I look forward to delivering the lecture ‘Responsibly Buying Artificial Intelligence: A Regulatory Hallucination?’ as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2023-24 organised by UCL Laws. The lecture will be this Thursday 23 November 2023 at 6pm GMT and you can still register to participate (either online or in person). These are the slides I will be using, in case you want to take a sneak peek. I will post a draft version of the paper after the lecture. Comments welcome!
Public procurement governance as an information-intensive exercise, and the allure of digital technologies
I have just started a 12-month Mid-Career Fellowship funded by the British Academy with the purpose of writing up the monograph Digital Technologies and Public Procurement. Gatekeeping and experimentation in digital public governance (OUP, forthcoming).
In the process of writing up, I will be sharing some draft chapters and other thought pieces. I would warmly welcome feedback that can help me polish the final version. As always, please feel free to reach out: a.sanchez-graells@bristol.ac.uk.
In this first draft chapter (num 6), I explore the technological promise of digital governance and use public procurement as a case study of ‘policy irresistibility’. The main ideas in the chapter are as follows:
This Chapter takes a governance perspective to reflect on the process of horizon scanning and experimentation with digital technologies. The Chapter stresses how aspirations of digital transformation can drive policy agendas and make them vulnerable to technological hype, despite technological immaturity and in the face of evidence of the difficulty of rolling out such transformation programmes—eg regarding the still ongoing wave of transition to e-procurement. Delivering on procurement’s goals of integrity, efficiency and transparency requires facing challenges derived from the information intensity and complexity of procurement governance. Digital technologies promise to bring solutions to such informational burden and thus augment decisionmakers’ ability to deal with that complexity and with related uncertainty. The allure of the potential benefits of deploying digital technologies generates ‘policy irresistibility’ that can capture decision-making by policymakers overly exposed to the promise of technological fixes to recalcitrant governance challenges. This can in turn result in excessive experimentation with digital technologies for procurement governance in the name of transformation. The Chapter largely focuses on the EU policy framework, but the insights derived from this analysis are easily exportable.
Another draft chapter (num 7) will follow soon with more detailed analysis of the feasibility boundary for the adoption of digital technologies for procurement governance purposes. The full details of this draft chapter are as follows: A Sanchez-Graells, ‘The technological promise of digital governance: procurement as a case study of “policy irresistibility”’ to be included in A Sanchez-Graells, Digital Technologies and Public Procurement. Gatekeeping and experimentation in digital public governance (OUP, forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4216825.