A sociotechnical systems lens on AI is often used to bring attention to the human factors and societal impacts that are often neglected through technical abstraction. However, abstraction is also a general principle of sociotechnical systems, where functional objectives (e.g. fair hiring decisions) are operationalised into low-level implementations (e.g. fair algorithms, recourse, legal basis). The trouble with abstraction arises when critical contextual factors are erroneously neglected, leading to an impoverished representation of the problem space. De-contextualisation can render the resulting solutions problematic when they are re-contextualised back into the site of use, where misabstractions may produce safety hazards, harms, moral wrongs, and context frictions. Despite growing recognition that context matters for how sociotechnical systems operate in practice, the normative implications of abstraction are still understudied. In this paper, we propose misabstraction as an analytic framework for thinking about the perils and challenges of sociotechnical abstraction. We use the framework to analyse the requirements specification outlined in the procurement tender of a recommender system for public employment services and show how misabstractions cascade through the sociotechnical stack, producing ripple effects that implicate hidden and neglected contextual factors across multiple frames (e.g. institutional, organisational, operational, and algorithmic). Misabstraction can help policymakers, system designers, critical scholars, and civil society alike to attend to the political conditions that shape design, and their implications for understanding and addressing systemic risk in sociotechnical AI systems.

Mission-oriented innovation policies have major justice implications because they aim to radically transform our societies. Although research on these policies rarely engages with the notion of justice, this paper rests on the premise that it has implicitly provided insights that are relevant, and which could function as an entry point for a much-needed debate on mission justice. In response, we identify and explicate implicit considerations of distributive, procedural, recognitional, and restorative justice in the context of missions by means of a systematic literature review. While the scholarly debate on missions has indeed raised relevant questions regarding justice, we find that it has provided few meaningful answers. In particular, scholars seem to overlook restorative justice considerations that could help rectify historical wrongdoing. We highlight the imperative and ways in which scholars and policymakers can engage with justice more explicitly to formulate, implement, and evaluate missions for more just transitions.

Land use change, managed retreat, and relocation programs are examples of exposure reduction measures in flood risk management (FRM). Exposure reduction measures are especially prone to conflict at the local level due to competing interests, values, and attachments. In this paper, we build upon the capability approach to justice and specifically the concept of political capabilities to advance justice in exposure reduction measures in FRM. A capabilities-based approach to justice helps to recognize the multiplicity of valuable ways of life and addresses a wide range of inequalities including concerns related to recognition justice. The innovation of our capabilities-based approach to justice is that we include both actors who have too little political influence as well as those who have too much and can thus excessively steer FRM in their advantage. A political capabilities analysis is different than a focus on principles or rights because it draws attention to realized political influence and includes the informal stages of FRM politics such as lobbying. The political capabilities concept also shifts the focus from vulnerability to human agency, thereby addressing concerns in the FRM literature about the loss of self-determination and misrecognition. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the opportunities and limitations of using the political capabilities concept in FRM.

Governance lies at the heart of instigating, steering, and creating the conditions for mission-oriented transitions that potentially help resolve some of our grand societal challenges. In doing so, policymakers will need to navigate both epistemic and normative considerations to develop, implement, and evaluate missions responsibly. A number of scholars have therefore expressed the need for a better conceptualization of responsible mission governance as a procedural approach, particularly with the aim of coping with the complexity, uncertainty, and contestation that render these wicked problems intractable. In this paper we develop an integrative framework for responsible mission governance by taking wickedness dimensions as our entry point. Accordingly, we argue that responsible mission governance should integrate various complementary governance responsibilities (e.g., reflexivity) and modes (e.g., reflexive governance) that potentially improve the effectiveness and desirability of missions.

Transformative mission-oriented innovation policy aims to redirect innovation, but evidence of this directional ability is limited. This paper examines whether transformer missions redirect values reflected by mission-oriented projects. We study the EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ and use probabilistic topic modelling and thematic analyses to identify, conceptualize, and compare latent values described in 17 policy documents (i.e., strategic layer), 37 mission-oriented projects, and 809 mission-relevant projects (i.e., operational layer). We map how these values changed during the mission launch. The results of this study are ambivalent. On the one hand, the mission launch corresponds with an increase of funded projects of which mission-oriented projects commonly frame efforts towards mission objectives. On the other hand, there is a misalignment between policy and project-level values while the prevalence of project-level values remained largely unaffected by the mission. These mixed results provide a more nuanced understanding of transformer missions’ directional abilities.

With the increasing reliance on technological advancements, it becomes imperative to critically examine and evaluate their implications on society and the environment. The concepts of acceptance and acceptability have gained prominence among researchers shaping technology implementation strategies. However, the lack of precise definitions for these concepts leads to diverse interpretations, compromising their usefulness in technology development and impeding further progress in research endeavours. This paper illustrates how these important concepts have been used in the energy technology discourse and develops a schematic overview highlighting the varied overarching interpretations of these concepts: the funnel of acceptance and acceptability. It underscores how different research levels – institutional, societal, and individual – affect the relevant understanding of these concepts. The funnel metaphor emphasises the interconnectedness of these interpretations and underlines the importance of addressing all research levels to ensure technology implementation processes advance in a desirable and responsible manner.

As global issues such as climate change and diminishing resources become increasingly pressing, water recycling has moved into the focus. However, the successful implementation of Direct Potable Water Reuse (DPR) projects hinges on securing public acceptance, which remains challenging. This paper aims to flesh out possible reasons for the lingering public rejection of DPR. We will do so by conducting a literature review on how public acceptance is understood and what approaches are proposed to enhance it. These approaches are analyzed using Responsible Research and Innovation principles and the `opening up', `closing down' and `leaving ajar' approaches. Our research identifies an overreliance on the controversial information deficit model, closing down large parts of public engagement. We advocate for becoming more inclusive through the `leaving ajar' approach. Particularly, attention should be paid to reflexivity and responsiveness to public concerns to ensure meaningful public engagement.

Public sector organizations increasingly use artificial intelligence to augment, support, and automate decision-making. However, such public AI can potentially infringe on citizens’ right to autonomy. Contestability is a system quality that protects against this by ensuring systems are open and responsive to disputes throughout their life cycle. While a growing body of work is investigating contestable AI by design, little of this knowledge has so far been evaluated with practitioners. To make explicit the guiding ideas underpinning contestable AI research, we construct the generative metaphor of the Agonistic Arena, inspired by the political theory of agonistic pluralism. Combining this metaphor and current contestable AI guidelines, we develop an infographic supporting the early-stage concept design of public AI system contestability mechanisms. We evaluate this infographic in five workshops paired with focus groups with a total of 18 practitioners, yielding ten concept designs. Our findings outline the mechanisms for contestability derived from these concept designs. Building on these findings, we subsequently evaluate the efficacy of the Agonistic Arena as a generative metaphor for the design of public AI and identify two competing metaphors at play in this space: the Black Box and the Sovereign.

Societal inequities and barriers to participation in societal decisions mean that some people and groups have difficulty in accessing sufficient resources to meet their essential needs. This increases the vulnerability of those who lack social and political capital in times of crises, such as climate change impact events. Collective action institutions can redress this inequity by facilitating the redistribution of essential resources from the wealthy to the vulnerable. In this article, we use a stylised agent-based model of a community subject to a climate change impact that affects the availability of an essential resource. We use it to explore the types of societal conditions and policies that contribute to the emergence of a collective action institution that effectively redistributes resources to ensure that people are able to maintain a sufficient level of welfare. We find that removing barriers to participation in societal decisions for vulnerable people, and increasing the sensitivity and urgency in the decision-making process to impacts in the community, help to realise effective collective action institutions. The key insight that our model helps to uncover is that participatory justice promotes timely distributive justice.

Climate adaptation and resilience scholars are struggling to address distributive and procedural justice in climate resilience efforts. While the capability approach (CA) has been widely appraised as a suitable justice basis for this context, there are few detailed studies assessing this possibility. This paper addresses this gap by advancing discussions about the prospects of the CA for guiding justice work in climate resilience. With its emphasis on the final value and mutually irreducible character of the concrete beings and doings of individuals, we find the CA relevant for tackling salient aspects of adaptation, such as the multi-faceted and locally specific nature of climate vulnerability. We also present and discuss a capability application that has particular relevance for including distributive and procedural justice considerations in climate resilience. On the other hand, we find that extant arguments in support of the CA neglect the limitations of the CA and some dilemmas involved in applying it, also overestimating the differences between the CA and other justice approaches, especially those based on resources and needs. These problems lead us to advise against treating the CA as a one-size-fits-all solution to the ills of climate resilience and they further raise a need for joining efforts with complementary approaches.

European research funding organizations (RFOs) are increasingly experimenting with public engagement in their funding activities. This case study draws attention to the challenges they face in preparing, implementing, and evaluating ethical public engagement in the context of setting funding priorities, formulating calls for proposals, and evaluating project proposals. We discuss challenges related to seven themes: (1) recruiting participants; (2) commitments and expectations; (3) meaningful dialogue and equal engagement; (4) accommodating vulnerability; (5) funding call formulations; (6) lack of expertise in engagement ethics; and (7) uncertainty, resource constraints, and external factors. To address these challenges, we propose the following seven interventions: (1) developing comprehensive recruitment strategies with experienced recruiters and community organizations; (2) establishing clear communication of roles, expectations, and outcomes through codes of conduct; (3) training mediators to address power imbalances; (4) designing flexible engagement methods and providing tailored support; (5) implementing collaborative feedback loops for inclusive funding call formulation; (6) enhancing ethical standards through internal expertise and external advisory inputs; and (7) developing adaptive strategies for flexible and ethical public engagement. These recommendations emphasize the need for context-adaptive insights to support funding organizations to implement ethical public engagement activities, even when faced with organizational constraints and a lack of ethical expertise.

Mission-oriented innovation policy is currently gaining renewed interest as an approach for addressing societal challenges. One of the promises is that missions can mobilise and align diverse stakeholders around a shared goal. Recent literature underlines the importance of public participation (e.g. municipalities and civil society organisations) in the socioeconomic transformations required for attaining missions. We ask how public participation differs among (non-)mission-oriented innovation projects. Drawing on a database containing Dutch government-funded innovation projects, we investigate whether mission-oriented projects are associated with earlier, more open, and more influential forms of public participation than conventional projects. Although the results suggest that mission-oriented projects indeed correspond with earlier participation of more public actors, we find little evidence that they also coincide with increased diversity and financial influence of public participants. We conclude by discussing how policymakers and intermediaries may engage in strategies to make missions more inclusive.

Moral (or ethical) sensitivity is widely viewed as a foundational learning goal in engineering ethics education. We have argued in this paper is that this view of moral sensitivity cannot be readily transported from the nursing context to the engineering context on the basis of a care-analogy. The particularized care characteristic of the nursing context is decisively different from the generalized and universalized forms of care characteristic of the engineering context. Through a focus on care and maintenance, the engineering student’s moral sensitivity can be refined, opening up a perceptual awakening and affectivity towards the complex nature of the engineer’s Other. This awakening is in part promoted through an understanding of the ideology of neutrality as a moment in the history engineering. Becoming aware of this ideology as an ideology can then be seen as an activity of dividing loyalties that allows for a reflexive and critical view of the biases and presuppositions inherited within the world of engineering. This process of deepening the engineering student’s moral sensitivity is perhaps as much a process of the student becoming aware of her professional world, how it shapes her understanding of herself, and what it means to be a good engineer.

Residential small-scale solar PV systems are expected to play an important role in reducing the current reliance on fossil fuels in the urban environment. However, not all households are equally capable of investing in solar PV technologies. Both the socioeconomic barriers in accessing renewable energy technology and the focus of solar energy policy on technology penetration rates alone has led to an oversight of equity concerns, disproportionately positioning households to have unequal access to participate in the renewable energy transition. This research aims to define and spatially assess the distribution of accessibility to residential solar PV systems across the urban environment, and evaluate how such access spatially intersects with rooftop solar potential. We observe significant patterns of spatial clustering regarding access to solar PV systems, aligning with the existing inequitable distribution of residential solar PV systems. Moreover, the majority of technical solar potential is located in areas where the capabilities of the population to access this potential are limited, indicating a significant amount of untapped potential in these areas. Analysing the intersection of accessibility to solar PV systems and rooftop solar potential will enhance understanding of where solar potential is more likely to be utilised and where households will need additional policy support to utilise this potential.

Responsible Innovation has recently been taken up in public policies and discourses. However, it remains challenging to institutionalise its core dimensions – inclusion, anticipation, responsiveness, reflexivity, and transparency – in practice. De jure standardisation is increasingly seen as an instrument to embed the core principles of Responsible Innovation in innovation processes, because of its anticipatory and inclusive nature. Yet, Responsible Innovation within the standardisation literature is an under-researched field of study. This paper explores and evaluates the relative importance of Responsible Innovation’s core dimensions in the standards development process. We identify eighteen criteria that are deemed essential to the quality of standardisation processes. The Best-Worst Method was used to rank these criteria on their perceived importance. Diversity of participation was found to be the most important contributing factor to the quality of standardisation.

In shaping collective responses to societal challenges, we currently lack an understanding of how to grasp and navigate conflicting ideas on societal problems and potential solutions. The problem-solution space is an increasingly popular framework for conceptualizing the extent to which problem-oriented and solution-oriented views are divergent. However, this reflexive framework needs an operationalization to become useful in practice. We contribute to this debate by demonstrating how Q-methodology can be used to systematically identify, describe, and compare collectively held visions in relation to problems and solutions. We use the case of Dutch circular construction, and identify three conflicting imaginaries that inform us about disagreement and common ground. We conclude by discussing how policymakers can use different approaches to navigate contestation, presumably mobilizing actors for a collective response.

Driven by climate change and energy crises, an increasing number of households in the European Union are becoming vulnerable to energy poverty. However, current renovation programs fall short in effectively targeting and addressing the needs of vulnerable groups, particularly in underprivileged neighborhoods where low effectiveness rates and resident resistance to renovation measures persist. This exacerbates the risk of social and spatial inequity, calling for an urgent integration of justice considerations in European renovation policies. To address this challenge, this study proposes a novel case-study mixed methods (CS-MM) approach to include justice in renovation policies, considering the socio-spatial vulnerability to energy poverty. The case of Amsterdam Zuidoost is examined to achieve four main objectives: [1] identify systematic challenges in tackling energy poverty in underprivileged neighborhoods, [2] develop a vulnerability framework encompassing social, economic, energy, and building-related factors, [3] identify and localize energy vulnerable groups, and [4] tailor policy strategies in a multi-stakeholder environment based on the characteristics and needs of the identified vulnerable groups. The findings illustrate how the CS-MM approach can be applied to incorporate justice into renovation policies, informed by local insights on energy poverty. From a scientific perspective, this study contributes to the existing knowledge by providing insights into the identification of vulnerable groups, the inclusion of justice in renovation policies, and the deployment of a CS-MM approach to address socio-spatial vulnerability to energy poverty. From a societal standpoint, the findings empower local decision-makers to identify vulnerable groups and tailor policies accordingly.

Energy poverty is a pressing issue in the Netherlands, with the number of households struggling to cover their energy bills doubling to nearly one million in recent years. Current policies and subsidies have failed to address the needs of underprivileged social groups, leaving them vulnerable and unable to access support for dwelling renovations. This policy brief emphasises the importance of adopting a socio-spatial approach to tackle energy poverty and incorporate justice into renovation policies. By understanding the underlying factors that contribute to vulnerability and pinpointing their spatial distribution, targeted policies can be developed to meet the unique needs of vulnerable groups. The brief highlights the systemic challenges in Amsterdam Zuidoost, where low incomes, lack of trust, and financial constraints hinder renovation efforts. It stresses the urgency of adopting a spatial perspective, recognising the socio-spatial dimensions of vulnerability, and engaging local communities. Through inclusive and participatory processes, the brief aims to promote social equity, spatial justice, and sustainable solutions to combat energy poverty in Amsterdam Zuidoost.

Local governments increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) for automated decision-making. Contestability, making systems responsive to dispute, is a way to ensure they respect human rights to autonomy and dignity. We investigate the design of public urban AI systems for contestability through the example of camera cars: human-driven vehicles equipped with image sensors. Applying a provisional framework for contestable AI, we use speculative design to create a concept video of a contestable camera car. Using this concept video, we then conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 civil servants who work with AI employed by a large northwestern European city. The resulting data is analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify the main challenges facing the implementation of contestability in public AI. We describe how civic participation faces issues of representation, public AI systems should integrate with existing democratic practices, and cities must expand capacities for responsible AI development and operation.