Crisis Management Student Group & Program on Crisis Leadership

About the Seminar
Learn about various student activities and research and academic initiatives related to crisis leadership and disaster risk management. Leaders of the HKS Crisis Management Student Group and faculty and staff affiliated with the Program on Crisis Leadership will make brief presentations and be available to meet and talk with students. Light refreshments will be provided.... Read more about Open House & Informational Session

Participation, Representation, & Political Experimentalism in Brazil
Thamy Pogrebinschi, State University of Rio de Janeiro 

About the Seminar
The national public policy conferences are arguably the largest and most innovative participatory experience currently being held in Brazil. Summoned by the Executive Branch, and organized at the national level along with civil society, such policy conferences have proven themselves successful enough to affect the policies drafted by the administration, and to influence the legislation enacted by the Congress. While redesigning the policy-making process, and changing the pattern of the state and civil society relationships, national policy conferences are perhaps the best example of Brazil’s pragmatic democracy: a strong commitment to political experimentalism, in which the false contradictions between representation and participation, and State and civil society, are dialectically superseded through a process of institutional redesign that moves the country away from liberal democracy.... Read more about Moving Away from Liberal Democracy

The Vietnam Program engaged a select group of provincial and national-level policymakers in policy dialogue through its Vietnam Policy Update (VPU) program held in partnership with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Vietnam faces a range of complex policy challenges in an international context fraught with uncertainty. Against this backdrop, Vietnamese policymakers are preparing the country's development strategy for the next ten years, which will be debated and adopted at the Party Congress in 2011. Over three days, VPU engaged the participants in a structured discussion with leading Vietnamese and international experts on a range of issues related to Vietnam’s socioeconomic development. Key topics included regional development strategies in an international context, geopolitical developments in East and Southeast Asia, the regional and global economic outlook, an analysis of Vietnam's competitiveness and economy, and infrastructure challenges.