FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling.
FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world.
FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street,
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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seaverchang@stanford.edu
Visiting Scholar
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Shui Yung Chang (張水庸) is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Mr. Chang is a career diplomat who joined the Foreign Service in 1992 and has served in various capacities in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and America. His overseas posts for the Foreign Service include Vice Consul in Johannesburg, South Africa; First Secretary in New Delhi, India; and Director in Miami, Florida, United States. In Taipei he held the positions of Desk Officer of African Affairs; Section Chief of the Institute of Diplomacy and International Affairs (formerly known as Foreign Service Institute); Secretary of the Coordination Council of North American Affairs; Director of the Public Diplomacy Coordination Council on home assignment and served as the External Affairs Officer and translator to the Premier Office of Executive Yuan, R.O.C.
Mr. Chang graduated from National Taiwan University with a Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Languages and Literatures in 1991. He continued his education on History of Art at University of Pretoria, South Africa 1996-1997, and obtained Master of Arts in Strategic Studies from Australian National University, Australia in 2005. He also received his certificate on diplomacy from Oxford University, United Kingdom in 1995.
Mr. Chang speaks fluent Taiwanese, Mandarin and English. His research interests include Asia studies, International Affairs, Taiwan Foreign Policy, Public Diplomacy, Democracy and Development. In his career he also actively involved in the promotion of culture, academy and humanitarian work for Taiwan. Over the years, Mr. Chang has travelled widely across countries and continents on his official trips and personal tours with family. He is married to Ms Maya Chen and has two children, Sonia and Sophia Chang. They currently reside in Taiwan.
The last few decades have seen a growth in the number and influence of governance indicators in development. These indicators shape the institutional reform agenda in many countries. They create pressure for 'reforms as signals', however, which are often limited to changes in form and not function: governments look better after reforms but are not actually better. Given evidence that this is indeed the case, the question is how to construct governance indicators and promote reforms that actually make governments more functional. Select experiences show that this is possible and suggest a new set of principles that could be used to guide institutional reforms in the future.
Speaker Bio:
Matt Andrews is Associate Professor of Public Policy. His research focuses on public sector reform, particularly budgeting and financial management reform, and participatory governance in developing and transitional governments. Recent articles focus on forging a theoretical understanding of the nontechnical factors influencing success in reform processes. Specific emphasis lies on the informal institutional context of reform, as well as leadership structures within government-wide networks. This research developed out of his work in the provincial government of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa and more recently from his tenure as a Public Sector Specialist working in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. He brings this experience to courses on public management and development. He holds a BCom (Hons) degree from the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa), an MSc from the University of London, and a PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
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f.fukuyama@stanford.edu
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
A global movement has been underway to use innovative technology platforms to record, store, process, and disseminate public information to advance transparency and accountability. A multitude of actors in government, civil society, and academia have been pioneering innovations to increase citizen engagement and democratic practices worldwide.
On March 11-12, the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is convening a conference to examine these digital tools and their impact on the development of democratic development. Hosted in partnership with U.C. Berkeley’s Data and Democracy Initiative, the two-day conference will bring together academics, practitioners, and policy-makers to examine the theoretical and practical implications of the right to information, transparency, and governance.
Speakers include former Chief Technology Officer of the Icelandic Constitutional Council, Finnur Magnusson, who will share how Iceland’s public participated in the drafting of a new draft constitution through a crowd-sourcing event on Facebook and Twitter. Twenty-five citizens were elected to be part of a council that formulated the draft constitution. Last year, the council delivered the world’s first “crowd-sourced constitution” that included progressive legal reforms for government transparency, human rights, and civic participation.
Representing the City of San Francisco, Deputy Innovation Officer Shannon Spanhake will be discussing the Open Innovation Program. Led by Mayor Edwin M. Lee, the Open Innovation Program enables job creation, citizen engagement, and government efficiency. Last year the program introduced the Improve SF Campaign to encourage the local community to address civic challenges through an online platform. Spanhake will speak about this initiative on a panel devoted to innovations in civic participation with panelists hailing from U.S. and Canadian city governments.
One of the nation’s leading advocates for open government, John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, will address his work on increasing transparency in the U.S. government, from legislation and accountability in Congress to ethics and information policy in the executive branch. Academic speakers include: Jeremy M. Weinstein, associate professor of political science at Stanford University; Guy Grossman, assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania; Helene Landemore, assistant professor of political science at Yale University; and Daniel Posner, professor of political science at MIT, among others.
Thirty-five speakers will present their papers and initiatives in short plenary sessions and the afternoon will be spent in workshop sessions where participants will have the opportunity to propose a theme of their choice to explore within the right to information theme.
All sessions will be held at Stanford University's Bechtel Conference room in Encina Hall and are free and open to the public. Space is extremely limited so please RSVP here to attend. A complete agenda can be found here.
For conference updates via Twitter please visit #RTITECH.
Many Stanford computer science majors hope to land coveted jobs in Silicon Valley upon graduation. Parth Bhakta or Ben Rudolph aren't so sure. They first want to take their skills far afield of the storied technology hub.
Bhakta and Rudolph joined two other Stanford students earlier this month to travel to Ethiopia, making their way to remote refugee camps along the Sudanese border. They are researching ways in which technology and design innovation can help improve conditions for refugees and their surrounding communities.
“As a computer science student, I feel that a lot of Silicon Valley is focused on solving trivial problems,” said Bhakta, a senior from Palm Desert, Calif., who graduates this year with an undergraduate degree in symbolic systems and a master’s in computer science. “I hope to apply my skills toward something that has a meaningful impact. I want this experience to help me better understand how to tackle big, tangible problems.”
The students worked with the UNHCR and International Rescue Committee in the Bambasi and Sherkole refugee camps in western Ethiopia to test out ideas they’ve been working on with the goal of improving camp communications; food security and economic self-sufficiency; host community relations; and the often difficult process of setting up camps to house arriving refugees.
The idea for the trip emerged from a dialogue and collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). An official from the UN agency approached CISAC Co-Director Tino Cuéllar last spring, and encouraged CISAC to explore ideas to better protect and support the care of more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.
These early discussions led to a multidisciplinary partnership involving CISAC, students from across the Stanford campus and at the Hassno-Platner Institute of Design – better known as the d.school – as well as professors, NGOs, physicians, officials with experience in humanitarian settings, architects and other professionals eager to volunteer their time and expertise.
Among those professionals is Jeffrey Geisinger, an architect with Ennead Architects in New York. The firm, which designed the new Stanford Law School wing and the recently inaugurated Bing Concert Hall, is doing pro bono work on the project through its advocacy lab.
Geisinger hopes to start designing modules that might be used in shared spaces. To do this, he said, he must see what construction materials are available, what deficiencies typically exist out in the field and which social networks and local skills might be tapped to help the UN build more innovative structures shared by both communities.
“From an architect’s perspective, we’re interested in some kind of design solution,” said Geisinger. “But before we can even begin to put pencil to paper, it’s important to really define the problem.”
For CISAC, the project represents a further effort to bridge the gap between scholarship and practice.
“This is an extraordinary manifestation of CISAC’s mission to help shape public policy,” said Liz Gardner, CISAC’s associate director for programs. “This project marries up scholarship, teaching and close interaction with policymakers – with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of refugees.”
The project also led to dozens of students from a variety of majors to enroll in the Law School class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities,” co-taught by Cuéllar and Leslie Witt of the global design consultancy, IDEO. The students have been brainstorming and investigating, then hammering out concepts and prototypes they hope might one day be implemented by the United Nations.
Now, they want to put those ideas to the test.
Rudolph, a senior from Chicago, is working with his team to build a software platform that would enable early camp registration and provide two-way communication between the UNHCR and refugees, using mobile technology. RescueSMS is software designed to better profile each refugee and alert them to upcoming events or emergencies in the camp, as well as give them a voice to express concerns or ask questions of the UN.
“I’m excited about applying my computer science knowledge to humanitarian efforts, where I think software is underused,” said Rudolph, who has had a string of internships at Silicon Valley startups. “I wanted a change of pace from the corporate world; I was tired of working for traditional software startup companies.”
So he’s taking an untraditional route. Rudolph’s interest in the project has led to an internship with the UNHCR’s innovation lab in Geneva after he graduates this summer.
One of Cuéllar’s goals is to build long-term relationships with organizations such as the UNHCR so that the work by Stanford students becomes embedded in the innovation process of public organizations.
Devorah West’s team is looking at infrastructure in the space that is shared by refugees and the indigenous people from the surrounding community. When thousands of refugees stream into border communities in neighboring countries, resources become scarce and tensions run high. West is representing the team looking at ways to build schools, medical facilities and marketplaces that could be shared by both communities.
“My team will use this trip to get a better understanding of realities on the ground,” said West, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies from Santa Fe, N.M., who graduates this summer. “We hope to find ways to defuse tensions over scarce resources and allow both communities to satisfy social and physical needs.”
West said she was drawn to the project by the interdisciplinary nature of the teams.
“Having worked in the policy world, I was really interested in using design thinking to fuse together academic research and policy development in order to have a concrete impact on refugee communities,” she said.
Jessica Miranda is representing the team focused on food security and economic self-sufficiency. They are working on understanding how to encourage small-scale mobile farming. During her visits to the camps, she will investigate the challenges that affect small-scale gardening and learn more about the terrain, the nutritional status of vulnerable households and what the cultural views are on agriculture.
“I know how it feels to leave your country behind,” said Miranda, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies from Toluca, Mexico. “And I want to help. But it’s difficult to think about refugee camps from the comfort of my couch. It’s time to go and see how these ideas might work on the ground."
Beth Duff-Brown, CISAC’s communications manager, traveled with the students and will be reporting from the field.
A fundamental transformation of services is underway, driven by developments in information and communications technology (ICT) tools, the uses to which they are being put, and the networks on which they run. Services were once considered a sinkhole of the economy, immune to significant technological or organizational productivity increases. Now, they are widely recognized as a source of productivity growth and dynamism in the economy that is changing the structure of employment, the division of labor, and the character of work and its location. Yet, the actual character of this transformation is often obscured by the increase in jobs labeled as services and by a focus on the digital technologies that, certainly, are facilitating this transformation. This transformation, central to the growth of productivity and competition in the economy, poses basic policy and business choices.
The core of our story of the services transformation is not about the growth in quantity or value of the activities labeled services, the conventional emphasis of much of the writing about services. Nor is it about the revolution in digital technology. Rather, it is about how the application of rule-based information technology tools to service activities transforms the services component of the economy, altering how activities are conducted and value is created.
There are significant implications for how firms compete. Services are increasingly the way that firms pursue value-added activities to avoid ever-faster commoditization of products, that is to avoid competition based solely on price when market offerings are relatively similar. However, the unbundling of services activities themselves accelerates this commodification, since competitors have the same efficiency-enhancing business process and infrastructure services available to them. Firms increasingly become bundles of services purchased on markets, and at the same time some of those in-house business functions that are maintained are then offered as services. A consequence is that the distinction between products and services blurs, as manufactured products are increasingly embedded within and recast as services offerings. Clearly, traditional sectoral boundaries break down, as information and services offerings bring previously unrelated firms into direct competition.
Likewise, the consequences for business organization, production, and work are profound, just as work was transformed by the evolution of manufacturing. The automation of basic activities both frees, but also requires, professionals to perform more advanced tasks. And the analytical tasks of managing information flows generated by ICT-enabled services often require a different set of skills than providing the service itself.
Capturing the possibilities from the services transformation presents new policy challenges for governments and regions. Services are deeply rooted in social rules, conventions, and regulations. Consequently, capturing the value possibilities inherently means recasting the rules, regulations, and conventions in which the services are embedded.
The development and deployment of ICT-enabled services should be considered a form of production. As ICT has become integral to the creation and delivery of services, ICT-enabled services have taken on the characteristics of production normally assigned solely to manufacturing. ICT systems that deliver the services have to be designed, developed, built, and implemented and they are very much open to innovation and productivity increases. Investments are often industrial in scale.
ICT-enabled services are the latest phase in a long history of production innovation. The history of manufacturing production progressed along distinct epochs, each with distinct manufacturing processes, management structures, labor practices, productivity, and outputs. The development of ICT tools and their application to services activities has driven a shift to the latest epoch.
The advent of Cloud Computing, emerging as the next dominant computing platform, accelerates the transformation of services. Cloud Computing, a distinct set of business models and performance attributes (not simply a code-word for everything online), enables new business models, transforms existing strategies, lowers the bar for new entrants, and raises a myriad of policy issues.
From a policy standpoint, the question is how to conceive, design, develop and build and deploy the new system. The “good” jobs, high value added functions, are in the innovative development and deployment of these systems. Policy makers need to employ strategies that will help communities and firms to develop the competencies required for this new form of production.
The continuing debate in political, economic and public policy circles about the relative value of manufacturing jobs and service-sector jobs is increasingly irrelevant to policy debates in the real economy. Just as it is inaccurate to assume that manufacturing jobs are secure and well paid, it is also inaccurate to consider service jobs to be dead-end, low-wage, unskilled positions.
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Oxford University Press in "The Third Globalization: Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich in the Twenty-First Century?"
It has been said that constitutional court judges around the world increasingly participate in a "global judicial dialogue" that causes judges to make increased use of foreign law. This is a dialogue, however, from which the members of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court are largely excluded. Taiwan’s precarious diplomatic situation and intense lobbying by China have effectively prevented the members of Taiwan's Constitutional Court from participating in international judicial gatherings and official visits to foreign courts. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court routinely engages in extensive consideration of foreign law, either expressly or implicitly, when deciding cases. This fact casts doubt on the notion that "global judicial dialogue" explains judicial use of foreign law. Comparison of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court and U.S. Supreme Court demonstrates that “global judicial dialogue” plays a much smaller role in shaping a court’s utilization of foreign law than institutional factors such as (a) the rules and practices governing the composition and staffing of the court and (b) the extent to which the structure of legal education and the legal profession incentivizes judges and academics to possess expertise in foreign law.
Speaker Bio:
David Law is Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He works in the areas of law and political science, public law, judicial behavior, comparative constitutional law, and comparative judicial politics. Born and raised in Canada, he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, a B.C.L. in European and Comparative Law from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has previously taught at the University of San Diego School of Law and the University of California, San Diego political science department and has been a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University College of Law, Seoul National University School of Law, and Keio University Faculty of Law in Tokyo, and a visiting scholar at the NYU School of Law. His current research focuses on the identification, explanation, and prediction of global patterns in constitutional law, and his recent scholarship on constitutional globalization and the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution has been featured in a variety of domestic and international media.
CISAC Conference Room
David Law
Professor of Law and Political Science
Speaker
Washington University in St. Louis
