Traditional policy analysis approaches are characterized by a focus on system modeling and choosing among policy alternatives. While successful in many cases, this approach has been increasingly criticized for being technocratic and ignoring the behavioral and political dimensions of most policy processes. In recent decades, increased awareness of the multi-actor, multiple perspective, and poly-centric character of many policy processes has led to the development of a variety of different ...

This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows h...

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influenceIf the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in com...

Massive amounts of data on human beings can now be analyzed. Pragmatic purposes abound, including selling goods and services, winning political campaigns, and identifying possible terrorists. Yet 'big data' can also be harnessed to serve the public good: scientists can use big data to do research that improves the lives of human beings, improves government services, and reduces taxpayer costs. In order to achieve this goal, researchers must have access to this data - raising important priv...

Many books instruct readers on how to use the tools of policy analysis. This book is different. Its primary focus is on helping readers to look critically at the strengths, limitations, and the underlying assumptions analysts make when they use standard tools or problem framings. Using examples, many of which involve issues in science and technology, the book exposes readers to some of the critical issues of taste, professional responsibility, ethics, and values that are associated with po...

Managing safety in a professional environment requires constant negotiation with other competitive dimensions of risk management (finances, market and political drivers, manpower and social crisis). This is obvious, although generally not said in safety manuals. The book provides a unique vision of how to best find these compromises, starting with lessons learnt from natural risk management by individuals, then applying them to the craftsman industry, complex industrial systems (civil avia...

How effective are public managers as they seek to influence how public organizations deliver policy results? How, and how much, is management related to the performance of public programs? What aspects of management can be distinguished? Can their separable contributions to performance be estimated? The fate of public policies in today's world lies in the hands of public organizations, which in turn are often intertwined with others in latticed patterns of governance. Collectively, these o...

This book explores how transportation models can play a role in a changing transport planning and policy making context. Most models are rooted in decades of development work and are geared to offer value-free, academic and explicit knowledge to transport planning experts. However, planning practice has changed dramatically over the years, resulting in a less technical rational view on the use of such knowledge – especially so in early, strategy making phases. More and more complex policy ...

GIS and the Social Sciences offers a uniquely social science approach on the theory and application of GIS with a range of modern examples. It explores how human geography can engage with a variety of important policy issues through linking together GIS and spatial analysis, and demonstrates the importance of applied GIS and spatial analysis for solving real-world problems in both the public and private sector.The book introduces basic theoretical material from a social sc...

Addressing the urgency of radical decarbonization as a mitigative response to climate risk, this book explores how business can respond to the challenges of climate risk, through various transformational processes. Those processes involve cognitive transformations, organizational changes, climate risk integration into risk management practices, shifts in corporate reporting and disclosure as well as futuristic scenario-based planning beyond normal business planning cycles.Though mu...

This is an open access book. As a leading role in the global megatrend of scientific innovation, China has been creating a more and more open environment for scientific innovation, increasing the depth and breadth of academic cooperation, and building a community of innovation that benefits all. Such endeavors are making new contributions to the globalization and creating a community of shared future.The 3rd International Conference on Big Data and Social Sciences (ICBDSS 2022) was...

This open access book is based on "Spationomy – Spatial Exploration of Economic Data", an interdisciplinary and international project in the frame of ERASMUS+ funded by the European Union.The project aims to exchange interdisciplinary knowledge in the fields of economics and geomatics. For the newly introduced courses, interdisciplinary learning materials have been developed by a team of lecturers from four different universities in three countries. In a first study block, students...