Smart government

It’s nice to be back and the quest for unpacking alternative and plausible futures for Ilocos continues.

But before I carry on let me share a bit of the wonderful experiences and insights I had when I participated in designing the United Nations Foresight Section and Rockefeller Foundation’s global futures literacy project in Bellagio, Italy and chaired a panel on changing research practices during the 2013 World Social Science Forum in Montreal, Canada.

The Bellagio foresight conference explored new ways of using foresight for decision-making and governance. The juice of the event was to design using collective intelligence approach the UKnow Lab Global Futures Literacy project for developed and developing countries. The International Social Science Council, on the other hand, granted me a scholarship fund to write, present and chair a panel on the futures of the social sciences at the Montreal Forum. Here I met a lot of wonderful people and experts from all around the world. I got exposed to emerging ideas and some plausible trends that might impact Ilocos in the years to come.  

First, there is an expanding and deepening interest in strategic foresight at the global and local levels.

The UN Global Futures Literacy Project wants to engage decision-makers to apply strategic foresight in decision-making and governance. The future is a resource and a social capital that could be use in policy-analysis and development planning. By enlarging decision-makers understanding of anticipatory systems thinking and tools, novel approaches to governance and leadership could emerge. Will we see the creation of department of foresight, committee of foresight and integration of strategic foresight in national and local planning and policy-making and implementation in the immediate future? My take is absolutely yes. 

Second, in my research on the futures of the social sciences I concluded that big data and social robotics will certainly impact the way we perceive change, create, learn and distribute knowledge in the near future. The country may likely emerge, in a status quo scenario, as late adopters of the ASEAN convergence and big data governance.  Our current IT infrastructure, broadband penetration and internet speed is one of the lowest in South East Asia. Hong Kong, a hyper dense region, leads the world in average peak connection speed at an impressive 63.6 Mbps according to Bloomberg. The Philippines is at 1.4 Mbps and 13.8Mbps at best in a recent AKAMAI report. 

Big data governance is the term used for the collection of large data sets in governance to spot emerging trends, prevent disease, share and transfer analysis to combat crime, traffic, anticipate weather impacts, etc.  Big data governance is an emerging imperative for policy analysis and development. We might likely have them sooner than later. It could be that the World Bank might include them in their structural adjustments agenda, etc. The Philippines could be in the list where they could experiment big data governance in developing countries.

So you might ask will it impact our personal and public lives in the future. Yes I think so. In fact, corporations are utilizing big data tools to collect our cellphone records and Facebook accounts at this moment to spot trends, analyze public sentiments, etc. for commercial and market purposes. Will people congregate in the streets to protest against big data governance? Or will we embrace it?

With that in mind, in addition to the above emerging trends here are four emerging governance trends that might impact the province in the next ten years:

So what’s the post-2015 successor to the Millennium Development Goals? A special report indicates that the world succeeded in halving poverty rate but health goals looks quite difficult to achieve in 2015. There are menus of indicators for some candidate goals.  A set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will likely build on the MDGs is quite an emerging trend. The Rio + 20 outcome document entitled “The Future We Want” called for some goals to be integrated in the new UN post-2015 development agenda. An international symposium in Sydney Australia will be held in September 2014 to discuss what’s in and what’s out for SDGs. A special summit will also be held to explore ways of “branding” the SDGs this year. Academics and social innovators are encouraged to begin their research and participate in setting the global agenda.

After a decade of research and public experimentations, culture-based governance succeeded in shifting local governance priorities and agenda. The idea has become a trend and may likely intensify in the next five years. The Maharlika Artists and Writers National Sunrise (MAWF) festival is one of the early adopters of culture-based governance and leadership. The group saw the role of arts and culture in revitalizing local governance and indigenous communities. It had produced top caliber artists—Kadangyan, Florence Cinco, Katribu ng Palawan to name a few and had significant roles and participation in helping design or inspire the festivals of the provinces of Iloilo, Davao City, Cebu City, Boracay among others. We learned that arts and culture is an effective public relations approach. So what’s emerging? Science, Technology and Innovation to governance. Local governments will be encouraged to engage communities develop dirt-based, low-cost, cheap, easily replicable technologies. It sounds like India and South Korea to me.

Grant reductions will continue up until the twenty five to thirty percent reduction targets are met at the local and global levels.  New and radical conversations between local governments and citizens have to occur to create a more sustainable operating model for public services. So questions such as how can we encourage local citizens to play a significant part in governance to cut back spending, decrease welfare dependency, and respond to social care, community resilience and climate change are significant. Are we ready to engage citizens in co-designing and co-producing ‘big society’ projects?

Smart government. The question of driving public complaints to make public sector services more efficient and stronger is on the radar. Governments have to find ways to reframe ‘citizen complaints’ beyond the culture of fear and blame. Complaints are good sources of insight. As suggested by a colleague improving “staff happiness” and “humanizing the front end” is a key factor to a better citizen-government engagement.