Happy New Year! I hope 2024 is off to a good start for you.
My last project of last year (finished on the buzzer…) was a paper expanding the ideas first floated in the DigiCon blog post ‘Resh(AI)ping good administration: beyond systemic risks vs individual rights?’, which sparked interesting discussion at the DigiCon III conference last fall.
With a slightly different (and hopefully clearer) title, the paper is now under peer-review (and so, as always, comments welcome ahead of a final revision!).
Titled ‘Resh(AI)ping Good Administration: Addressing the mass effects of public sector digitalisation’, the paper focuses on what I think is the most distinctive feature of public sector digitalisation and the prime challenge to traditional good administration guarantees: mass effects. Its abstract is as follows:
Public sector digitalisation is transforming public governance at an accelerating rate. Digitalisation is outpacing the evolution of the legal framework. Despite several strands of international efforts to adjust good administration guarantees to new modes of digital public governance, progress has so far been slow and tepid. The increasing automation of decision-making processes puts significant pressure on traditional good administration guarantees, jeopardises individual due process rights, and risks eroding public trust. Automated decision-making has so far attracted the bulk of scholarly attention, especially in the European context. However, most analyses seek to reconcile existing duties towards individuals under the right to good administration with the challenges arising from digitalisation. Taking a critical and technology-centred doctrinal approach to developments under the law of the European Union and the Council of Europe, this paper goes beyond current debates to challenge the sufficiency of existing good administration duties. By stressing the mass effects that can derive from automated decision-making by the public sector, the paper advances the need to adapt good administration guarantees to a collective dimension through an extension and a broadening of the public sector’s good administration duties: that is, through an extended ex ante control of organisational risk-taking, and a broader ex post duty of automated redress. These legal modifications should be urgently implemented.
Sanchez-Graells, Albert, ‘Resh(AI)ping Good Administration: Addressing the mass effects of public sector digitalisation’ (December 19, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4669589.