünf Beiträge aus den Federn von Wolfgang Schulz, Matthias C. Kettemann und Amélie Heldt, die in den Jahren 2018-2019 erschienen sind bzw. für Anhörungen erstellt wurden und das NetzDG aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven thematisieren: Wolfgang Schulz’ Beitrag Regulating Intermediaries to Protect Privacy Online - the Case of the German NetzDG stellte die erste englischsprachige Analyse des Gesetzes dar und wurde weltweit stark gelesen. Anlässlich des Internet Governance Forum (Deutschland) 2018 in Berlin wurde Matthias C. Kettemann vom Center on Deliberative Democracy der Stanford University eingeladen, "Balanced Briefing Materials" zu erstellen, um die Diskussion über das NetzDG zu versachlichen. Amélie Pia Heldt untersucht in ihrem Beitrag aus dem Jahr 2019 die ersten Berichte von Intermediären nach dem NetzDG. Matthias C. Kettemann hat eine Stellungnahme als Sachverständiger für die öffentliche Anhörung zum Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz auf Einladung des Ausschusses für Recht und Verbraucherschutz des Deutschen Bundestags vom Mai 2019 erarbeitet. Matthias C. Kettemann hat zudem eine Analyse für den Europarat verfasst, die einen Überblick über den Umgang mit illegalen Internet-Inhalten in Deutschland 2016-2019 bietet

Model-Based Noninvasive Estimation of Intracranial Pressure from Cerebral Blood Flow Velocity and Arterial Pressure

Intracranial pressure (ICP) is affected in many neurological conditions. Clinical measurement of pressure on the brain currently requires placing a probe in the cerebrospinal fluid compartment, the brain tissue, or other intracranial space. This invasiveness limits the measurement to critically ill patients. Because ICP is also clinically important in conditions ranging from brain tumors and hydrocephalus to concussions, noninvasive determination of ICP would be desirable. Our model-based approach to continuous estimation and tracking of ICP uses routinely obtainable time-synchronized, noninvasive (or minimally invasive) measurements of peripheral arterial blood pressure and blood flow velocity in the middle cerebral artery (MCA), both at intra-heartbeat resolution. A physiological model of cerebrovascular dynamics provides mathematical constraints that relate the measured waveforms to ICP. Our algorithm produces patient-specific ICP estimates with no calibration or training. Using 35 hours of data from 37 patients with traumatic brain injury, we generated ICP estimates on 2665 nonoverlapping 60-beat data windows. Referenced against concurrently recorded invasive parenchymal ICP that varied over 100 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) across all records, our estimates achieved a mean error (bias) of 1.6 mmHg and SD of error (SDE) of 7.6 mmHg. For the 1673 data windows over 22 hours in which blood flow velocity recordings were available from both the left and the right MCA, averaging the resulting bilateral ICP estimates reduced the bias to 1.5 mmHg and SDE to 5.9 mmHg. This accuracy is already comparable to that of some invasive ICP measurement methods in current clinical use.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (R01 EB001659)CIMIT: Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technolog

Not all who are bots are evil: A cross-platform analysis of automated agent governance

The growth of online platforms is accompanied by the increasing use of automated agents. Despite being discussed primarily in the context of opinion manipulation, agents play diverse roles within platform ecosystems that raises the need for governance approaches that go beyond policing agents’ unwanted behaviour. To provide a more nuanced assessment of agent governance, we introduce an analytical framework that distinguishes between different aspects and forms of governance. We then apply it to explore how agents are governed across nine platforms. Our observations show that despite acknowledging diverse roles of agents, platforms tend to focus on governing selected forms of their misuse. We also observe differences in governance approaches used by platforms, in particular when it comes to the agent rights/obligations and transparency of policing mechanisms. These observations highlight the necessity of advancing the algorithmic governance research agenda and developing a generalizable normative framework for agent governance

Not all who are bots are evil: A cross-platform analysis of automated agent governance

The growth of online platforms is accompanied by the increasing use of automated agents. Despite being discussed primarily in the context of opinion manipulation, agents play diverse roles within platform ecosystems that raises the need for governance approaches that go beyond policing agents’ unwanted behaviour. To provide a more nuanced assessment of agent governance, we introduce an analytical framework that distinguishes between different aspects and forms of governance. We then apply it to explore how agents are governed across nine platforms. Our observations show that despite acknowledging diverse roles of agents, platforms tend to focus on governing selected forms of their misuse. We also observe differences in governance approaches used by platforms, in particular when it comes to the agent rights/obligations and transparency of policing mechanisms. These observations highlight the necessity of advancing the algorithmic governance research agenda and developing a generalizable normative framework for agent governance

Evaluation of the protein characteristics of four diverse grasses

Forage protein characteristics in four grasses were evaluated by the nylon bag method. All of the forages used (Bermudagrass hay, brome hay, forage sorghum hay, and prairie hay) were of relatively low quality, except the Bermudagrass, which was of average quality. The forages differed in the size of different protein fractions and in the rate and extent of protein degradation. Predicted extent of ruminal protein degradation (i.e., ruminal protein availability) was lowest for prairie hay, intermediate for Bermudagrass and forage sorghum hay, and highest for the brome hay