Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Building a foundation for critical engagement

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North Korea fired off short-range missiles last Tuesday close to the arrival of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to the region. Carter, who was on his inaugural trip to Asia as the newly confirmed Secretary of Defense, said the launch was a sign of the region’s continued tensions.

The United States consistently expresses concern over North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, yet attempts to resume the Six-Party Talks, the negotiations to denuclearize North Korea which began in 2003, have been unsuccessful. The United Kingdom, although not an official participant in the Talks, has had diplomatic relations with North Korea since 2000, setting itself apart from many in the West, and from Japan which do not have formal diplomatic ties with the country. 

In a new policy brief, Mike Cowin, the 2014-15 Pantech Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), discusses lesser-known channels of engagement between the United Kingdom and North Korea. 

Cowin is the former deputy head of mission at the British Embassy Pyongyang, and implemented many of the programs he describes in the paper, "Critical Engagement": British Policy Towards the DPRK.

Typically small-scale and led largely in collaboration with European NGOs, the Embassy’s initiatives span from humanitarian aid – providing water supplies and sewage systems – to exchanges – hosting visiting delegations of North Korean paralympic athletes and English teachers.

The Embassy also works to build a stronger understanding of modern Britain in North Korea. They have shown films such as Wallace and Grommit and Philomena at the Pyongyang International Film Festival, and supplemented reading materials in the Grand People’s Study House, a central library in Pyongyang.

Cowin says that it’s not easy to construct these exchanges, but if established, they provide small steps in the right direction, and help set the stage for critical engagement in the future. The United Kingdom’s approach shares commonalities with the suggestions made by a Stanford research team in Tailored Engagement, he says.

“The United Kingdom’s efforts are not going to have the immediate result we all want. However, they do show that the DPRK is not completely isolated from the Western world and that it is possible to carry out engagement,” he says.

Cowin is also the author of an earlier policy brief on relations between North Korea and the European Union.

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Presenters on stage at the 13th annual Pyongyang International Film Festival in North Korea. | Mike Cowin
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The United States and Global Food Security: A View From Rome

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Ambassador David Lane was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 24, 2012.

Ambassador Lane has more than twenty years of experience working in leadership positions across sectors.  Before coming to Rome, he served at the White House as Assistant to the President and Counselor to the Chief of Staff. 

Prior to joining the Obama Administration, he served as President and CEO of the ONE Campaign, a global advocacy organization focused on extreme poverty, development, and reform.  Before that, as Director of Foundation Advocacy and the East Coast Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he helped lead that organization’s advocacy and public policy efforts. 

During the Clinton Administration, he served as Executive Director of the National Economic Council at the White House and Chief of Staff to the U. S. Secretary of Commerce.  He served as Vice-Chair of Transparency International USA, and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Ambassador Lane earned his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his M.P.A. from the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.   

Sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). Supported in part by Zachary Nelson ('84) and Elizabeth Horn.

Ambassador David Lane, United States Representative to UN Agencies in Rome United States Representative to UN Agencies in Rome Speaker
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Food and Nutrition Policy Research Symposium Series

Shaanxi Daily: China’s First “Parenting Trainers” Will Be Born in Shangluo

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The Shaanxi Daily issued a press release on REAP's ongoing Perfecting Parenting project.  This article was translated and reprinted with permission from The Shaanxi Daily.  Read the original article (in Chinese) here.

 

China’s First “Parenting Trainers” Will Be Born in Shangluo

March 19, 2015
 
Shaanxi Media Online
Commentary

In Shangluo, tucked away in the distant parts of the Qinling mountain range, 70 officials have already undertaken the assignment of “early child development parenting trainers.”

Yaojiang Shi, Director of the Center for Experimental Economics in Education at Shaanxi Normal University, was brimming with confidence as he received journalists, saying, “before long, they will pass the evaluations and become China’s first generation of parenting trainers.”

According to statistics, in 2013, 40 percent of 6- to 12-month-old children living in rural areas in Shaanxi province clearly lagged behind in cognitive ability and social-emotional development. Parents are only concerned that their children have enough to eat and warm clothes to wear, neglecting their mental health and development. Scientific research has proven that the first three years of a child’s life is a critical period for mental development. However, in China’s vast rural areas, there is still a blank space in place of education for 0- to 3-year-old children. In order to change this situation, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, Shaanxi Normal University, Stanford University in the United States, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly established the “Perfecting Parenting” project. Following this project’s officially launch last November, 70 “parenting trainers” were recruited from among the family planning officials in 58 townships across Danfeng, Shangnan, Shanyang, and Zhenan counties, and 275 babies were randomly selected to take part in the project. After undergoing rigorous training, the “parenting trainers” will teach scientific child-rearing knowledge to children’s parents and caretakers through demonstration and guidance. By having parents interact more with their children through story telling, singing songs with them, playing games, and engaging in other parent-child activities, they aim to improve the babies’ cognitive abilities, motor development, and social-emotional development.

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Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt

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Abstract:

Islamic charities occupied a critical space in Mubarak-era Egypt. While there are a plethora of organizational types and activities, Mona Atia describes a particular type of work performed by Islamic charities as a merging of religious and capitalist subjectivity, or pious neoliberalism. Pious neoliberalism describes how Islamism works in conjunction with neoliberalism rather than as an alternative to it. It represents a new compatibility between business and piety that is not specific to any religion, but rather is a result of the ways in which religion and economy interact in the contemporary moment. In Egypt, pious neoliberalism produces new institutions, systems of knowledge production and subjectivities. This lecture explores the relationship between Islamic charity and Egypt’s variegated religious landscape. The author will discuss how Islamic charities helped spread Islamic practices outside the space of the mosque and into everyday life/spaces and their impact on development in Egypt.

Speaker Bio:

mona atia

Mona Atia is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She received her PhD in Geography at the University of Washington, where she received the 2008 Distinguished Dissertation Award. She holds a MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics and a BS in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Atia is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity and finance, philanthropy and humanitarianism, and the production of poverty knowledge. She is author of Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She currently holds an NSF CAREER Award for her project "The Impact of Poverty Mapping on the Geography of Development."

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

 

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Mona Atia Associate Professor The George Washington University
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REAP and OneSight: Vision Care for 7,000 Kids in 8 Days

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by Hannah Myers
 
As the bus lurches up the pot-holed dirt road into the village, a storm of seventh- and eight-graders comes rushing out to meet it.  This bus isn't taking them to class, but to a clinic that will revolutionize their school careers.  They are travelling to a OneSight Vision Clinic.  By the end of the day, they will have had their eyes examined, lenses edged, and frames selected for a brand new pair of eyeglasses.  For these children, such a simple intervention can have a huge impact on their education and future.
 
Three years ago, REAP researchers noticed something surprising: in rural China, almost no children wear glasses.  In response, REAP launched the Seeing is Learning program, and have screened over 30,000 children in a series of randomized controlled trials. REAP found that in a nine-month period, nearsighted students who were given glasses learned almost twice as much as those without them--putting them essentially a full grade-level ahead.
 
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Next, REAP and regional governments in China designed a scaleable sustainable vision care centers based in county hospitals. The vision centers target rural primary school students, and to date have provided new glasses to virtually all 3rd through 6th grade students who need them in two pilot counties.
 
But what about older rural students who need glasses, and whose schoolwork is suffering as a result?  The REAP-supported vision care centers are already operating at capacity to meet the needs of primary school students.  Therefore, from March 15th to 27th, OneSight—with support from REAP—operated a charitable clinic to provide vision care to all middle-school students in Yongshou county Shaanxi Province.  The REAP team trained Yongshou's middle-school teachers to screen their students, then organized buses to transport students who failed the vision tests to the Onesight clinic in the county seat.  OneSight's 65 volunteer optometrists and eye care specialists efficiently diagnosed each student, custom-ground lenses, and delivered a new pair of glasses.  In total, approximately 7,000 students were screened and almost 3,500 received new glasses in the 12-day clinic.
 
In this remote corner of rural China, the group of foreigner eye doctors pulling up in a massive OneSight truck stocked with autorefractors, eye-dilating medicines, and enormous lens-grinding machines was certainly a sight to see.  Local media captured much of the clinic, broadcasting it throughout Yongshou and surrounding areas.  Moving forward, REAP plans to use this momentum to expand its sustainable vision care model into more counties across rural China.

 

Contacts

Matthew Boswell: Project Manager, Seeing is Learning (boswell@stanford.edu)

Scott Rozelle: REAP Co-Director (rozelle@stanford.edu)

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Stanford scholars discuss framework for inter-Korean dialogue

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Gi-Wook Shin, director of Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, presented the policy report Tailored Engagement at the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies in late March. The event in Seoul coincided with the public release of the report in Korean.

Shin delivered a keynote lecture on the study which offers steps that South Korea can take to establish sustainable dialogue with North Korea. The report is an outcome of a longstanding research project seeking to understand the future domestic and global implications of North Korea’s situation.

Shin’s lecture was followed by remarks from Korea Program Associate Director David Straub and a panel discussion among four other experts. The panelists shared their observations on the current political climate in and around the Korean Peninsula.

Video from the event is available below:

Gi-Wook Shin’s lecture (in Korean)

David Straub’s remarks (in English)

Panel discussion (in Korean)

More than 320 people attended the event including students, policymakers and academics. The event marked the second occasion in Seoul where the Stanford team presented the report. In late 2014, they briefed the Special Committee on Inter-Korean Relations, Exchange and Cooperation of the South Korean National Assembly. An article about the briefing can be accessed here.

Shin is a professor of sociology, director of Shorenstein APARC, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Straub is the associate director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC.

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Connecting the Dots 2015: The Food, Energy, Water and Climate Nexus

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For more information and to register, visit tomkat.stanford.edu/ctd.

Each year Stanford experts from a range of disciplines meet to discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity's needs for and use of food, energy, water and the effect they have on climate and conflict.  These experts will illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in others, and discuss opportunities to make decisions that can have positive benefits in one area while avoiding negative or unintended consequences in other areas.  This year, in celebration of our 5th anniversary of Connecting the Dots, we return to the food nexus. 
 

Confirmed Speakers

  • Keynote Speaker: Karen Ross, Secretary of California Department of Food and Agriculture
  • Professor Stacey Bent, TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, Precourt Institute for Energy, Chemical Engineering
  • Professor Roz Naylor, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
  • Professor David Lobell, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Environmental Earth System Science, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment 
  • Professor Marshall Burke (food - conflict nexus), Environmental Earth System Science, Center on Food Security and the Environment
  • Professor Steve Luby (food - health nexus), Stanford Medicine, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Freeman Spogli Institue for International Studies
  • Professor Scott Rozelle (food, education and development nexus), Co-director, Rural Education Action Program, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Center on Food Security and the Environment

 

Student-led Breakout Sessions

  • Christopher Seifert, Graduate Student, Environmental Earth System Science
    "Boondoggle or Risk Reducer? Crop insurance as the farm subsidy of the 21st century"
  • William Chapman, Graduate Student, CEE-Atmosphere and Energy
    "No Red Meat or a New Electric Vehicle, Food Choices and Emissions"
  • Priya Fielding-Singh, PhD Candidate, Sociology
    Maria Deloso, Coterminal B.S/M.A. Candidate, Environmental Earth System Science  
    "From Farm to Lunch Tray: Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Federal School Lunch Program"
  • Rebecca Gilsdorf, PhD Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering
    Angela Harris, PhD Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering
    "Poop and Pesticides: Looking beyond production to consider food contamination"
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Assessment of the Development of Groundwater Market in Rural China

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Using field survey data collected by the authors, this chapter first describes groundwater markets in northern China that have been developing rapidly in the last two decades.  Groundwater markets in the area are informal, localized and mostly unregulated.  Thre is little price discrimination, and institutional privatization of tubewells is one of the most important driving forces encouraging the development of groundwater markets.  Increasing water and land scarcity are also major determinants.  The chapter also explores the impacts of the emergence of the groundwater markets on agricultural production - including crop water use and crop yields - and farmer income in northern China.  Results indicate farmers that buy water from groundwater markets use less water than those that have their own tubewells.  However yields of water buyers are not negatively affected.  This is probably because water buyers exert more efforts to improve water use efficiency.  Results also show that other things held constant, the crop incomes of water buyers are not statistically different from those of well owners.  The chapter also finds that groundwater markets in northern China are not monopolistic, supporting the notion that they offer poor rural households affordable access to irrigation water.

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Doomsday Vaults, Genebanks and Plant Breeding in the Age of Climate Change

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Read a full event summary here. 

Agricultural crops are on the front lines of climate change. Can we expect increased food production in the context of global warming? Do our crops come pre-adapted to a climate not seen since the dawn of agriculture, or must we take bold measures to prepare agriculture for climate change? This talk will focus on the role that crop diversity must necessarily play in facilitating the adaptation of agricultural crops to new climates and environments. Genebanks, the “Doomsday Vault” near the North Pole, and possible new roles for plant breeders and farmers will be explored. 
 

cary fowler 1

Dr. Cary Fowler is perhaps best known as the “father” of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has described as an “inspirational symbol of peace and food security for the entire humanity.” Dr. Fowler proposed creation of this Arctic facility to Norway and headed the international committee that developed the plan for its establishment by Norway. The Seed Vault provides ultimate security for more than 850,000 unique crop varieties, the raw material for all future plant breeding and crop improvement efforts. He currently chairs the International Council that oversees its operations.

In 2005 Dr. Fowler was chosen to lead the new Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international organization cosponsored by Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This position carried international diplomatic status. During his tenure, he built an endowment of $130 million and raised an additional $100 million (including the first major grant given for agriculture by the Gates Foundation) for programs to conserve crop diversity and make it available for plant breeding. The Trust organized a huge global project to rescue 90,000 threatened crop varieties in developing countries – the largest such effort in history - and is now engaged in an effort Dr. Fowler initiated with the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) to collect, conserve and pre-breed the wild relatives of 26 major crops. He oversaw development of a global information system to aid plant breeders and researchers find appropriate genetic materials from genebanks around the world. These initiatives at the Crop Trust, positioned the organization as a major path-breaking player in the global effort to adapt crops to climate change.

Prior to leading the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Dr. Fowler was Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås Norway. He headed research and the Ph.D. program at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies and was a member of the university committee that allocated research funding to the different departments. 

The U.N.’s FAO recruited him in the 1990s to lead the team to produce the UN’s first global assessment of the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources. He was personally responsible for drafting and negotiating the first FAO Global Plan of Action on the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, formally adopted by 150 countries in 1996. Following this, Dr. Fowler served as Special Assistant to the Secretary General of the World Food Summit (twice) and represented the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR/World Bank) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. He chaired a series of Nordic government sponsored informal meetings of 15 countries to facilitate negotiations for this treaty. And, he represented Norway on the Panel of Experts of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Cary Fowler was born in 1949 and grew up in in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of a judge and a dietician. He studied at Simon Fraser University in Canada where he received a B.A. (honors – first class) degree. He earned his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in Sweden with a thesis on agricultural biodiversity and intellectual property rights. Dr. Fowler has lectured widely, been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a visiting professor at the University of California – Davis. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 articles and several books including the classic Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity (University of Arizona Press), Unnatural Selection, Technology, Politics and Plant Evolution (Gordon & Breach Science Publishers) and The State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources (UN-FAO).

Dr. Fowler currently serves on the boards of Rhodes College, the NY Botanical Garden Corporation, the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust and Amy Goldman Charitable Trust. He remains associated with the Global Crop Diversity Trust as Special Advisor. He is a former member of the U.S. National Plant Genetic Resources Board (appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture) and former board and executive committee member of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. He has served as chair of the national Livestock Conservancy. He is the recipient of several awards: Right Livelihood Award, Vavilov Medal, the Heinz Award, Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings Award, the William Brown Award of the Missouri Botanical Garden and two honorary doctorates. He is one of two foreign elected members of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 

 

Dr. Cary Fowler Speaker Senior Advisor, Global Crop Diversity Trust
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