An official website of the United States government
Food-energy-water nexus governance has been promoted as an approach to integrate the management and policy of the three sectors together for coordinated governance. However, there are limited approaches to evaluate, assess, or measure the governance of the food-energy-water nexus. Assessment of the governance process is important to move the concept from conceptualization toward implementation and to understand the specific potential and limits of the nexus governance process. Therefore, this study presents a theoretical framework and associated indicator set to assess urban collaborative food-energy-water nexus governance in practice. This theoretical framework is then applied to two example cases: Phoenix, Arizona, USA and Cape Town, South Africa. The implementation of this framework provides recommended factors needed for improved collaborative FEW nexus governance in cities. These cases showcase the utility of this framework in assessing urban collaborative food-energy-water nexus governance.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 15, 2026
Multi-level Collaborative Governance Framework for Designing Accountable AI Systems for Emergency Management
This paper addresses a gap in the AI governance literature in understanding collaboration between national governments and tribal nations in governing AI systems for emergency management. This conceptual work develops and presents a governance design framework for accountable AI systems to fill the knowledge gap by drawing from the fields of public administration, information systems, indigenous studies, and emergency management. This framework situates the governance framework in a cross-sovereignty historical, legal, and policy contexts. It captures the multi-level features and embeddedness of governance structures, including the levels of collaborative governance structure, software system governance rules, and technical software system design. The focal governance dynamics involve the collaborative process in the bi-directional relationship between governance rules and technical design for accountability and the feedback loop. The framework highlights the importance of multi-level and process considerations in designing accountable AI systems. Productive future research avenues include empirical investigation and resulting refinement of the framework and analytical rigor employing institutional grammar.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2317086
- PAR ID:
- 10636007
- Publisher / Repository:
- Vol. 26 (2025): Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Conference on Digital Government Research
- Volume:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 3050-8681
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.more » « less
-
Artificial intelligence (AI) provides versatile capabilities in applications such as image classification and voice recognition that are most useful in edge or mobile computing settings. Shrinking these sophisticated algorithms into small form factors with minimal computing resources and power budgets requires innovation at several layers of abstraction: software, algorithmic, architectural, circuit, and device-level innovations. However, improvements to system efficiency may impact robustness and vice-versa. Therefore, a co-design framework is often necessary to customize a system for its given application. A system that prioritizes efficiency might use circuit-level innovations that introduce process variations or signal noise into the system, which may use software-level redundancy in order to compensate. In this tutorial, we will first examine various methods of improving efficiency and robustness in edge AI and their tradeoffs at each level of abstraction.Then, we will outline co-design techniques for designing efficient and robust edge AI systems, using federated learning as a specific example to illustrate the effectiveness of co-design.more » « less
-
Abstract In complex, polycentric environmental governance systems, actors may choose to collaborate with one another to reduce their collective vulnerability and enhance system function. However, collaboration can be costly, and little evidence exists for how particular collaborative forums impact the broader governance system in which they are embedded. To address this gap, we investigate the role of intermediate collaborative forums, which support collaboration among a subset of system actors, in polycentric governance systems. Empirically, we analyze the structural and functional role of an intermediate collaborative forum called the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association (AMWUA) within the municipal surface water governance network for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area (PMA) in Arizona, United States. To do this, we draw from 21 interviews with water professionals in the PMA, which we analyze through a combination of network analysis and qualitative coding. We find that AMWUA facilitates strong bonding capacities among members, allowing for streamlined bridging to the rest of the network that enhances information processing and advocacy of member needs. Our findings advance theory on the role of collaboration in polycentric systems and inform the design of collaborative institutions to improve environmental governance.more » « less
-
Modeling from the perspectives of software engineering and systems engineering have co-evolved over the last two decades as orthogonal approaches. Given the central role of software in modern cyber-physical systems and the increasing adoption of digital engineering practices in complex systems design, there is now significant opportunity for collaborative design among system users, software developers, and systems engineers. Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and systems modeling languages can support seamless cross-domain connectivity for design, simulation, and analysis of emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR). This paper presents a co-design process for extending the capability of an existing AR application referred to as a No-Code AR Systems (NCARS) framework. NCARS enables content developed by multi-domain authors to be deployed on AR devices through a software layer that bridges the content to the game engine that drives the AR system. Utilizing a software dependency diagram of the AR Annotation function, an existing MBSE model of the AR system is extended to include the structure and behavior of relevant software components. This allows a modular design of the system to address needs in integrating new requirements into the existing application. New user requirements for tracking items in motion in the user’s physical environment with virtual annotations in the augmented space are collaboratively designed and visualized through use case, block definition, internal block, and sequence diagrams. They capture the required structure and behavior of the proposed to-be system.more » « less
