The inaugural (March 2008) issue of PRISM, an undergraduate journal published by the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), carries a dozen essays. Six were written by Stanford undergraduates for a Stanford Overseas Seminar taught in Singapore in September 2006, and six by NUS undergrads in the USP for an NUS course taught at Stanford in May 2007.

The Stanford students, their paper topics, and brief summaries of their conclusions follow:

Jenni Romanek examined Singapore’s national identity. She found that Singaporeans “embody certain shared attributes of national identity, but they do so on a superficial level … If the government truly wishes to impart upon citizens a Singaporean identity, it must allow them to cultivate and define it, at least in part, by themselves. This necessitates a level of self-expression that is not currently acceptable by government standards.” She ended her essay by asking, “Without free speech, whose identity are Singaporeans representing?”

François Jean-Baptiste examined Singapore’s efforts to inculcate national identity through the school curriculum. He found the education ministry’s top-down methods “generally unsuccessful” and recommended a more student-and-teacher-driven approach. “The real and representative Singapore narrative,” he wrote, involved the ambitions of a wide range of Asian immigrants including “Filipina maids,” “Malay Muslims,” and “opposition leaders like J.B. Jeyaretnam and Slyvia Lim.” Education in the city-state’s secondary schools, he concluded, “should and can incorporate that story.”

Lauren Peate studied the “Four Million Smiles” campaign launched in the run-up to the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held in Singapore in September 2006 while the Stanford seminar was in progress. She found general public support for the campaign except among “young, [more] educated, and electronically connected” Singaporeans, one of whom told her, “We trust the government but it doesn’t trust us [to smile without being told to].” She ended by wondering how the authorities would choose to deal with a young generation of bloggers with critical minds.

Jon Casto explored Singapore’s efforts to instill an entrepreneurial culture despite a general aversion to risk (and a preference for state employment) “perpetuated through cultural norms, the labor market and [government-linked corporations].” He also, however, found entrepreneurship in Singapore “slowly on the rise” and argued that “today’s experiences” in promoting it “may bear tremendous fruit” if and when the economic climate because problematic enough to demand “that Singaporean individuals, not just the [People’s Action Party] government, provide solutions.”

Alexander Slaski researched the implications of illiberal politics for environmental policy in Singapore. He credited the government with having provided its citizens with a high quality of life, including “excellent environmental governance” from the top down. But he was struck by an artifact of the government’s relatively authoritarian approach to being green: the virtual absence in the city-state of a bottom-up or civil-society movement for conservation. To that extent, he concluded, “the authoritarian elements of the government have kept environmental protection from being as strong as it could be.”

Sam Shrank investigated the status and future of renewable energy. Singapore had previously managed to secure for itself “a constant and assured flow of oil and natural gas from abroad at reasonable.” But “peak oil—the year in which the supply of oil peaks—is in sight, and the end of natural gas is not far behind.” Oil and gas prices, he warned, will rise as demand outpaces supply. Amply sunlit as it is, Singapore could and should be doing much more to exploit sources of renewable energy sources, and solar (photovoltaic) energy in particular.

Compared with these essays, the Singaporean students’ essays in PRISM were no less diverse. If the Americans concentrated single-mindedly on Singapore, in keeping with the focus of the Stanford seminar, the Singaporean contributors were more inclined to compare American conditions and experiences with those in their own country.

Dan Goh, the NUS professor who taught the Singaporeans at Stanford, introduced the student essays. His thoughts are excerpted here:

"Reflections on Western civilization have often found themselves seduced by the idea of the American exception. … It seems ironic therefore that a group of American students would travel to this island to study what they have termed as the Singapore exception. Seen in the immediate context of Southeast Asia, Singapore is indeed an exception [whose] culturally diverse [im]migrants [have transformed the city-state] into a forward-looking nation. With little historical gravitas except for founding moments and fathers, it is a young nation filled with anxieties and self-doubt. Yet, it is resolute in forming its citizenry through clever ideological campaigns and in engineering visionary technological and economic projects based on successful foreign examples. For all its democratic institutions, it is beset by political elitism and illiberal tendencies. Despite its Edenic ideals and scientific prowess, it is reluctant to pursue environmental sustainability. These are the themes and contradictions tackled in the articles by the six young American scholars featured in this inaugural volume."

"But if we look closer, these themes and contradictions describe America as well. I have always suspected that the study of the exceptional other is always the study of our self as normal when the two are actually much more similar than they are different. Irony has a way of turning in on itself. However, the American students’ essays show that there is a major difference at the heart of comparing the American and Singapore exceptions."

"Given the American political culture of suspicion of state authority, it is not surprising that [in the Stanford students’ essays] the state sticks out visibly in the landscape of Singapore society. For the Singaporean students traveling to the Bay Area however, the feeling is best described by the excitement and trepidation of a Western naturalist traveling from sedate urban London to the rich jungles of Borneo. The state monolith fades and vibrant cultural diversities, intriguing identity evolutions and self-organizing chaos beckon. But always with Singapore in their minds, the young scholars reflected their study of Silicon Valley and San Francisco back unto Singapore. What they found was that the same diversities, evolutions and chaos were also evident in Singapore, but with the roots of the state apparatus sunk deeper into the rich soil here."

"Singapore is not anything like America and yet is everything American, except for the leviathan that stands over our shoulders. Nonetheless, the diversities and hybridities of vernacular everyday life continue to grow as ideas, images and identities speed around the global circuits of capitalism, … connecting young people across the deep Pacific …"

In his own preface to the PRISM issue, SEAF Director Donald Emmerson, who taught the Stanford seminar in Singapore, had this to say:

“In Praise of Bad Teaching.” Years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I pinned a page of text under that title to a bulletin board next to my office door. The author argued that bad teachers were really good teachers because their boring lectures drove their students out of the classroom and into the real world where real learning could occur.

The argument is not wholly facetious. Conventional undergraduate education is notoriously indirect. Independent field work is the preserve of professors and graduate students. Undergraduates sit, listen, read, take notes, and take exams. Technology—the ability to google—has reduced the teacher’s ability to control information. But in standard classrooms, it is still the teacher who selects, interprets, and conveys knowledge, and who then tests and grades its retention. In humdrum pedagogy at its worst, the professor and the student are, respectively, faucet and sponge. A charismatic lecturer—a supposedly “good” teacher—may fill lecture hall seats only to reinforce the enthralled passivity of the sitters.

Fortunately, the National University of Singapore and Stanford University are not conventional institutions. Both campuses encourage their students to go abroad. Professors are not dispensed with. But by affording students direct contact with foreign cultures, NUS and Stanford necessarily challenge the teacher’s span of control. In that loss of unquestioned professorial authority lies a chance for serious learning by students and teacher alike. …

For lack of space, alas, we could not [publish in PRISM] all thirty essays written for our seminars. But those that are printed herein should give readers a feel for what happened when two sets of undergraduate students were “turned loose” on each other’s turf. I am grateful to [Dan Goh and the other individuals who made this issue and the seminars possible] and above all to both complements of students, including those not represented in these pages, for giving me one of the most enjoyable and memorable “teaching”—that is to say, learning—experiences of my life.

PRISM is not available on line, but it can be ordered (stock permitting) from

The Editor, PRISM
University Scholars Programme
National University of Singapore
BLK ADM, Level 6,
10 Kent Ridge Crtescent
Singapore 119260

Private sector leaders, senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, and academic experts convened at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) for a forum on a revolutionary development in disaster response: the rise and pervasiveness of social network communications, and the way these networks will reshape the flow of information when disasters strike. 

The July 28, 2008 forum, “Applications of Pervasive End-User Information Technologies in Emergencies,” generated a broad range of recommended changes in DHS policy. Most important, participants concluded that the paradigm of government control over information flow – as embodied in the National Incident Response System – needs to be entirely rethought. Facebook, Twitter, and other social network communications will enable citizens to link up when disasters strike in a way that has never before been possible.  DHS can take a number of concrete steps to facilitate those communications and make them more useful for disaster response.  These include new mechanisms for DHS to support data authentication; targeted liability coverage for private sector firms in the social network realm; and a revamped exercise system to familiarize government, non-governmental organization and private sector disaster responders with the capabilities of social network communications.

The forum provided the first-ever opportunity for DHS and the private sector leaders in social network communications to examine these issues.  Participants agreed that the findings of the forum should be used to launch a new research program.  That design of that program is now underway.  Topics will include a comprehensive review of scholarly research on the impact of social network technologies on human behavior in emergencies; an analysis of the way these technologies can be applied to homeland security field; and additional measure that DHS should adopt to facilitate the use of these networks.

The forum was co-sponsored by CISAC and the Homeland Security Institute.

After the events of the past few days, I felt a need to update and expand on my note to you of last week about Dokdo.

First, as a preface for all that is to follow, I fully understand why Koreans feel very strongly about the Dokdo issue and, frankly, I personally sympathize with the ROK claim to the islets.

My basic understanding of the issue is as follows:

(1) The ROK has actual possession of the islets. Japan cannot take the matter to the international court unless the ROK agrees, and the ROK won't. Japan will not attempt to use force to take the islets. As far as I know, not a single country in the world wishes to get involved in the controversy between the ROK and Japan over Dokdo, and thus none will support Japan. In other words, there is no prospect that possession of the islets will ever change from the ROK to Japan (in fact, former Prime Minister Abe made a statement acknowledging this situation a few years ago).

(2) Because of (1) above, however, probably no country, much less the international community as a whole, is likely for the foreseeable future to formally support ROK sovereignty (as opposed to not challenging its actual possession) over Dokdo.

(3) Logically, therefore, the ROK's goals should be to (a) maintain actual physical possession of Dokdo, which, as explained above, is not a problem, (b) in the mid-term, persuade others in the international community that Korea's claim outweighs Japan's, and (c) thereby lay the basis, in the long run, for Japan's eventual dropping its claim and/or the international community actively supporting the ROK's claim.

(4) Given all of the above, tactically the ROK should take a confident, low-key, long-term, strategic approach toward Dokdo.

(a) Overreacting to offending Japanese steps or actions can play into the hands of the Japanese right-wing, both domestically in Japan where those Japanese not particularly interested in Dokdo may be offended and energized by Korean criticism of all "Japanese" and "Japan," and in the international community, where strong Korean reactions are widely reported and thus unintentionally result in increased publicity for the Japanese claim.

(b) Similarly, the ROK should take care not to "demand" that foreign countries support its position on Dokdo-for the time being that will not work and it risks offending those countries and thus hurting Korean interests overall-but confidently, diplomatically publicize its position based on the very best objective research on the issue.

(5) Regarding the recent controversy concerning the U.S., I agree fully that it was wise of President Bush to reverse the recent step by the Board on Geographic Names; the timing of the BGN step last week was extremely unfortunate. But for the ROK to develop a good strategy and good tactics on Dokdo for dealing with all countries, including the U.S., it is critically important for the ROK to correctly and fully analyze both the actions and the intentions of foreign countries.

As far as I can reconstruct what happened-and I caution that, as a former U.S. official, I have no access to confidential information and I am not a representative of the U.S. government-the BGN made a policy decision a year or more ago to note which territories are the subject of disputes around the globe.

Why then, the Korean media asks, did the BGN decide only last week to change the listing for Dokdo but not for other territories in the region, as has been asserted? It appears that bureaucratic procedures and resource limitations resulted in the BGN being very slow to make the actual changes mandated by its policy decision to specify territorial disputes.

What has not been noted in Korea, where the focus naturally is on the Dokdo issue, is that the BGN database has a huge number of errors and inconsistencies in its geographical listings, including territorial disputes, all over the world. Top U.S. government officials have publicly indicated that the BGN move was made by relatively low-level, technical officials who did not seek policy input from senior levels of the U.S. government. Clearly that was very unfortunate, and, for the U.S., the incident highlights the need for the BGN to seek such policy guidance in all cases.

As for the timing of the BGN change, it appears, ironically, that BGN officials were alerted to the controversy by media reporting about the strong Korean reaction to the latest Japanese step. (The Japanese step itself would have received virtually no coverage in the U.S. media if it had not been for the strong Korean reaction.) Acting without policy guidance related directly to Dokdo, the BGN officials apparently thought they were updating the database in response to the general policy change made a year or so earlier. I am aware of no indication that Japanese "lobbying" was behind the BGN move last week.

(6) I can thus easily understand why Koreans, based on their concerns and the information available to them, would construe the BGN action as "siding with" the Japanese position. But, in terms of developing ROK strategy and tactics, it is important, as I noted above, that the Korean government and people fully and accurately understand foreign intentions. In the U.S. case, it is clear that the U.S. government did not and does not intend to change its long-standing policy of not taking a position regarding Dokdo.

What happened in the U.S. was largely the result of pedestrian bureaucratic incompetence and failure to communicate internally within the government-not the result of a basic policy change, much less a conspiracy to support Japan. (I am reminded of the old and very wise saying that one should "never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by stupidity.")

While Koreans of course want all countries, particularly their U.S. ally, to support their position on Dokdo, they should also recognize the fundamentally favorable situation of the ROK in regard to Dokdo: the international community, including the U.S., is not challenging and will not challenge the ROK's actual possession of Dokdo. Thus, as former Prime Minister Abe indicated, Dokdo will remain Korean, and Koreans can say confidently, "Dokdo is our land."

Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis is now available for purchase from Stanford University Press.  Co-published with the East-West Center, the book is innovative in several respects.

First, it reflects new thinking by younger scholars.  Its editors are all assistant professors  of political science specializing on Southeast Asia:  Erik Martinez Kuhonta (McGill University), Dan Slater (the University of Chicago), and Tuong Vu (the University of Oregon, Eugene).  

Southeast Asianist assistant professors also account for seven of the volume's other contributors:  Regina Abrami (Harvard Business School), Jamie Davidson (National University of Singapore), Greg Felker (Willamette University, Salem, Oregon), Kikue Hamayotsu (Northern Illinois University), Allen Hicken (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung (University of Massachusetts, Lowell), and Meredith L. Weiss (State University of New York, Albany).  

Three senior scholars round out the table of contents:  Richard F. Doner (Emory University), Donald K. Emmerson (Stanford University), and Ben Kerkvliet (Australian National University).  

Second, the book is a "state of the art" review of political science knowledge of Southeast Asia.  Nothing else like it exists.  What do we really know about, the state, political economy, political parties, ethnic and religious politics, rural politics, globalization and politics, democracy or the lack of it, and political life generally in Southeast Asia?  For scholars, students, and the interested public, this book is a unique place to pursue the answers.  

Third and also distinctive is the book's exploration of unchartered intellectual terrain-the simultaneously productive and turbulent overlap between Southeast Asian studies and political science.  Are the area and the discipline at odds?  Do they offer rival methods and clashing epistemologies?  Or are place-based knowledge and disciplinary ambitions mutually enhancing?  The authors of the volume wrestle with these questions as well.

The idea behind Southeast Asia in Political Science dates from the conference Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis organized by SEAF at Stanford in 2004 while Erik Kuhonta was at APARC as a Shorenstein Fellow.

As oil prices surge through $140/barrel at the time of writing, surely one can at least count on the invisible hand of the market to drive further exploration and production and ultimately bring more supplies on line, right? Or perhaps, more ominously, high oil prices presage a darker future of shortage and conflict as global oil fields pass their geological “peak”? In fact, both positions miss a crucial point about the dynamics of the world oil market — that it is increasingly animated by the counterintuitive behavior of the state-owned oil and gas giants that now control the vast majority of the world’s hydrocarbon resources.

“On average national oil companies (NOCs) extract resources at a far lower rate than international oil companies (IOCs), leaving about 700 billion barrels of oil effectively ‘dead’ to the world market.”So-called “national oil companies,” or NOCs, own about 80 percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil, a percentage that has been on the rise as the persistent high price environment encourages countries to assert even tighter control over the rent streams flowing from their resources. NOCs are curious and variegated beasts, and, contrary to the popular imagination, some are highly capable both technically and organizationally. Brazil’s Petrobras is an acknowledged world leader in deepwater drilling, while Norway’s StatoilHydro is highly regarded for its competence and transparent business practices. Saudi Arabia’s national champion, SaudiAramco, is secretive to the outside world but generally considered to be a well-run, technically capable organization. At the other end of the continuum, government infighting and micromanagement hobble Mexico’s Pemex and Kuwait’s KPC. Once-independent PDVSA in Venezuela has been remade by President Hugo Chávez into a government puppet that spends liberally on social programs but consistently undershoots its production targets. And indeed some national oil companies are hardly oil companies at all — Nigeria’s NNPC, for example, is mostly a rent-seeking bureaucracy.

What NOCs do share in common as distinct from the familiar international oil companies (IOCs) is being answerable to a host government, which inevitably brings with it some focus on objectives other than simple profit maximization. Typically, an NOC arises originally from the desire of resource-rich governments (“principals”) to gain more effective control over resource extractors (“agents”) by creating an oil champion owned by the state. Prior to NOC formation, governments are frequently (and often justifiably) wary of exploitation by the foreign oil operators providing hydrocarbon extraction services. Lacking a deep understanding of the costs of production, states are simply unable to be sure they are taxing their agents appropriately. In addition to enhancing control over the hydrocarbon sector and the revenue it brings, states may hope for other benefits from the NOC: cheap energy to fuel a growing economy, employment and development of local industry to support the hydrocarbon sector, or even foreign policy leverage derived from control of key resources.

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A detailed study of NOC performance and strategy at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at FSI suggests a useful way of thinking about the effects of NOC resource domination on world oil and gas markets. Price versus quantity supply curves from classical economics assume that increased price will spur efforts to expand supply. Unfortunately, the counterintuitive reality for NOCs is that, when it comes to expanding supply in the current high-price environment, most either 1) can but don’t want to or 2) want to but can’t. The end result is what one could call a “backward-bending” supply curve — additional price increases do little or nothing to boost supply.

“The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs.”In the “can but don’t want to” category are resourcerich governments that have decided they cannot assimilate any more money. Already, their investments are running into political resistance around the globe — witness Dubai’s failed attempt to purchase U.S. port management contracts, CNOOC’s failed bid for Unocal, or the increasing calls for curbs on the activities of sovereign wealth funds. Nations may decide they have enough cash and are better off leaving resources in the ground where they safely await monetization at a later date.

In the “want to but can’t” camp are countries and their NOCs that are simply unable to provide the stable political and regulatory climate to support additional build-out of expensive production and transport infrastructure. This situation is particularly common for natural gas, where long investor time horizons are needed to bankroll the multibilliondollar capital costs of pipelines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.

Meanwhile, international oil companies are left on the sidelines salivating helplessly over the vast reserves in NOC hands. Venezuela’s Orinoco region could yield hundreds of billions of barrels of heavy crude, but the government and a nowpliant PDVSA invite favored countries and their NOCs to explore rather than selecting the operators most capable of extracting the challenging but plentiful resource. Technical expertise and massive investment are required to fully develop vast Russian gas fields including Kovykta, Shtokman, and Yamal, but IOCs already burned by nationalizations and shifting rules in these and other Russian ventures are unlikely to be in a position to supply enough of either. In the face of dwindling resources they can tap, IOCs will need to diversify their business models, perhaps tackling technologically challenging options like oil sands or liquids from coal in conjunction with the carbon storage techniques that could make these palatable from a climate change perspective. Ironically, the only “easy” oil for IOCs has become oil that is geologically and technologically difficult.

While oil price is dependent on many factors (including global economic health) and is impossible to forecast with certainty, one can confidently predict continued tight supply of oil and gas, especially given global demand that will be propped up indefinitely by rising consumption in China and India. The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs. Leverage over the market is weak; measures to reduce demand for oil and gas (though politically unpopular) or to spur development of alternative fuels and associated infrastructure (though slow to develop at scale) may be all that we have.

Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts “work”— in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict.

The study by Kenneth A. Schultz, associate professor of political science, and Jennifer Jones, research fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), examined 141 pairs of states (dyads) that experienced at least one militarized territorial conflict between 1816 and 2001. Two-thirds (94) of these dyads made at least one legal commitment to resolve the territorial conflict. Two-thirds of those treaties “worked”; they were never followed by militarized conflict over the territory addressed in the agreement. A multiple regression analysis revealed that a legally binding agreement on territory is associated with a roughly 70 percent reduction in the probability of a subsequent militarized conflict.

Realist accounts of international relations predict that such treaties would work in preventing violence insofar as they allocate disputed territory in accordance with the prevailing balance of power between the affected states. Schultz and Jones’s study reveals that this “distributional” factor alone does not account for the reduced likelihood of subsequent militarized conflict. Some other variables must be at play in creating the “treaty effect."

The study accordingly examined whether the existence of a territorial treaty could itself constrain states from resorting to force to revise the agreement. In this view, the treaty effect stems from the unwillingness of the states involved to incur the costs — such as external sanctions or domestic outrage — that would stem from breaking a previously agreed-upon arrangement. Although tests indirectly support this hypothesis, the more frequent violation of simple nonaggression pacts suggests that treaties are not major constraints on state behavior. More research is necessary to determine exactly what types of salient constraints treaties place on states.

A third explanation for the treaty effect considers the domestic political costs of surrendering a state’s legal claim to territory allocated to the other party under a treaty when the claim itself is valuable, e.g., the claim to ownership over a whole piece of territory, as in Kashmir, or the claim to territory based on religious rights, as in Israel. In this view, a state would be reluctant to sign a treaty when the value of the claim to the disputed territory is particularly high. Treaties, then, serve as screening mechanisms — only those states that place a relatively low value on a claim to disputed territory will sign treaties. In this view, the treaty effect arises because states enter into treaties only when they do not want to keep fighting over disputed territory, rather than because of the inherent constraints of the treaty itself.

Although the results of the study are consistent with the view that territorial treaties work because they serve as screening mechanisms, the evidence remains unclear. There is no direct evidence that states employ a claimsbased rationale when declining to sign a treaty. Schultz and Jones are, however, working on creative ways to observe the role of this rationale for the treaty effect and expect future results to be more specific.

One of Stanford's many remarkable attractions is the Rodin sculpture garden. And perhaps the most extraordinary Rodin sculpture is his Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante’s “Inferno.” In his Divine Comedy, Dante tells us that the inscription over the Gates of Hell is “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

For hundreds of millions of people, that sad admonition belongs over their workplace. Abandon all hope … and not only your hope. Abandon your health and your right to associate; and don’t expect to be paid much.

That problem — the terrible unfairness of so many people having to sacrifice so much simply to make a living — provides the focus for the Just Supply Chains project of the Program on Global Justice (PGJ). Because of resistance to such working conditions, and pressure from movements against sweatshops, many companies have adopted codes of conduct for themselves and their suppliers over the past decade. But studies of these “private voluntary codes” have generated considerable skepticism about their effectiveness in improving compensation, working conditions, and rights of association. The aim of the project is to explore how codes and monitoring for compliance might be improved and also to consider some alternatives to private voluntary codes for regulating global labor markets.

PGJ has held two meetings, with participation from academics (from Stanford and elsewhere), NGOs (Fair Labor Association, Ethical Trading Initiative, Workers Rights Consortium), companies (Ford, Nike, Gap, Coca-Cola, Apple, HP, and Costco), and unions (including the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation). Through wide-ranging discussions, participants identified a set of research topics: whether consumers are willing to pay more for goods produced under decent conditions, whether there is a “business case” for improved labor standards, what the effects on labor standards will be of current reorganizations of supply chains in response to growing transportation costs, and how national labor-inspection systems might work better under conditions of globalized production. The next step is to establish working groups, combining academics and practitioners, to refine these topics and start to answer open questions about how to promote more decent working conditions in global supply chains.

In addition to the Just Supply Chains project, PGJ has been working to launch some other interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research initiatives. Along with colleagues in the School of Earth Sciences, the Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Resources, FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), the Ethics Center, and the Woods Institute, PGJ is a partner in an NSF proposal aimed at establishing a training program for graduate students in social sciences and climate science on the differential vulnerability of human-environment systems to climate change, the ethical implications of such differential vulnerability, and the role of institutions in shaping the adaptive capacity of communities.

PGJ is also working on a project on Liberation Technology, bringing together social scientists with researchers in applied technology interested in economically, socially, and politically constructive uses of new information technologies (to enable producers to learn more about markets, citizens to monitor elections and hold officials accountable, and public service providers to identify where those services are most needed). Finally, the Program on Global Justice is launching a Human Rights project, with support from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies, for historical and comparative research on the roles of political mobilization and legal protections in securing human rights.

Michael Wara and David G. Victor's recent work "A Realistic Policy on International Carbon Offsets" addresses problems with the world's largest offset program, the UN's Clean Development Mechanism. Wara and Victor argue that much of the CDM investment doesn' actually meet the UN's crucial additionality standards, and they outline ways to fix the problem.

David Victor Discusses Climate Policy, Offsets, and Incentives in the Wall Street Journal

In the News: Wall Street Journal on July 23, 2008

Income from carbon offsets has become French chemical manufacturer Rhodia SA's most profitable business. The WSJ estimates payouts to the firm from projects in Brazil and South Korea could total $1 billion over seven years, raising questions about the incentive structure of the CDM. David G. Victor argues that carbon markets are not sending the appropriate signals to the developing world.

• » Wall Street Journal

Michael Wara and David Victor Address the Role of Offsets in California's Cap and Trade Plan

In the News: Science Magazine

California's plan to cut carbon emissions 10% by 2020 relies on offsets as a part of a cap and trade scheme. Michael Wara points out the challenges that face the state as it designs its offset program, and David G. Victor sheds light on difficulties faced by the world's largest offset program, the UN's CDM protocol.

• » Science Magazine

Michael Wara Discusses Coal and the CDM

In the News: Wall Street Journal on July 11, 2008

The CDM Executive Board recently approved several gas-fired power plants under the UN's carbon offset scheme, opening the door for subsidizing coal generation and stoking controversy. Michael Wara questions the additionality of such projects and argues subsidies are better spent on other clean-energy development.

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• » Wall Street Journal