CGIS South Building, S020, 1730 Cambridge Street, Concourse Level
At the Fifth Annual Tsai Lecture, Dr. Sadako Ogata will make the public address “Between Conflict Prevention and Building Peace: Evaluating International Responses.” Dr. Ogata is the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and was the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. For more information, please contact the Asia Center at 617-496-6273.... Read more about Between Conflict Prevention and Building Peace
124 Mount Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA
Julia Bezgacheva and David Strigel Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer
About the Seminar Designed to increase civic participation, government accountability, and transparency in government practices, the city of Washington, D.C. created an initiative making virtually all current district government operational data available to the public in its raw form rather than in static, edited reports.... Read more about Increasing Civic Participation Through Democratization of Data
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA
Lily Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
About the Seminar In consolidated democracies, democratic decision-making processes and positive citizen evaluations of procedural justice are robustly correlated with higher levels of citizen compliance with state authority. Citizens who participate in the selection of government officials and who believe that government officials solicit and incorporate citizen input in their decision making are more likely to abide by those decisions.... Read more about Citizen Compliance and State Legitimacy in Rural China
Rafael E. Cestero, Department of Housing Preservation & Development John B. Rhea, New York City Housing Authority
About the Seminar The nation’s economic crisis has put pressure on cities to increase the amount of affordable housing available to low- and moderate-income residents. Often already faced with housing shortages, cities must now address new challenges doing more with less. As leaders are being tasked to be more creative and innovative than ever, they are evaluating the past, looking at new programmatic ideas, and most importantly, establishing new cross-sector and cross-agency partnerships to expand the capacity and potential for affordable housing solutions.... Read more about Transforming Affordable Housing Through Innovation
124 Mt. Auburn, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Professor Guy Stuart, Harvard Kennedy School
About the Seminar In the past 30 years microfinance has evolved from small experiments in lending to the poor in Latin America and Bangladesh to a global financial services industry with access to global capital markets. In this seminar, Guy Stuart will argue that the diffusion of microfinance across the globe is the tale of two dynamics: one in which credit-led microfinance easily diffused throughout the developing world “beneath the radar” of regulators, and another in which savings-based microfinance has struggled in many countries to take hold because of the lack of an appropriate enabling environment, most prominently government regulations.... Read more about International Diffusion of Microfinance
Pop Center, 9 Bow Street, 1st Floor Conference Room
Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine
About the Seminar At this seminar, Professor Kamal Sadiq will discuss his book Paper Citizens. Sadiq reveals that most of the world’s illegal immigrants are not migrating directly to the U.S., but rather to countries in the vast developing world. And when they arrive in countries like India and Malaysia – which are often governed by weak and erratic bureaucracies – they are able to obtain citizenship papers fairly easily. Sadiq introduces “documentary citizenship” to explain how paperwork – often falsely obtained – confers citizenship on illegal immigrants. Once immigrants obtain documents, it is a relatively simple matter for, say, an Afghan migrant with Pakistani papers to pass himself off as a Pakistani citizen both in Pakistan and abroad. Across the globe, there are literally tens of millions of such illegal immigrants who have assumed the guise of “citizens.”... Read more about A Paper Trail to Citizenship
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Hank Johnston, San Diego State University
About the Seminar In this seminar, Professor Johnston suggests that unobtrusive forms of protest and small-scale resistance commonly occur in repressive states. He will trace the various forms of anti-regime activity to suggest that they play an important role in the process of authoritarian withdrawal and democratic transition. Drawing on a wide range of cases, he will describe a bottom-up, popular approach to regime liberalization in which the recursive effects of small, isolated protest actions lay claim to public spaces and take advantage of elite divisions.... Read more about Small Talk, Unobtrusive Protest, and Authoritarian Withdrawal
Margaret Anderson, University of California, Berkeley
About the Seminar Can robust democratic forces develop within self-conflidently authoritarian regimes? The Germany that Bismarck created was legendarily a “hard place” for democrats: headed by an hereditary monarch, whose slogan was “the will of the king is the supreme law”; governed locally by a civil service with all the arrogance that birth and expertise bestow; and aided by an agrarian (“Junker”) aristocracy whose control of the rural population brooked no dissent. Analogous powers were claimed in the Saar and the Ruhr by industrialists who disposed of the votes along with the livelihoods of their workforce. And yet this same society produced political parties (including the largest socialist party in Europe) whose candidates, in democratic elections, regularly bested those of their conservative masters; who in parliament defeated legislation dear to the Crown and its paladins; who wrung concessions from the government and forced the Right to play the parliamentary game. Was it culture or institutions that accounts for the electoral successes of Wilhelmine Germany’s democratic forces? And did their success matter?
124 Mount Auburn, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Kingsport, Tennessee’s Higher Education Program
About the Seminar Formerly a rustbelt city with an over reliance on heavy manufacturing, Kingsport, Tennessee faced the growing crises of an aging population, shrinking younger-aged workforce, and dropping education levels which threatened its already falling living standards.
In order to reverse its impending economic crisis, Kingsport launched a successful ’Educate and Grow’ campaign to attract new business investment to the region by upgrading the quality of its workforce. This initiative won the Innovations in American Government Award in 2009.
This event was part of the Innovation in Government Seminar Series, which explores various aspects and approaches to the study of government innovation.... Read more about Revitalizing a Community
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Towards a Comparative Framework Patrick Heller, Brown University
About the Seminar Brazil, India, and South Africa are three of the most successful cases of consolidated democracy in the developing world. They are also characterized by deep and durable social inequalities that have limited the effective political incorporation of subordinate groups. In this talk, Professor Heller developed a general analytic frame for assessing democratic deepening in comparative terms and identify distinct trajectories of democratic deepening in each country. These divergent trajectories were in turn linked to patterns of interaction between civil and political society.... Read more about Democratic Deepening
Julia Bezgacheva and David Strigel
Lily Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rafael E. Cestero, Department of Housing Preservation & Development
Professor Guy Stuart, Harvard Kennedy School
Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine
Hank Johnston, San Diego State University
Margaret Anderson, University of California, Berkeley