Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is the unlikely protagonist in one of the boldest policy gambits aimed at tackling the housing affordability crisis currently gripping many of America’s cities. Since being sworn into office in January 2018, the 37-year-old mayor of Minnesota’s largest city has helped shepherd through a radical rezoning of the city's 83 neighborhoods, which is intended to ease the creation of and access to affordable housing across the city.... Read more about Minneapolis Is Using Zoning to Tackle Housing Affordability and Inequality
Having just returned from observing India’s national elections, Ashutosh Varshney, the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and professor of political science at Brown University and a resident fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, sat down with the Gazette for a conversation about how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won such a convincing victory and what is at stake for the world’s largest democracy.... Read more about The Modi Mandate
Interdisciplinary collaboration across Harvard usually takes the form of co-authored papers or perhaps jointly chaired conferences. Tarek Masoud’s latest collaboration found him not in a classroom around campus but working with writers and directors of “We Live in Cairo,” a musical set during protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the tumultuous years that followed in Egypt. The show made its world premiere last spring at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University in Cambridge.... Read more about Scholarship on Stage
For most Americans, Huawei is hardly a household name. The Chinese telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer has had only a limited consumer footprint in the United States. That began to change, though, last year when the daughter of the company’s founder and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, stepped off a plane in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was immediately taken into custody by Canadian authorities at the behest of the United States. Her arrest for allegedly helping Huawei evade US sanctions on Iran, and the tit-for-tat detention of a number of Canadian citizens in China, has brought renewed attention on the company, its relationship with China’s military and intelligence agencies, and its ambitious goals to be a dominant player in the race to deploy 5G wireless technology around the world.
Paul Clifford, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Ash Center and author of The China Paradox: At the Front Line of Economic Transformation, helped shed light on Huawei’s growth strategy and addressed directly some of the security claims lodged at the company by senior Trump administration officials at a talk at the Ash Center earlier this spring.... Read more about Huawei, a self-made world-class company or agent of China's global strategy?
With national elections under way in India, hundreds of millions of voters are casting ballots at nearly a million polling locations. For the world’s most populous democracy, it is a herculean feat of electoral administration. But beyond the heavy logistical lift, this election has the potential to shape the very future of the country’s pluralistic political system, according to noted India expert Ashutosh Varney.
Just days after Ryan Swann MC/MPA 2019 and his identical twin brother, Bryan MC/MPA 2019, walked across the stage to accept their diplomas at Prince George’s County Largo High School in Maryland, the brothers enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and were en route to basic training in Parris Island, South Carolina.
“I come from a large family of veterans and public servants,” says Ryan Swann, recipient of the Ash Center's 2018–19 Roy and Lila Ash Fellowship in Democracy, a scholarship that is awarded to a meritorious mid-career student with a proven dedication to democratic governance and public-sector innovation. “I really felt the need to serve.”... Read more about Roy and Lila Ash Fellow Ryan Swann: A Story of Service
In the United States, nearly 23,000 young people age out of the foster care system every year without having been reunited with their families or placed in permanent homes. Approximately 20 percent of those who leave foster care without a permanent home after turning 18 join the growing ranks of the homeless in cities and towns large and small across the country, according to the National Foster Youth Initiative. Only half will find gainful employment by the time they turn 24.... Read more about Working Wonders for Foster Youth
With camera equipment often in tow, Cecily Tyler MC/MPA 2016 has been a familiar face at the Ash Center since graduating from the Kennedy School three years ago. Tyler, a documentary filmmaker, has worked with scores of students at the Center since starting to teach videographic essay-making skills as part of Ash Center resident faculty affiliate Jorrit de Jong’s Innovation Field Lab course.... Read more about Behind the Lens: Cecily Tyler Is Building a New Generation of Citizen Storytellers
Getting eligible Harvard students to vote in US elections shouldn’t be hard, should it? After all, the University prides itself on being a training ground for emerging leaders, inculcating into successive generations of students the values and importance of civic engagement and democratic governance. But it turns out that many of these same students don’t exercise what is arguably democracy's core right and responsibility while at Harvard: showing up at the polls.... Read more about Harvard Votes
The Ash Center sat down for a conversation with Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at HKS and one of Ash’s newest faculty affiliates.
You are known for your work on international human rights issues, but you also helped co-chair the School's participation in the Harvard Votes Challenge with Archon Fung. How did you go from the world of human rights, and the responsibility to protect, to voting?
Well, first, I've always been interested in human rights. I got interested in human rights as an undergraduate student living in Uruguay during the darkest days of the dictatorship.... Read more about Kathryn Sikkink on Voter Participation
Like most city leaders, Jennifer Musisi, the former municipal head of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, came into office with plans to shake up how local government did business. She wasn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers in order to improve how Uganda’s largest metro area, long plagued by corruption and poor administration, provided services to its one and a half million residents. What she didn’t expect was that her pursuit of greater government efficiency and transparency would result in threats on her life.... Read more about From Kampala to Cambridge: Jennifer Musisi knows what it takes to lead high-stakes change in city government
March 1–3, the Ash Center cohosted the Democracy Entrepreneurship Conference, which brought together democracy advocates, policymakers, philanthropists, academics, and journalists at HKS. The unique event helped attendees build connections, learn about innovative organizing strategies, and understand how best to tap into newfound energy directed toward strengthening US democratic institutions.
In 2016, Maine voters became the first to approve statewide ranked choice voting, but like many democracy reform battles, it was no easy task convincing the state’s political leadership and courts to support this new ballot-casting innovation. As part of the Ash Center's spring semester 2019 study group on democracy reform, led by Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy Miles Rapoport, HKS students had the opportunity to hear firsthand from reformers who helped make ranked choice voting a reality in Maine, as well as... Read more about Study Group Explores Maine’s Experiment with Ranked Choice Voting
In two recently released papers, a pair of scholars affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation take a close look at how urban leaders are grappling with the quick pace of technological and regulatory change in America’s cities today. In Reforming Mobility Management: Rethinking the Regulatory Framework, Stephen Goldsmith, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, lays out a new model for how...
As much of official Washington gathered in the cavernous nave of the Washington National Cathedral earlier this month to pay their final respects to the late Senator John McCain, Harvard’s Thomas Vallely MC/MPA 1983 stood among former presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and military service members to say goodbye to a friend of 30 years with whom he had worked to reshape U.S. policy in Southeast Asia... Read more about Remembering Senator John McCain and his efforts to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War
Kelly Lugbill Clark MPP 2018 was driving along the streets of Kinshasa in April 2015 when the news came over the radio that the death of a young African American man in police custody named Freddie Gray had touched off days of rioting in Baltimore. Clark, winner of the Ash Center’s 2018 Martha H. Mauzy Award for the Advancement of Democratic Governance, was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo helping to oversee human rights and democracy programming for the Carter Center of Atlanta. She was pressed by her Congolese colleagues on why she had traveled thousands of miles to work when America was plainly grappling with human rights issues of its own.... Read more about From Kinshasa to Richmond, Kelly Clark Works to Empower Community
A small, intensely blue, frozen pool sits isolated in a sparsely populated area of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, China. It is hard to imagine, but this bit of ice, the Lasagongma Spring, is the start of a river that serves as the lifeblood to 60 million people.
With spring’s arrival, the ice melts and the pool is awash as mountain snows turn to water and flood the valley. Ultimately, the water will flow through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, entering Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and then emptying into the South China Sea (or the East Sea to the Vietnamese). In total, the waters of the Greater Mekong Basin help feed an estimated 300 million people... Read more about Ensuring the Future of the Lower Mekong Basin
In Boston for a performance with Arcade Fire, the Montréal-based rock band he helped found, the Ash Center sat down Will Butler, a 2017 graduate of Harvard Kennedy School’s mid-career MPA program for a conversation on the intersection of public policy, the arts, and his efforts to strengthen a culture of public engagement and participation in government and elections... Read more about Arcade Fire's Will Bulter on Voting & Civic Participation
Nisreen Haj Ahmad MC/MPA ’08, a former visiting research fellow at the Ash Center, spent the first seven years of her professional career enmeshed in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team. By the end of her tenure as a Palestinian negotiator, “I was depressed,” she recalls. “I studied law to defend the rights of oppressed people.” However, the minutiae and grinding pace of negotiations led Haj Ahmad to question whether the power of law was sufficient to impact the lives of ordinary Palestinians.
