29,455 research outputs found

    Transparent government, not transparent citizens: a report on privacy and transparency for the Cabinet Office

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    1. Privacy is extremely important to transparency. The political legitimacy of a transparency programme will depend crucially on its ability to retain public confidence. Privacy protection should therefore be embedded in any transparency programme, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. 2. Privacy and transparency are compatible, as long as the former is carefully protected and considered at every stage. 3. Under the current transparency regime, in which public data is specifically understood not to include personal data, most data releases will not raise privacy concerns. However, some will, especially as we move toward a more demand-driven scheme. 4. Discussion about deanonymisation has been driven largely by legal considerations, with a consequent neglect of the input of the technical community. 5. There are no complete legal or technical fixes to the deanonymisation problem. We should continue to anonymise sensitive data, being initially cautious about releasing such data under the Open Government Licence while we continue to take steps to manage and research the risks of deanonymisation. Further investigation to determine the level of risk would be very welcome. 6. There should be a focus on procedures to output an auditable debate trail. Transparency about transparency – metatransparency – is essential for preserving trust and confidence. Fourteen recommendations are made to address these conclusions

    Concentration of Population in Tokyo: A Survey

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    The mono-polar concentration of population in Tokyo has been intensifying steadily in Japan since the mid-1990s. This demographic movement stands in sharp contrast to the tri-polar (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) demographic movement in the high growth era before the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Mono-polar in-migration reflects the change in industrial structure after the rapid yen appreciation and the two decades of stagnation caused by the bubble burst in an atmosphere of demographic aging and declining birth rate. One noteworthy recent feature of the population inflow into Tokyo is the increasing inflow of young females with post-secondary education, leading to even gloomier economic and social prospects in most outlying regions. This economic externality should be dealt with by means of well-designed policies which, benefitting from the experience of events several decades ago, avoid throttling the benefits of the market mechanism.This paper is based on a seminar presentation given in Japanese on July 11, 2015 at “Tokyo, a Mega-city in Asia,” organized by the Science Council of Japan. The seminar was produced by Prof. Kaoru Sugihara, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Kenji Umetani, GRIPS professor at the time of the seminar, thanks Prof. Sugihara for kindly offering him the opportunity to present there

    Community Resilience Research: UK Case Studies, Lessons and Recommendations report to the Cabinet Office and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

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    This report presents four case studies carried out for the Community Resilience project funded by DSTL and supported by the Civil Contingency Secretariat (CCS), Cabinet Office. The work for this project was carried out between September and December 2011. The aim of the Community Resilience project was to develop a better understanding of the role of community resilience in emergency response and recovery situations in order to inform Cabinet Office / Civil Contingencies Secretariat policy on community resilience and to inform the development of future work

    Appendix C - The Bahamas Information Services Letter

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    Appendix C - The Bahamas Information Services Letter

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    Recall of MPs in the UK : 'if I were you I wouldn't start from here'

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    The publication of a White Paper, Recall of MPs, and a draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny, by the UK Government in December 2011 was greeted with almost universal antipathy. In bringing forward the draft Bill Cabinet Office ministers declared their intention to ‘trigger a debate on what would be the best model for a recall mechanism’ and they expressed a willingness ‘to consider alternative models’ or even to contemplate ‘adopting a completely different approach’. Yet, they made it clear any such proposals ‘must work within our unique constitutional framework’ and be ‘suitable for our system of representative democracy’. The objective of this article, therefore, is to do precisely what Cabinet Office ministers asked: to examine comparative experience and to apply lessons from that experience to the UK's ‘unique constitutional framework’. Three questions guide the analysis: first, what is the problem to be addressed in introducing recall?; secondly, what does comparative experience reveal about the operation of recall? and thirdly how unique is the UK's constitutional framework

    Doing the Möbius Strip: The politics of the Bailey Review

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    In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions associated with making both arguments at once. We theorise the split as ‘doing the möbius strip’, as both sides agree on the assumption that commercial and sexual choice is either present or absent for young women. In this way, they reframe the contradictions and inequalities that shape young women’s behaviours as a problem of propriety and decency

    Revisiting ‘common-sense’ in a time of cultivated ignorance – a conversation with Errol Lawrence

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    An interview with Errol Lawrence, discussing the concept of common-sense racism, the adaptation of racist cultures, battles around public services and the role of the state and the continuing influence of The Empire Strikes Back

    National Security Risks? Uncertainty, Austerity and Other Logics of Risk in the UK government’s National Security Strategy

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    Risk scholars within Security studies have argued that the concept of security has gone through a fundamental transformation away from a threat-based conceptualisation of defence, urgency and exceptionality to one of preparedness, precautions and prevention of future risks, some of which are calculable, others of which are not. This article explores whether and how the concept of security is changing due to this ‘rise of risk’, through a hermeneutically grounded conceptual and discourse analysis of the United Kingdom government’s national security strategy (NSS) from 1998 to 2011. We ask how risk-security language is employed in the NSS; what factors motivate such discursive shifts; and what, if any, consequences of these shifts can be discerned in UK national security practices. Our aim is twofold: to better understand shifts in the security understandings and policies of UK authorities; and to contribute to the conceptual debate on the significance of the rise of risk as a component of the concept of security
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