Tackling civic participation challenges with emerging technologies

1. Introduction

OECD countries have been experiencing a gradual erosion of public trust. On average, across OECD countries, only 39% of people have high or moderately high trust in their national governments1.

Nevertheless, OECD data also shows that countries can act to improve citizens’ trust by creating regular and meaningful opportunities for citizens to be part of policy and decision making. OECD data shows that perceptions of having a say in government actions influence trust more than socio-economic and demographic characteristics do (OECD, 2024[1]). In 2024, on average, among those who reported having a say in what the government does, 69% report high or moderately high trust in the national government, in contrast to only 22% among those who feel they do not have a say, representing the largest trust gap.

Many governments, in particular at the local level, are exploring mechanisms such as participatory budgeting, consultation, direct mechanisms such as referenda or petitions and deliberative processes. The OECD has collected almost 800 deliberative cases from 34 countries, with 96% of those situated within OECD members. For example, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have organised citizen assemblies on climate issues at the national level, and the European Union used these mechanisms to gather citizens across the Union to deliberate on future-looking issues such as virtual worlds and energetical transition.

Governments are increasingly adopting digital technologies to transform the way they interact with the public, both in formal channels (public consultations, participatory budgeting, etc.) as well as informal channels such as social media. Cities like Barcelona (Spain), the Hague (Netherlands), or Valongo (Portugal) have deployed digital tools to enable citizens to suggest ideas and vote in consultations. Emerging technologies can open a new range of opportunities for citizen participation. For example, AI and virtual reality can improve the reach and effectiveness of participatory and deliberative processes, addressing challenges such as inclusion and the provision of information. However, emerging technologies also pose new risks that need to be accounted for and addressed to ensure they can deliver their full potential. Although emerging technologies can provide an exciting and experimental prospect to solve participation challenges, the approach adopted aims to navigate this subject without succumbing to techno-solutionism nor to techno-pessimism. The paper does not advocate technology as a silver bullet to the challenges of participation or deliberation, neither will it discount technology’s potential to innovate and usher in new approaches and tools to address well-established barriers and hurdles.

The content and findings of this paper are based on desk research, a comprehensive literature review, and interviews with leading professionals in the field of emerging technologies and participation from public administration, private sector, academia, and international organizations. Its purpose is to support public authorities across the OECD in improving citizen participation with emerging technologies by exploring (i) the potential benefits, (ii) challenges and (iii) outlining key actions for governments to effectively leverage emerging technologies, with the ultimate goal of improving citizen participation.

Emerging technologies and their interaction with the public sector

The OECD has undertaken significant work on digital technologies and its use in the public sector. This research builds upon existing work published by the OECD on the matter, including Blockchains Unchained: Blockchain Technology and its Use in the Public Sector (Berryhill, Bourgery and Hanson, 2018[1]), State of the Art in the Use of Emerging Technologies in the Public Sector (Ubaldi et al., 2019[2]), the Uncertain Promise of Blockchain for Government (Lindman et al., 2020[3]), the OECD Framework for Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies (OECD, 2024[4]) and the work done by the OECD’s Observatory for Public Sector Innovation in particular Hello, World: Artificial Intelligence and its use in the Public Sector (Berryhill et al., 2019[5]).

Table 1. Different approaches and definitions to understand digital and emerging technologies

Scope	Definition
Technology	“The knowledge, concepts, experimental processes, tangible and intangible artefacts and wider socio-technical systems that are required to recognise technical problems and to conceptualise, formulate, research, develop, test, apply, diffuse and maintain effective solutions to those problems as they change through time”. Nightingale (2014)
Digital technology	“Information and communication technologies (ICTs), including the Internet, mobile technologies and devices, as well as data analytics used to improve the generation, collection, exchange, aggregation, combination, analysis, access, searchability and presentation of digital content, including for the development of services and apps.” OECD (2014)
Emerging technology	“Emerging technologies, from synthetic biology and neurotechnology to AI, immersive and quantum technologies, are characterised by rapid development and uncertainty in trajectory and impact”. OECD (2024) “Those technologies of recent adoption, or currently under development, offer disruption to the current operating models of government and allow for innovative solutions for public policy and service delivery, and to the socio-economic context overall.”Ubaldi et al (2019) “Emerging technologies have the potential to reshape industries, economies, and societal structures, presenting both opportunities and challenges for organizations of all sizes and types”. World Economic Forum (2024)

Source: Author’s own elaboration

From a legal and regulatory perspective, emerging technologies represent a challenge for the discipline as they are rapidly changing and uncertain in their development development (Rodriguez, Green and Lubomira Kubica, 2021[6]). Existing legal concepts and tools such as copyright, intellectual property, liability, privacy – must (re)adapt. They may also alter the legal practice itself by introducing new processes (e.g. smart contracts based on blockchain) or by improving them (e.g. the automation of tedious tasks or the use of natural language processing (NLP) to enhance research or drafting). For example, the increased use of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) to create content such as images, music and video is challenging the existing legal tools that protect intellectual property.

From an access and usage perspective, emerging technologies are technologies that have not yet been widely used or experienced by the majority or have not yet reached everyday life ( (Pink et al., 2020[7])). Technology in general follows this logic: the closer one gets to expert communities, the more concrete is the understanding; the farther away, the more abstract. This is especially specific to emerging technologies as they are characterised by their uncertainty in development and applications, a necessity for deep technical understanding and the speculation around them ( (Moore, 2014[8])). For example, virtual and augmented realities have been part of popular culture mainly through science fiction but remain still far from the everyday life.

From an economic perspective, emerging technologies can be at the origin of new markets, by introducing innovative solutions or replace existing markets by presenting alternatives to established products and services. Emerging technologies can impact the labour market by creating new jobs, while transforming others through task automation, generating demand for new skills and introducing skill gaps, provoking wage disparities, and changing the overall work environment. Moreover, emerging technologies can alter the economy by bringing radical innovation (e.g. quantum computing) known as product innovation, or old technologies that are used in new contexts, known as position innovation (e.g. AI as search engines) ( (Tidd and Bessant, 2005[9])).

From an innovation perspective, emerging technologies are based on fields of expertise that are still developing, distinguishing them from “mature technologies” which are well established technologies and “zombie technologies”, technologies that have a robust knowledge base but are no longer actively supported or developed (e.g. fax machines). Emerging technologies are therefore characterised by experimentation and evolving expertise, occupying a dynamic space where innovation and uncertainty intersect. They represent a breakthrough in terms of computational capabilities (storage capacity, processing power), engineering (algorithmic sophistication, new interfaces), data science (data handling and treatment), or scientific knowledge (material science and manufacturing processes). Technologies can be considered as emerging even when they have existed for an extended time, if their development and scale of adoption face a substantial increase in society and the economy. For example, in recent years AI has shifted from mostly existing in a niche space of experimentation and deployment to massive adoption in everyday activities of governments, businesses, and individuals.

From a political perspective, emerging technologies are those whose potential applications and limitations have not yet been widely explored or discussed in the public domain. This means that the public is still building an opinion and defining the red lines and guardrails to adopt to avoid negative or abusive uses of such technology. Emerging technologies might have been present in the popular culture or collective imagination but are not yet embedded or translated into normative practices, such as policies or politics ( (Godhe and Goode, 2018[10])). For example, the emergence of AI technologies is prompting governments to discuss the limits or ethical red lines, for example on the uses of AI for security purposes in the public space.

Beyond the Hype: introducing the opportunities of AI, blockchain and virtual realities for the public sector

Building on previous OECD work, case studies and desk research, this paper identified three emerging technologies with real opportunities to improve how governments work and deliver: artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual realities. This section briefly reviews the use of artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual realities by governments as context for subsequent sections that explore the specific opportunities for their application in addressing the existing challenges of citizen participation and deliberation.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

The OECD has adopted the following definition: “an AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in their levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment.”2

The promise of AI for governments is high and can be clustered around three main potential transformations (OECD, 2024[11]):

• Productivity enhancement: AI can streamline internal government operations and improve the effectiveness of public policies. It can automate repetitive administrative tasks, allowing public officials to focus on more complex and strategic functions.

• Responsiveness and inclusivity: AI can help governments design and deliver more proactive and personalised public services, making them more responsive to citizens’ needs.

• Accountability and oversight: AI can bolster government accountability by enhancing the capacity for oversight and red-flagging potential fraud risks.

Blockchain

The OECD (2022[12]) defines blockchain as “all types of Blockchain technologies and distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the protocol, network, and application layers. DLT is a combination of technologies that together create a digital, shared and self-updating ledger of verified transactions or information among parties in a network based on innovative database technologies, including blockchain technologies. DLT uses various types of multi-party consensus mechanisms to validate and record transactions and has various governance systems, ranging from “centralised” models through to instances where there may be no control by a central authority(ies) (also known as “decentralised”).”3

The original promise of blockchain is to enable a secure transfer directly between parties. In other words, blockchain provides a technical infrastructure for decentralised, transparent and auditable transactions without an intermediary (Lindman et al., 2020[13]). Most use cases by the public sector correspond to ensuring integrity of data records (e.g. in case of electronic voting, public tender, citizen records), eliminate dependency upon a third-party organisation which may not be trustworthy (Ubaldi et al., 2019[14]), or in the cybersecurity field. Despite hundreds of pilots, there have been few government success stories related to blockchain implementation. Scepticism and cynicism are on the rise as this technology appears to be entering the proverbial “trough of disillusionment” common among emerging technologies as they inch towards maturity and a fuller understanding. The Illinois Blockchain Initiative reported more than 200 public sector blockchain initiatives by 2017 which most of them were inactive in 2020 (Lindman et al., 2020[13]).

Virtual and augmented realities

Recent reports by the OECD4 and European Commission5 provide a policy-centred perspective to understand the diversity of immersive technologies which can be understood as part of a continuum between fully real to fully virtual:

• Virtual reality (VR) completely replaces a user’s surroundings with a digital environment using a head-mounted display (HMD) with two near-eye displays, one for each eye creating a fully immersive 3D environment (DigitalCatapult, 2024[15]).

• Augmented reality (AR) creates an immersive experience for users by blending the real with the virtual. AR seamlessly blends the digital and physical worlds by allowing a user to overlay digital objects in a physical space. For example, the famous videogame Pokémon Go (DigitalCatapult, 2024[15])

• Extended realities (XR) offer an umbrella term that covers all forms of virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies as well as all the different degrees of immersion and interaction offered to the user to engage with virtual contents (Hupont Torres et al., 2024[16])

• Virtual worlds (metaverse): immersive environments based on augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and other extended reality (XR) technologies that enhance the realism of virtual experiences, blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds. The term metaverse is broad, not well-defined and overused. The term, which came from science fiction, is a future-oriented concept that has spread to video game developers and academia. (OECD, 2024[17]). With an estimated global growth of EUR 800 billion by 2030 and a potential 860 000 new jobs created by 2025 in the European Union, virtual worlds are set to transform all sectors alike from industry, business and public sectors (Hupont Torres et al., 2024[16]) .

Uses of VR/AR technologies by the public sector are still scarce and mostly on pilot or experimentation levels. In the majority of cases, governments are using immersive technologies to provide an advanced delivery channel (an additional way of providing online access) for public services, and to transform it into a personalised experience tailored to an individual pattern and behaviour.

Notes

← 1.  OECD Trust Survey (2024)

← 2.  The OECD published further guidance on the definition of AI which can help the reader understand AI systems and its components: https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/definition

← 3.  For additional definition on blockchain for a public sector perspective, the reader can consult (Ubaldi et al., 2019[14]) and the OECD Blockchain Primer: https://cdn.gihub.org/umbraco/media/2431/oecd-blockchain-primer.pdf

← 4.  2024 Digital Economy Outlook’s chapter on VR: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a1689dc5-en/1/3/5/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/a1689dc5-en&_csp_=5cbbea11094afe4b75c96b4a3ec0bcd2&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book#sect-75

← 5.  Report on Next Generation Virtual Worlds https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC133757