Joe Moore, City of Chicago

About the Seminar
Around the United States, city leaders are increasingly asking their residents for suggestions about budget spending. In Chicago’s 49th Ward, a city council member is going one step further. Through a novel experiment in democracy known as participatory budgeting (PB), Alderman Joe Moore is not just asking their opinions – he is giving his constituents the power to make real decisions about how to spend their tax dollars.

PB is an innovative model of democratic deliberation and decision-making in which ordinary citizens decide how to allocate part of a municipal budget.... Read more about Participatory Budgeting: Democratic Deliberation and Decision Making at the Local Level

About the Webinar
The Power of Social Innovation Series returns this spring with practitioner-led webinars on timely topics from education reform to economic development. Each webinar features innovators sharing their experiences and insights with fellow practitioners, students and scholars from across the country.

This event is sponsored by the Government Innovators Network and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and features government leaders and experts from innovative service organizations.

The panel will discuss the relationship between community support and Detroit’s turnaround schools/education reform efforts. They will explore the important role that civic leaders – both outside the public school system and within – can play in engaging and mobilizing the support of parents, neighbors and other residents in a city-wide effort to turnaround an education system that is failing so many of their young people.... Read more about School Reform in Detroit: Critical Lessons in Building Community Support

Muhammad Chatib “Dede” Basri, University of Indonesia

About the Seminar
This seminar will provide an overview of the role of fiscal policy in Indonesia after the 1998 fiscal crisis and especially during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Basri’s presentation will be based on his new joint paper with Sjamsu Rahardja, which will be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by Takatoshi Ito.... Read more about Mild Crisis, Half Hearted Fiscal Stimulus: Indonesia During the GFC

The China Energy and Environment Conference at Harvard University will provide a forum for extensive debate and collaboration. It will bring influential scholars, government officials, and private sector leaders from China and the U.S. together to address Chinese energy and environmental issues. The aims are to: enhance U.S.-China collaboration; discern the critical challenges China faces and prospects for solutions; provide insight into current Chinese policy; and offer opportunities for networking and career development.... Read more about China Energy & Environment Conference (2011)

Michael Woolcock, World Bank

About the Seminar
After the fall of the New Order government in 1998, Indonesia faced a momentous challenge: responding to an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression while attempting to nurture the emergence of democratic governance in the lives of more than 200 million citizens. International agencies faced their own serious problems, given their explicit support of the New Order regime. Into this space a bold experiment in participatory development was undertaken by the government of Indonesia and the World Bank. Launched as a pilot but quickly scaled up as a national flagship, the Kecamatan Development Program (KDP) was in no small part “a democracy project disguised as a development project” – an attempt to meet the immediate economic needs of everyday villagers by harnessing their local knowledge and by requiring full transparency and accountability of competitive selection mechanisms used to allocate grants to community groups. Via these procedures, KDP sought to instill deliberative civic skills, to enhance the legitimacy of new democratic service delivery models at the local level, and to minimize the serious conflict that necessarily accompanies institutional change.... Read more about Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia

Barbara Geddes, University of California Los Angeles

About the Seminar
In this seminar, Professor Barbara Geddes will investigate the survival strategies of dictators whose tenure in office depends on armed supporters. The main threat that faces such leaders is ouster by military coup. Geddes will argue that dictators’ strategy choices for responding to that threat depend on characteristics of the military force from which these rivals are likely to come. Where the military is unified and disciplined, commanders can make credible promises to support a dictator who shares power with the rest of the officer corps and also credible threats to oust those who do not. In such circumstances, dictators’ best strategy is to agree to authoritarian institutions that induce power sharing and consultation among military rivals. Where the military is factionalized, however, promises of support are not credible because commanding officers cannot assure the discipline of other officers. Dictators who lack the option of stable power sharing with the rest of the military often try to build a balancing political force through the creation of a mass-based party and holding elections. Results of the data analysis are consistent with the argument that dictators from factionalized armed forces are more likely to organize support parties. Her argument also implies that if the strategies described are effective, dictators who form parties while they rule should be less likely to be ousted by coup than those who do not. Results from the data analysis show that party creation tends to reduce the likelihood of coups and coup attempts. The implication of this argument is that institutions that mimic those in democracies may be responses to challenges from within the armed group supporting the regime rather than from societal opposition groups.... Read more about How the Military Shapes ’Democratic’ Institutions in Dictatorships

Jonatan Lassa, Indonesia Research Fellow, Ash Center

About the Seminar
In this talk, the fourth in the 2010/2011 Harvard Disaster Management in Asia Seminar Series, Dr. Jonatan Lassa will present key findings from his research on disaster risk reduction efforts in Indonesia. Currently a Harvard Kennedy School Indonesia Program Research Fellow, Dr. Lassa received his Ph.D. in geoinformation from the University of Bonn (Germany). He has more than 10 years of work experience with various civil society organizations, including those focusing on disaster governance issues.... Read more about Can Indonesia Incrementally Reduce its Disaster Risks? Some Recent Findings

John Dryzek, Australian National University
Co-sponsored by the Program on Science, Technology and Society, HKS

About the Seminar
In environmental political theory and associated fields such as ecological economics, it is now widely accepted that deliberative governance ought to be able to promote both effective environmental performance and democratic legitimacy. But do these claims stand up in light of the reality of climate governance, currently so problematic at every level from the local to the global? Making reference to studies ranging from locally constituted citizen forums to global negotiations and networks, John Dryzek will claim that the theoretical arguments for deliberative democracy can be sustained when it comes to climate governance. The idea of a deliberative system proves crucial. Implications will be drawn for the content of rhetoric that can reach skeptics when climate science cannot.... Read more about Deliberative Democracy and Climate Governance