We are happy to welcome Victoria Adelmant to our research seminar in Human Rights Studies. Victoria is Director of the Digital Welfare State Project at NYU School of Law and a Doctoral Student at the University of Oxford.

Victoria Adelmant's forthcoming book Just Digitalization (Oxford University Press) is co-written with Philip Alston and Christiaan van Veen. At the seminar she will present a draft journal article on digital government and human rights

ABSTRACT

Around the world, governments are abandoning digitalised welfare systems after serious harm has emerged. In Australia, the so-called ‘Robodebt’ system, designed to detect fraud among welfare applications, resulted in serious errors, with tens of thousands falsely accused of fraud. This generated severe exclusions and harm to affected individuals—ultimately leading to class settlements and the scrapping of the system. In the Netherlands, too, an algorithmic system erroneously accused tens of thousands of individuals of welfare fraud, leading to distress and destitution. The similarities are striking—in different parts of the world, government agencies have deployed almost identical systems in the welfare sphere, without legal safeguards nor adequate institutional oversight. Some public agencies have decided to abandon some such algorithmic systems in welfare contexts. Some have faced lawsuits; others have abandoned such systems due to ethical concerns, legal considerations, or because the tools are ineffective. But even as similar issues result from the deployment of the same kinds of systems across very different contexts, and even as governments scrap such systems, lessons are not being learned. Where government agencies consider developing and deploying an algorithmic welfare tool, they rarely (if ever) look to other countries’ experiences; systematic analysis of comparative case studies is not taking place. As scholars, practitioners, and governments increasingly accept the importance of ex ante impact assessments of automated tools in public governance, it will be vital to ensure that comparative analysis and cross-border exchange are brought much more centrally into such exercises.

If you want to familiarize yourselves with Victoria’s contributions to issues of digitization and digital risks in welfare politics, here are links to a few of her articles: 

Hollow rights victories? Dutch struggles against digital injustice

Who Builds Digital Government? Accountability in the Private Sector’s 'Agile' Reconstruction of the Administrative Justice System