... and how to link governmental policy processes and geosciences via an interactive decision making platform for water resources co-management.
Initial Context - Case Study New Zealand
The responsibility of management of natural resources, in particular water, is typically delegated to the Regional Councils by the Resource Management Act. Decisions regarding water management are regulated through the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. However, those decisions need to be backed by thorough science and in consultation with all stakeholders, be it Iwi, domestic, agricultural or industrial water users, or the general public in regards to recreational services that water resources provide.
The responsibility of management of natural resources, in particular water, is typically delegated to the Regional Councils by the Resource Management Act. Decisions regarding water management are regulated through the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management. However, those decisions need to be backed by thorough science and in consultation with all stakeholders, be it Iwi, domestic, agricultural or industrial water users, or the general public in regards to recreational services that water resources provide.
Current policy and management decision processes follow a rigid procedure, 1) the science to understand the resources, 2) a consultation process (if at all) about the plan how to manage the resource and 3) the development of a long term strategy and policy decision.
The main concern that I’d like to address is the agility of that process. These steps follow the traditional waterfall project management model, which probably is due to the limitations of current tools. Scientific models that aim to characterise the availability and of natural resources and dynamics of environmental process are developed, possible impact assessed and then described in reports for further use. The data and assumptions utilised in the research process are limited snapshots in time, dependent on the quality of data collection and curation processes, and scope and depth vary with available budget. Based on the information from these reports resource managers discuss strategies how to manage the water resources in reconciliation with demands. The consultation with users is again a cost- intensive process, because it is time-consuming. Furthermore, assumptions e.g. limits or local/regional differences in water allocation for the modelling process cannot be changed flexibly.
The consultation process therefore seems limited to very few pre-decided scenarios, which might not have considered all important stakeholders (who are all important stakeholders anyway?). Thus, a final management and policy decision is often not satisfactory.
I would like to propose more research into an agile, aka “liquid resource management system”. Recent advances in computer and web technologies for example allow dynamic exposure of datasets and scientific software. So it might be time to link data with models and a “delegated voting” mechanism into an online resource management feedback system. Such an online platform would provide the capabilities to run different scenarios transparently within a democratic discussion forum. Through delegates stakeholders can have their interests represented in a co-management approach which allows a close link of the resource managers with the affected communities while having the current science at hand.
Background Liquid Democracy
Probably one of the first explicit thoughts on Liquid Democracy originate from Bryan Ford's draft named Delegative Democracy from 2002. Back then it was uncertain what scientific venue(s) it would be suitable for. Bryan unfortunately didn’t manage to get back to exploring and developing it in any rigorous scientific fashion.
- Delegative Democracy: http://www.brynosaurus.com/deleg/deleg.pdf
However, he published a well cited informal blog post revisiting the idea and pointing to some of the interesting developments since 2002:
- Delegative Democracy Revisited: http://bford.github.io/2014/11/16/deleg.html
The closest academic work Bryan referred to as a reasonably serious, rigorous exploration of the topic of any kind (and the only peer-reviewed and published work directly on the topic that by then was James Green-Armytage’s political-economic analysis:
- Direct Voting and Proxy Voting: http://jamesgreenarmytage.com/proxy.pdf
- Green-Armytage, J. (2015). Direct Voting and Proxy Voting. Constitutional Political Economy, 26(2), 190–220. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9176-9
This paper took a first step at theoretically defining and analyzing the idea from a cost/benefit perspective, but it’s only a first step and leaves a lot of unanswered questions and issues, and of does not contributes to the empirical space.
Helene Landemore, a colleague of Bryan in political science at Yale, has been interested in this and related “collective intelligence/decision-making” topics for a while. She is working with Rob Reich and Lucy Bernholz at Stanford on some events in the near future exploring this and other related “digital democracy” topics. One might try reaching out to any or all of them as additional points of contacts with more experience in the political and social sciences space.
Further academic or applied works around Liquid Democracy can be found occasionally, for example:
- Blum, C. & Zuber, C.I., 2015. Liquid Democracy: Potentials, Problems, and Perspectives. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 24(August 2014), pp.6–9. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/jopp.12065
- Rodriguez, M. et al., 2007. Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making. In 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07). IEEE, pp. 90–90. Available at: http://public.lanl.gov/jhw/Jen/Publications_files/Smarto-Share.pdf
- Paulin, A., 2014. Through Liquid Democracy to Sustainable Non-Bureaucratic Government. CeDEM, 6(2), pp.216–230. Available at: http://research.apaulin.com/research/2014/cedem14-ld-snbg
- Boldi, P. et al., 2011. Viscous democracy for social networks. Communications of the ACM, 54(6), p.129. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1953154
- Zwattendorfer, B., Hillebold, C. & Teufl, P., 2013. Secure and Privacy-Preserving Proxy Voting System. 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on e-Business Engineering, 0, pp.472–477
- Link, J.Á.B., Tchorbadjiiski, A. & Wehrle, K., 2014. Opportunistic Vote Delegation for E-Voting Based on Liquid Democracy. In Proceedings of the 6th Extreme Conference on Communication. Galapagos Islands: ACM. Available at: https://www.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/fileadmin/papers/2014/2014-bitsch-extremecom-liquid-democracy.pdf
- Behrens, J. et al., 2014. The Liquid Democracy Journal - Issue 1, Berlin. Available at: http://www.liquid-democracy-journal.org/.
- Behrens, J. et al., 2014. The Principles of LiquidFeedback. Interaktive Demokratie e. V. Berlin. ISBN: 978–3–00–044795–2, p.240
Possibly the most prominent of the application of Liquid Democracy is the German Pirate Party [1], for which the Software Liquid Feedback was developed [2]. A Medium article describes the distinctive features [3]:
Liquid Democracy is a new form for collective decision making that gives voters full decisional control. Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains. This is in contrast with direct democracy, where participants are required to personally vote on all issues; and in contrast with representative democracy, where participants vote for representatives once in a certain election cycle and then never worry about voting anymore.
Coming back to the water sciences and data issues around the water resources management process. In the last decade so called geoportals evolved to integrated systems of systems, not only providing data, but also processing routines and visualisations of the processed geospatial data to support science and education as well as policy and decision making for particular environmental domains. From a scientific and data-centric point of view, it becomes an obvious choice to link the democratic processes with the data in an online platform, e.g. as suggested by Craglia & Shanley (2015), or in an elaborate study "When Water Becomes the New Oil" (Kwiatkowski & Höchli, 2016) from the Swiss Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), an independent think tank based in Rüschlikon near Zurich, which frames this as a participatory process.
- Craglia, M. & Shanley, L., 2015. Data democracy - increased supply of geospatial information and expanded participatory processes in the production of data. International Journal of Digital Earth, 8(9), pp.679–693. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17538947.2015.1008214
- Kwiatkowski, M. & Höchli, B., 2016. Wenn Wasser zum neuen Öl Wird Wie die Schweiz die Konflikte der Zukunft meistert, Zurich. Available at: http://www.gdi.ch/de/Think-Tank/Studien/Wenn-Wasser-zum-neuen-Oel-wird/727
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