AI Governance Engineer
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Recourse

By Updated

The ability of a person to obtain a different decision by changing inputs they can actually act on, such as income rather than age 1. Counterfactual explanations restricted to actionable features are its usual engineering form; a system can offer contestation and still leave no recourse.

Developed in
ch. 16, Counterfactual explanations
Chapters
ch. 16, Fairness & XAI · ch. 21, AI Laws Worldwide
Contrast with
Contestability
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

4 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Counterfactual explanation

    An explanation that states the smallest change to the input that would have changed the outcome, restricted to features the person can actually change.

Sources

  1. [1] "Actionable Recourse in Linear Classification" (Ustun, Spangher and Liu; recourse as the ability to change a model's decision by altering actionable inputs; arXiv 1809.06514). arXiv. 2018-09-18. https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06514 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Recourse. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/recourse. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026recourse,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Recourse}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/recourse}
}