Collective Intelligence, Planetary Challenges, and Public Problems Solving

Course focus and approach:
This is an interdisciplinary course that will combine international relations, international law, democratic theory, political philosophy, new technology and political science in order to analyze the planetary challenges that we face, especially in the public sector, and the kind of institutional responses that might be most adequate to solve them. The approach will rely on three different frameworks: United Nations’ Initiative for the Sustainable Development Goals, Pompeu Fabra University’s Planetary Wellbeing Initiative, and Professor Beth S. Noveck’s methodology for finding and implementing more innovative, effective, and legitimate solutions to public problems through collective intelligence. The course will follow an active methodology based on problem-based and project-based learning as well as on collaborative learning.

Course description:
We live in a new era characterized by globalization and the digital revolution, and by the emergence of new planetary challenges and threats that require global, collective and effective solutions. These planetary challenges and threats include climate emergency, global health, nuclear security, global inequality, migratory movements, tax evasion, global terrorism, digital security and privacy, etc. All these challenges are global, complex, and interrelated. They need a response that is also global, intelligent and effective. An adequate management of them requires a holistic approach such as the United Nations’s framework of Sustainable Development Goals and UPF’s proposal for “planetary wellbeing”. This course will study how global institutions, as well as nation states, cities and others actors, can face global challenges like those mentioned above. Thoeir responses will need to be creative and intelligent. This is why this course will focus on the new ways in which collective intelligence, crowdsourcing methods and public involvement in decision making in general can enhance the quality of global responses to these challenges. Students will be exposed to some successful practical examples of collective intelligence enhanced through new technologies, like the idea of Crowdlaw, which might combine data analysis, machine learning, AI, Blockchain and even virtual reality with the aim of improving public decision making.
The course will also focus on the conditions under which international organizations, states and cities can make or contribute to make international legal decisions that might provide solutions to these problems in a way that preserves democratic legitimacy and justice. For that purpose, this course will combine the study of global governance, and new technologies with political philosophy, legal philosophy, international law and international relations. After being exposed to all these existing solutions, students will be asked to be creative and work collectively to learn from each other and to find the best solutions to the problems they choose to work in. Each student will have to work on a particular problem, but he/she will share with the rest of the class his/her work and proposed solutions and all students will help each other to refine their final proposals.

Learning objectives:
1. Understanding how the world has changed and how it now faces new global, complex challenges that require quick, collective, and effective solutions and a holistic concern for planetary wellbeing
2. Learning how the methods of collective intelligence in general, and the new technologies in particular, can help to find more legitimate and more effective solutions to those global problems
3. Learning how to explore, identify and analyze alternative solutions and find the most adequate and creative for these global challengesproblem in week 3, a mid-term presentation with a more refined definition of the problem and a tentative proposal of solutions in week 6, and a final presentation with a complete picture of the final paper and a focus on implementation challenges and the proposed practical strategies. Students are encouraged to collaborate among each other to mutually improve their respective papers, giving feedback to their classmates after their presentations.
4. Finally, each student will have to record a video-presentation (maximum five minutes long) with a defence of the policy paper, trying to make it innovative, creative, and persuasive.