U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice '86 will give a special public lecture at the Freeman Spogli Institute on Climate Change and National Security.
Doors open at 4:00pm. Space is limited.
Nearly nine years following the release of the Center for Global Development’s When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation report, and almost a decade into increased focus on evaluation among global donors, many in the research community are reflecting on the state of the impact evaluation field, whether the development community is learning what was hoped to from impact evaluations and where the future of impact evaluation leads.
As part of this reflection, in this paper we will explore the recent past, current status and future of impact evaluation of development interventions.
This book evaluates the global status and prospects of democracy, with an emphasis on the quality of democratic institutions and the effectiveness of governance as key conditions for stable democracy. Bringing together a wide range of the author’s work over the past three decades, it advances a framework for assessing the quality of democracy and it analyzes alternative measures of democracy. Drawing on the most recent data from Freedom House, it assesses the global state of democracy and freedom, as of the beginning of 2015, and it explains why the world has been experiencing a mild but now deepening recession of democracy and freedom since 2005.
A major theme of the book across the three decades of the author’s work is the relationship between democratic quality and stability. Democracies break down, Diamond argues, not so much because of economic factors but because of corrupt, inept governance that violates individual rights and the rule of law. The best way to secure democracy is to ensure that democracy is accountable, transparent, genuinely competitive, respectful of individual rights, inclusive of diverse forms and sources of participation, and responsive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens. Viable democracy requires not only a state that can mobilize power to achieve collective goals, but also one that can restrain and punish the abuse of power—a particularly steep challenge for poor countries and those with natural resource wealth.
The book examines these themes both in broad comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of historical trends and future prospects in Africa and Asia,. Concluding with lessons for sustaining and reforming policies to promote democracy internationally, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in democracy, as well as politics and international relations more generally.
Abstract: How rainfall arrives, in terms of its frequency, intensity and the timing and duration of rainy season, may have a large influence on rainfed agriculture. However, a thorough assessment of these effects is largely missing. This study combines a new synthetic rainfall model and two independently-validated crop models (APSIM and SARRA-H) to assess sorghum yield response to possible shifts in seasonal rainfall characteristics in West Africa. We find that shifts in total rainfall amount primarily drive the rainfall-related crop yield change, with less relevance to intra-seasonal rainfall features. However, dry regions (total annual rainfall below 500 mm/year) have a high sensitivity to rainfall frequency and intensity, and more intense rainfall events have greater benefits for crop yield than more frequent rainfall. Delayed monsoon onset may negatively impact yields. Our study implies that future changes in seasonal rainfall characteristics should be considered in designing specific crop adaptations in West Africa.
In a recent piece in Stanford News, FSI Senior Fellow Larry Diamond expresses his thoughts on the ebbing of global democratic expansion, highlighting that not all countries have equal opportunities at achieving democracy and that democratic change should be approached multilaterally.
Stanford Assistant Professor of Medicine Marcella Alsan had always wondered why the mineral-rich African continent — with so many natural resources, diverse climates and arable land — remains so poor.
She launched into extensive research while working on her PhD in economics and has now come up with an intriguing theory: A pesky parasite prevented many precolonial Africans from adopting progressive agricultural methods, a phenomenon that still impacts parts of the continent today.
The tsetse fly has plagued Africa for centuries — having sent millions of people into the confusing stupor of sleeping sickness, while killing the cows and other livestock needed to plough their fields and feed their families.
Alsan writes in a paper published in The American Economic Review that the tsetse fly, which today is found only in Africa, drove precolonial Africans to use slaves instead of domesticated animals for agriculture. This limited their crop yields and the ability to transport goods.
“Communicable disease has often been explored as a cause of Africa’s underdevelopment,” writes Alsan, who is the only infectious-disease trained economist in the United States and a core faculty member of the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research.
“Although the literature has investigated the role of human pathogens on economic performance, it is largely silent on the impact of veterinary disease,” she notes. “This is peculiar, given the role that livestock played in agriculture and as a form of transport throughout history.”
The economic impact caused by the parasite of the trypanosome vector is estimated to be as much as $4 billion a year. The Food and Agricultural Organization estimates 37 African countries are affected by the tsetse fly and that its trypanosomosis kills around 3 million livestock per year.
The World Health Organization reports that the sleeping sickness delivered by the tsetse bite in humans is hard to diagnose and treat. Some 60 million people were once at risk with an estimated 300,000 new cases each year.
Sleeping sickness causes headaches, fatigue and weight loss; confusion and personality disorders occur as the illness progresses. If left untreated, people typically die after several years of infection.
Fortunately, sustained control efforts have reduced the number of new cases, dropping below 10,000 annual cases annual for the first time in 50 years in 2009. This is in part to an eradication effort using radiation sterilization techniques adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the lingering economic impact from the tsetse has been monumental.
For her research, Alsan used geospatial-mapping software to mine data gathered by missionaries and anthropologists in the 1800s. She found that farming methods used in other developing regions of the world — such as the agricultural revolution in England — were not widely adopted in Africa.
“Livestock were really important for development in many places, such as Europe and North America and in some parts of Africa like the highlands of Ethiopia,” Alsan said in an interview. “They pulled plows and carried carts, their manure was used for fertilizer. They helped transport people and goods across land.”
She found that ethnic groups inhabiting tsetse-prone African regions were less likely to use domesticated animals to plow their fields, turning instead to the slash-and-burn technique still used in many parts of the continent today.
The same people were also less likely to be politically centralized, due to lack of transportation by livestock, and had a lower population density.
“These correlations are not found in the tropics outside of Africa, where the fly does not exist,” she writes. “The evidence suggests current economic performance is affected by the tsetse through the channel of precolonial political centralization.”
The FAO estimates that the tsetse fly infects nearly 10 million square kilometers in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of this large area is fertile but left uncultivated, a so-called green desert not used by humans and cattle. Most of the tsetse-infected countries are poor, debt-ridden and underdeveloped.
And this is what triggered Alsan’s interest in the tsetse fly: How its deadly bite has altered the socioeconomic impact of a continent.
“I am an infectious disease doctor, so part of my work is looking at neglected infectious diseases much like this one,” she said. “And it is
incredibly important to shine light on issues that are Africa-specific and therefore may not garner as much attention as those economic and medical issues that affect wealthier regions of the world.”
Alsan, who sees patients at the Stanford University Medical Center and is an investigator at the VA Palo Alto Health Care Systems, is now launching work in India, Ghana and the San Francisco Bay Area. She hopes to better understand how socioeconomic and health disparities interact, and the important role that history plays in understanding those interactions.
From its inception, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) considered itself to be a moderating force in the Cold War and in the post-colonial world. In September 1961, in the wake of the Belgrade Conference and at the height of the Berlin crisis, it dispatched emergency missions to Washington and Moscow, with Sukarno and Keita journeying to Washington and Nehru and Nkrumah flying to Moscow. Yet, by the decade's end, the movement had moved away from that mission. Paying particular attention to key turning points of the mid-1960s such as the 1964 Congo crisis and the Americanisation of the Vietnam War, this paper interprets the abandonment of cold war mediation as a product of the Vietnam War, rising anti-colonial sentiment, and organised non-alignment's corresponding shift toward a more militant stance on the world stage. This shift helped to foster a newly antagonistic relationship between the United States and the NAM.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Larry Diamond presents a timeline of democracy charting the spread, regression, and sometimes even collapse, of democracy in the last 40 years.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy initiated a bold new policy of engaging states that had chosen to remain nonaligned in the Cold War. In a narrative ranging from the White House to the western coast of Africa, to the shores of New Guinea, Robert B. Rakove examines the brief but eventful life of this policy during the presidencies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Engagement initially met with real success, but it faltered in the face of serious obstacles, including colonial and regional conflicts, disputes over foreign aid, and the Vietnam War. Its failure paved the way for a lasting hostility between the United States and much of the nonaligned world, with consequences extending to the present. This book offers a sweeping account of a critical period in the relationship between the United States and the Third World.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an economist who trained at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent several years at the World Bank before returning to India to serve as the Economic Advisor to the Finance Minister. The Government of India then appointed him to several senior positions, including Secretary of Commerce and Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Finance. In 1998, he was appointed as a Member of the Planning Commission and Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. In 2001, he became the Director of Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund, resigning this position in 2004 to become the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission.
He has written widely about India and the world economy, co-authoring Redistribution with Growth: An Approach to Policy, and editing Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy: Issues for Reforming the Global Financial Architecture with Y.V. Reddy and S.S. Tarapore.
The Payne Distinguished Lectureship is named for Frank and Arthur Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. This lectureship, hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, brings speakers with an international reputation for leadership and visionary thinking to Stanford to deliver a major public lecture.
This event is carried out in partnership with the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID).
A public reception will follow the lecture.