Around the World in Seven Days: MIP Students Travel the Globe to Practice Policymaking

Artificial Intelligence promises to transform Public Defenders in Brazil, as seen throughout our fieldwork trip in Rio de Janeiro. Our team spent the week discussing the integration of AI in legal practices with defenders from 13 states and experts from Instituto de Tecnologia e Sociedade (ITS Rio) and COPPE / UFRJ. We focused on developing AI tools tailored to reduce administrative burdens, enabling defenders to concentrate on advocacy. With nearly 80% of Brazilians entitled to free legal aid, AI can automate routine tasks like document categorization and grammatical corrections.

Significant challenges relate to privacy and potential biases in algorithms, underscoring the need for collaborative governance to ethically implement these solutions. Thus, a unified technological strategy is crucial. We hope that through our work, we can create a collaborative governance framework that will facilitate the development of digital and AI tools, ultimately helping citizens at large. We appreciated the opportunity to learn from incredibly dedicated professionals who are excited to find new ways to jointly develop tools.

We met with government agencies, legislators, military and national security officials, private sector actors, and civil society figures within Taiwan's vibrant ecosystem for countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). On the ground, the team found that China’s FIMI operations are evolving and increasingly subtle and complex. As generative AI empowers malign actors, our team assessed that the battle against sophisticated, state-sponsored influence campaigns requires a more integrated and strategic approach that spans legal, technological, and societal responses.

During their time in Ghana, Skylar and Maya met with various stakeholders in the Ghanaian transportation field, including government agencies, ride-share apps, freight businesses, academics, and paratransit operators. Presently, paratransit operators, known locally as "tro tros," dominate the public transportation space and with a variety of meetings with their union officials and drivers in terminals around Accra they were able to learn about the nature of the tro tro business and their relationships — and lack thereof — with the government.

In D.C., Rosie met with development organizations and transport officials and attended the World Bank’s Transforming Transportation Conference and their paratransit and finance roundtable. Collectively, they learned about the issues facing the transport industry primarily related to problems surrounding bankability, infrastructure and vehicle financing, and lack of government collaboration with stakeholders. Insights from the trip spurred their team away from conventional physical interventions and toward solutions that will bridge stakeholder gaps and improve transport governance and policy implementation.

Our team had the opportunity to go to Mongolia and Washington DC where we conducted over twenty structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders. We spoke with people including local and central government officials, officials of international organizations, representatives from mining and cashmere industries, community organizations, academic researchers, herder households, NGOs and Mongolian politicians. Though we knew the practice of nomadic herding is core to Mongolia’s national identity, we didn’t fully realize just how integrated this practice, and the problem of grassland degradation, are in the economy, society and politics of Mongolia.

In the run-up to Mongolia’s election in June, this issue was especially top of mind to those we interviewed. Everyone we spoke with had some form of direct connection with herding, mostly through their own families. Our interviews, as well as being in Ulaanbaatar and the surrounding provinces, helped us to deepen our understanding of the context in which possible interventions operate. Most especially we observed all the extensive work that is being done to tackle grassland degradation and that institutionalizing and supporting these existing approaches could help tackle this issue.

While on the ground, our team met with members from Chinese student organizations and professional associations to gather primary evidence on the online harms they face. We also met with Tom Udall, the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, his team, and university faculty to brainstorm solutions to tackle this problem. We learned about the prevalent use of “super-apps” beyond WeChat in crowdsourcing solutions and support, and were able to better grasp the complexities of the relationships between public safety organizations and the focus demographic. In retrospect, it was insightful to hear from actors across the public, private, and civic sectors about the prevalence of online harms and how invested major stakeholders are in finding common solutions through a joint, holistic approach.

Our team met with private sector mini grid developers, government officials from the public utilities commission and energy ministry, and rural communities benefiting from mini grid electrification. While we saw first-hand the significant impact that solar mini grids can have on communities living in energy poverty, we also developed a deeper understanding of the macroeconomic, market, and policy conditions preventing the industry from reaching its full potential of providing energy access to millions of Sierra Leoneans. Moving forward, we will explore innovative climate finance solutions and leverage our policy experience to develop feasible recommendations specific to the local environment.

During our travels around Taiwan and our many meetings, we were surprised with the lack of consensus among local decision-makers regarding which potential solution pathways were likely to yield the most timely and effective results. These discrepancies often reflected the presence of information asymmetries and divergent institutional interests across stakeholders—both of which run counter to Taiwan’s most urgent strategic priorities. Revising existing bureaucratic authorities and facilitating the spread of technical expertise would enable—and enrich—investment in future resilience.

While we anticipated that structural inefficiencies would impede change to some degree, our onsite interviews gave us a clearer picture of where policy interventions will likely have the most positive effect for Taiwan's defense. With the insights from our fieldwork, we intend to spend the remainder of the quarter exploring new leads, delving into theory of change, and designing a set of meaningful policy recommendations.