Harvard Kennedy School and Tsinghua University, China
Established in 2001, China’s Leaders in Development program is widely recognized by the Chinese government as one of the best overseas training programs for government officials. Taught both at Tsinghua University, China, and Harvard Kennedy School, this eight-week training program is specifically designed to help prepare senior local and central Chinese government officials to more effectively address the ongoing challenges of China’s national reforms.... Read more about China’s Leaders in Development (2010)
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 Street, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Richard Allen, University of Idaho William J. Kramber, Idaho Department of Water Resources
About the Seminar Because over 90 percent of Idaho’s water is used for irrigating agriculture and rainfall amounts remain low, regional water supply disputes continue to grow. In collaboration with the University of Idaho, Idaho’s Department of Water Resources was the first government agency in the nation to develop and use satellite-based evapotranspiration imagery to enhance the understanding of agricultural water usage in the state. Originally intended to track water evaporated from soil and transpired from vegetation, the state of Idaho has enjoyed multiple uses for evapotranspiration data beyond what was originally conceived, including improving wildlife habitats and settling litigation, and it has also resulted in significant cost savings.
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
JFK Jr. Forum, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA
This conversation about social innovations in government is moderated by Stephen Goldsmith and includes panel speakers Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor of NYC; Mitch Landrieu, Lt. Governor of Louisiana & Mayor-elect, New Orleans; Michael Lomax, Pres. & CEO, United Negro College Fund; Michelle Rhee, Chancellor, D.C. Public Schools.
124 Mt. Auburn, Suite 200-North, Room 226, Cambridge, MA
Dr. Ronald Sanders, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
About the Seminar The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Intelligence Community Civilian Joint Duty Program requires intelligence professionals to complete assignments outside their agency to achieve executive rank, with the goal to develop leaders that can break through the silos that prevented the intelligence community from “connecting the dots” prior to September 11th. The program won the Innovations in American Government Award in 2008.... Read more about Improving National Security Through Knowledge Sharing
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