Insights

The Governance Lab and CEPS convened experts to advance the 100 Questions Initiative by shifting focus from identifying women's health research priorities to embedding them within EU policies. Key recommendations include institutionalizing question-driven research by requiring clear question statements in funding proposals and creating a European Women’s Health Question Catalogue. Framing women’s health as a driver of competitiveness aims to align political and financial incentives and strengthen Europe’s leadership. Integrating women’s health explicitly within the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework through dedicated funding and innovation challenges is crucial for improved accountability and reduced fragmentation.
Health
From questions to institutionalisation – how to embed women’s health priorities in EU research and policy
Timely and accurate humanitarian situation reports are critical but traditionally manual and inconsistent. A new fully automated framework leverages large language models (LLMs) to convert diverse humanitarian documents into structured, evidence-based reports. The system combines semantic text clustering, automatic question generation, retrieval-augmented answer extraction with citations, multi-level summarization, and executive summaries, supported by evaluation metrics mirroring expert judgment. Tested on over 1,100 documents across 13 humanitarian events, it achieved high relevance, importance, urgency, and citation precision. The AI-generated reports are more structured, interpretable, and actionable than existing methods, demonstrating that generative AI can autonomously produce accurate, verifiable, and operationally useful humanitarian situational reports.
A Large-Language-Model Framework for Automated Humanitarian Situation Reporting
The book edited by Kelebogile Zvobgo and Francesca Parente offers a practical framework for analyzing human rights issues such as repression, compliance, and transitional justice amid global challenges. It features quantitative and mixed-methods research by emerging and established experts, highlighting innovative measurement and evaluation techniques. Topics include state repression, civil society activism, and adherence to international law. The contributors emphasize substance-driven research and demonstrate the use of diverse evidence, including advanced methods like machine learning and text analysis, guiding future empirical human rights studies.
Innovations in Human Rights
National statistical offices (NSOs), especially in low- and middle-income countries, face a systemic data crisis due to deep cuts in development financing, legitimacy challenges, rapid technological advances like AI, and increasing demands for inclusive data. These pressures expose longstanding issues in trust, capacity, and data use, threatening NSOs’ relevance and sustainability. The situation presents a critical choice: either pursue incremental reforms or embrace more transformative changes in how data systems are designed, governed, and integrated into society. This crossroads calls for strategic debate on the future direction, financing, legitimacy, and equity of official statistics globally.
Mali, Serbia | ICT, Financial services, Education, Health
Data Systems at a Crossroads: Official Statistics for a New Era
Kent Smetters analyzes the economic impact of a conflict with Iran, highlighting significant budgetary costs and potential GDP losses due to elevated oil prices. He explains that supply shocks from such conflict can drive inflation higher and influence Federal Reserve monetary policy decisions. Overall, conflict with Iran poses substantial risks to the U.S. economy through increased government spending and disrupted energy markets.
The Economic Cost of Conflict with Iran
Global fertility rates are declining primarily due to delayed couple formation linked to women's increased education and career focus, reducing the childbearing window. Many choose to have fewer or no children, reflecting shifting societal norms. In Europe, fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, with countries like Italy and Spain at around 1.2, while Nordic countries once had higher rates but have recently converged with the European average. Pronatalist policies yield only temporary boosts in birth rates. The population decline raises environmental discussions, but addressing consumption patterns and resource use is crucial alongside demographic changes.
Africa, Latin America
Berkay Ozcan: “Immigration is not a silver bullet for falling birth rates”
AI in medical imaging is rapidly advancing but currently serves to support, not replace, skilled radiologists. Despite AI models demonstrating diagnostic accuracy comparable to professionals, regulatory restrictions and inconsistent AI performance prevent full automation. Radiologists use AI mainly as a decision-support tool to double-check abnormalities, helping catch small lesions that might be missed. Professionals develop selective skills in interpreting AI outputs to avoid errors. Rather than causing job losses, AI is expected to reduce radiologists' workload amid workforce shortages, easing recruitment and training pressures while augmenting existing practices.
Education
Is AI replacing the work of skilled radiologists? They give us their thoughts
Abuse, loneliness, and financial strain significantly impact the physical and mental health of older adults. A survey of over 1,000 people aged 60+ in Wales found that half experienced at least one adversity, with over 10% reporting abuse since turning 60. Those facing abuse or social isolation exhibited higher rates of smoking, suicidal thoughts, poor mental wellbeing, and low life satisfaction. These adversities also increased experiences of ageism. The findings highlight the need to address social factors alongside medical care to improve older adults’ wellbeing, support independence, and reduce healthcare pressures. Comprehensive prevention and support strategies are crucial for enabling dignified, healthy aging.
Abuse, loneliness and financial strain in later life linked to poorer health
Geopolitical conflicts significantly disrupt global sports by affecting athletes' ability to compete, travel, and secure contracts. Iranian footballers have sought asylum, cricket teams faced travel delays due to regional tensions, and political controversies surround events like the FIFA World Cup. These conflicts exacerbate monopsony power in sports labor markets, limiting opportunities for many athletes while top stars maintain high earnings through global media exposure. Furthermore, instability fosters shadow economies, increasing risks of corruption and illegal betting. Despite these challenges, sport remains a potent means for social unity and psychological relief amid turmoil, exemplified by historic events like South Africa’s 1995 Rugby World Cup.
Latin America | Financial services, Health
How geopolitics disrupts the business – and meaning – of sport
The aviation sector is experiencing strong passenger and cargo growth but faces increasing challenges to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 due to rising clean-technology costs, geopolitical tensions, and decarbonization pressures. Industry leaders emphasize the need to maintain safety, efficiency, and affordability while adopting a more pragmatic approach to sustainability. Key measures include commercializing sustainable aviation fuels, transforming airports into integrated economic and energy hubs, and expanding market mechanisms like book-and-claim. Greater regulatory stability and coordinated international action are essential to accelerate large-scale progress toward net-zero aviation.
Global Aviation Sustainability Outlook 2026
Air pollution in Asia and the Pacific affects over 90% of the population, causing millions of premature deaths annually and significant economic losses. Key pollution sources include vehicles, industry, power stations, and agricultural burning, which cross national borders and undermine local clean air efforts. Regional cooperation is essential, as seen in initiatives like the Asia Clean Blue Skies Program and ASEAN’s legally binding agreement against transboundary haze. Coordinated actions such as harmonized monitoring, combined investments across sectors, and strengthened political commitment can significantly reduce pollution. Development agencies play a crucial role by supporting research, finance, and regional partnerships to achieve sustained air quality improvement.
ASEAN, Latin America
Why Regional Cooperation Is Vital for Better Air Quality in Asia and the Pacific
AI agents trained with theory-based natural language instructions, empirical data, and prior AI knowledge can generalize social science theories to predict human behavior across novel settings without ad hoc modifications. Using a diverse set of 883,320 newly designed games, these agents—built from data on related but different "seed" games—outperform cognitive hierarchy models, game-theoretic equilibria, and standard AI agents in predicting initial human play. In preregistered experiments, simulations also predicted human responses in new novel games better than existing published human data, demonstrating a scalable approach to applying social theories in unobserved contexts.
General Social Agents
The future of European science depends on legitimate, expanded access to data, which is crucial for breakthrough discoveries and evidence-based solutions to complex challenges like health, climate, and economic transformation. Despite Europe's intellectual ambition and initiatives such as the Data Governance Act and the European Open Science Cloud, data access is increasingly restricted due to institutional silos, political retrenchment, and backlash from rapid AI development. To progress, Europe must prioritize ‘question science’—systematically identifying and aligning high-priority societal questions with data access—to ensure data sharing is purposeful and supports meaningful scientific advancement.
Africa | Financial services, ICT, Health, Education
Legitimate data access will determine whether European science has a bright or bleak future
AI, digital transformation, biodiversity markets, biotechnology, and finance for nature increasingly depend on data from indigenous and local territories, yet governance of these data flows remains undefined. Version 1.0 of the Sovereign Data Supply Chain: Functional and Operational Framework presents an evolving, structured approach to establish sovereign data chains grounded in Collective Rights. Developed with support from Kinray Hub, NaturaTech LAC, and Climate Collective, it aims to transition from extractive data models to frameworks validated through feedback, territorial input, and pilot implementations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania | Financial services, ICT, Health
Sovereign Data Supply Chain: Functional and Operational Framework
Local colleges and universities across the U.S. are emerging as key but underutilized partners in deploying AI to benefit communities. While AI discussions often center on big tech and federal policies, higher education institutions are already governing AI internally, building technical capacity, and training an AI-savvy workforce. However, collaboration between these institutions, local governments, and nonprofits remains limited. Bridging this gap offers a unique opportunity to align AI development with public needs, enhancing democratic infrastructure and building public trust, rather than leaving AI’s evolution solely to academic or commercial interests.
Education
The AI Lab Next Door
The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran has significant economic repercussions, notably worsening the UK's economic outlook due to energy supply disruptions and market instability. While ordinary citizens and small businesses suffer, defense contractors like BAE Systems and US firms Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman experience substantial profit gains. The war also politically benefits incumbent leaders through distraction from scandals. In Iran, sanctions have strengthened the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' control over key industries, while ordinary Iranians face deepening poverty. Rising oil and gas prices aid some global producers and may slow the green energy transition by making fossil fuels more lucrative. Addressing these conflicts' incentives through measures like windfall taxes on defense firms could help align interests toward resolution.
Bahrain, United Kingdom | Financial services
Who profits from war with Iran? Understanding that will be key to resolving the conflict
Compute, talent, and capital are essential for AI-enabled biotechnology, but large, representative, and interoperable biodata is the critical limiting factor. Biodata, encompassing DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites, is a strategic asset foundational to innovations in medicine, agriculture, and bio-based industries. The U.S. must enhance access to secure, high-quality biodata to lead in AI-driven biology, which promises advances in health, industrial production, and national defense. China currently holds an advantage through coordinated national strategies integrating biotech, big data, and AI, exemplified by large-scale genomic testing and cell/gene therapy ecosystems that accelerate research-to-deployment timelines.
Education
AI-Ready Biodata Is America’s Next Strategic Infrastructure
In 2021, the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP) emerged after many governments pledged to cease using public funds for overseas fossil fuel projects, leading to a 78% reduction in such financing among signatories. This shift stemmed from a grassroots UK campaign initiated in 2017 targeting UK Export Finance (UKEF), a government agency heavily funding fossil fuel projects internationally. Persistent activism, parliamentary scrutiny, and public pressure culminated in the UK government's 2020 unilateral ban on fossil fuel public finance. Leveraging this domestic victory, UK officials and activists successfully encouraged 34 countries and multiple institutions to commit to similar actions at the Cop26 summit, marking a rare international climate cooperation success.
Financial services
How a grassroots UK campaign sparked a multi‑billion‑dollar exit from public fossil fuel finance
China’s growing trade with the global south, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is reshaping global trade dynamics. Despite rising protectionism and trade tensions led by the US, China recorded a record $1.19 trillion trade surplus in 2025, with over half linked to the BRI. This initiative strengthens infrastructure and economic cooperation across more than 150 countries in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America, offering vital access to resources and new markets. China's integration into global supply chains has propelled economic growth and poverty reduction worldwide, positioning south-south trade with China as a crucial future driver of global economic development.
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Taiwan, China, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Türkiye, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe | Financial services
South-south trade with China is the future of global trade
The next wave of AI involves agentic systems that autonomously interact with government digital infrastructure by querying databases, retrieving records, and navigating portals. This shift has led to increased machine traffic on government sites, ranging from benign search activities to potentially harmful actions like fraudulent requests or overwhelming system capacity. Current government interfaces are ill-equipped for these AI interactions, often forcing agents to improvise through scraping and guesswork. Boston is pioneering a balanced approach by creating a secure, governed layer to mediate AI agents’ access to public resources, aiming to safely integrate these technologies without blocking or unregulated acceptance.
AI agents are coming for government. How one big city is letting them in

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