Governance in the Information Era ─ Theory and Practice of Policy Informatics

Policy informatics is addressing governance challenges and their consequences, which span the seeming inability of governments to solve complex problems and the disaffection of people from their governments. Policy informatics seeks approaches that enable our governance systems to address increasingly complex challenges and to meet the rising expectations of people to be full participants in their communities. This book approaches these challenges by applying a combination of the latest American and European approaches in applying complex systems modeling, crowdsourcing, participatory platforms and citizen science to explore complex governance challenges in domains that include education, environment, and health.

The traditional norms of hierarchical governance, expert-driven decision-making, institutional control, and centralization have begun to fade as the costs of community engagement have declined, data have become increasingly available and accessible, and computational and analytical skills have increased dramatically. Further, stakeholders and publics are becoming more diverse, unequal, vocal and polarized. Against this backdrop, the book explores how to enable public values to flourish by promoting new forms of effective governance and exploring the changes necessary in technology, processes, institutional capacity and social norms to realize that future.

Erik W. Johnston is the Director of the Center for Policy Informatics at Arizona State University and an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs. He also holds joint or affiliated positions in Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences, the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, the School for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and the Decision Theater.