Stanford University

Governance

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.

Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Environmental Humanities - Finding a future for climate change

-

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being.

Download pdf
Download pdf
Download pdf

Y2E2 Room. 300

Andrew Light Center for American Progress and George Mason University Speaker
David Magnus Host
Sandra Koelle Moderator
Workshops
Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory

Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Cultural Heritage - The Concept of Human Rights: A Skeptical View

-

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being.

Download pdf
Download pdf
Download pdf
Download pdf

Building 500, Seminar Room

David Abernethy Professor Emeritus Speaker Department of Political Science, Stanford
Workshops
Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory

Lessons learned after 10 years of war in Afghanistan

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Karl Eikenberry has a unique perspective on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The former ambassador to Kabul, his 35-year career in the army includes an 18-month tour as commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces in the country. As the conflict hit the 10-year mark, Eikenberry discussed President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, the challenge of working with Pakistan, and the problem of overpromising.

We are coming up on 10 years in Afghanistan. What’s your snapshot of where we are now and where Afghanistan is going?

We're on the right path. The president has adopted a strategy that by the end of 2014 – if it’s well implemented – will have us in a position, and have the Afghans in a position, where the Afghans will be fully responsible for providing their own security.

It's going to require that the Afghan army and the Afghan police continue to develop sufficient capabilities so that by 2014 they have the right numbers and the right quality to allow our military forces to step back into a supporting role. It's going to require that the Afghan government continues to make improvements in terms of its accountability and its responsiveness to its people. And third, it's going to require that Pakistan make more efforts to attack the sanctuaries that Afghan Taliban currently enjoys there.

That doesn't mean we’ll be at a point where the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan ends. We'll continue to provide security assistance to the Afghan national security forces beyond 2014. We will continue to have a robust diplomatic mission at the end of 2014. I would expect that we'll still have a substantial foreign assistance program to Afghanistan – not at the level it is right now, but still substantial by global standards, and we’ll still, I expect, remain very diplomatically engaged in that part of the world.

So you've laid out three things: capacity building, governance, and Pakistan. Can we accomplish all three?

I think we have a reasonable possibility for success. I would not put probability against that. We know how to do capacity building especially with security forces, and I'd say over the last decade, we’ve made some important gains in knowing how to do that. It takes time, it takes resources, and it takes patience. The second thing – "good governance" – that's harder.

Ultimately, you can only have success in the first category of capacity building if you have success in the second category because all those institutions have to rest upon a foundation of what the people might say is reasonable, good governance, something that they’re willing to voluntarily support. That's more problematic.

The third category, Pakistan, is even more problematic. Their support of the Afghan Taliban is still seen by some elements within the state of Pakistan as being in their national security interest.

Are there things you think the U.S. policy makers have learned in Afghanistan that can be applied elsewhere?

I do. If you look in any of the domains we’re working in in Afghanistan – security assistance, rule of law, education and health – there are good lessons we've learned over time. Americans are extraordinarily adaptive. We’re creative. One of our good characteristics is that we frequently pull back from an enterprise, sum up lessons learned, be self critical, and continue to improve.

Another lesson learned coming out of Afghanistan may be the need to get a better understanding of what’s realistic in terms of setting goals and objectives. When we went into Afghanistan it’s fair to say that all of us – the international community, the Americans, the Afghans – did not fully understand the level of effort that would be needed to achieve some of the goals and objectives that we initially set for ourselves. 

I think if we could roll the clock back and go back in time, one of the lessons is that we might have tried to under promise more and then over deliver. When we went in in 2001 and 2002 we had talked about infrastructure that would be developed, how fast institutions would be built, how fast representative democracy might be able to take hold.

I think historians will look back and say they didn't really understand the complexities and the problems, they didn’t fully understand just how difficult this might all be.

All News button
1

The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications

-

Co-sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and The Europe Center

 

Event Synopsis:

The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications
October 21, 2011

After an introduction by Professor Dornbach, Professor Wittenberg asserts that while a spirit of bipartisan ship is a nice feature of the U.S. legislature, it is not a fundamental requirement of democracy and  has historically not characterized the Hungarian parliament. He traces a decades-long tradition of ruling parties using Parliament to limit the presence and influence of minority parties. The current Fidesz government, which ended up with 2/3 of the seats after the 2012 election, now has a supermajority necessary to alter the constitution. Professor Wittenberg attributes Fidesz’s victory to three factors: the incompetence of older right wing parties, partly resulting from lack of governing experience during last four decades of Socialist rule; 2) the arrogance of the Socialist party; and 3) a simple lack of alternatives for voters. Wittenberg points out that Hungary’s complex electoral system resulted in more Fidesz parliamentary seats than the party’s actual popularity with voters would predict. He concludes that the 70% of parliamentary vote won, cumulatively, by extreme nationalist parties, does not bode well for the future of liberal politics in Hungary.

Professor Scheppele describes how the Fidesz party under the leadership of (Victor) Orban has taken its victory as a “mandate to change everything,” often in ways that will allow Fidesz to stay in power in the future. The constitution was amended 10 times during the party’s first year in power. Key changes included reducing the size and jurisdiction of constitutional courts, limiting media activities, allowing election commission representatives to be appointed with a 2/3 majority, and fast tracking the process of voting on new laws to approximately 3 days, leaving little room for discussion and debate. Scheppele echoes Professor Wittenberg’s argument that many voters simply did not have an attractive alternative to Fidesz, which would be less of a danger if the country’s constitution were not so easy to amend. She predicts that Hungary’s current situation should offer lessons to other countries on how to design constitutions.

Professor Halmai concludes the panel by crediting the arrogance (and corruption) of the Socialist coalition with the success of Fidesz in the 2010 elections. He highlights three central problems with the new constitution: 1) It leaves questions regarding who is to be subject to the constitution – for example, does this include the Roma population within Hungary, or Hungarian-Americans living within the United States? 2) The constitution intervenes in the private lives of Hungarians with respect to religion, marriage, abortion, etc. 3) It limits constitutional courts to narrower jurisdictions. He also laments the lack of consensus within the Hungarian government on a set of liberal democratic values.

A discussion session raised such questions as: What prospects are there for pushback from the European Union against some of the recent constraints on rule of law in Hungary? Does the fact that the Hungarian constitution considers the 1.4 million Hungarian-Americans in the United States as Hungarian citizens raise any legal challenge from the U.S.? Does the fact that Hungary has to operates within the frameworks of the European Union and NATO put constraints on its actions with regards to democracy and the constitution? Where does Fidesz’s funding come from?

CISAC Conference Room

Gabor Halmai Speaker Institute for Political and International Studies, Budapest; former chief counselor to the President of the Constitutional Court and former Vice President of the Hungarian Electoral Commission
Kim Lane Scheppele Speaker Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
Jason Wittenberg Speaker UC Berkeley
Marton Dornbach Speaker Stanford University
Panel Discussions

Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Environmental Humanities - Ecologies of Art: human and land rights in Australian Aboriginal painting

-

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being.

Download pdf
Download pdf

Stanford Humanities Center Board Room

John Carty Speaker Art History & Anthropology Australian National University
Workshops
Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory

The Program on Human Rights welcomes new program manager

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to announce that Nadejda Marques has joined the Program on Human Rights (PHR) to serve as the new program manager. In this capacity, Marques will coordinate a range of interdisciplinary initiatives and events, support new research projects, and spearhead PHR's outreach and fundraising efforts. Marques will work together with PHR Program Director and FSI Senior Fellow, Helen Stacy to support the conceptualization, design, and conduct of PHR's research initiatives, advancing the mission and visibility of PHR activities at Stanford University and beyond.

Marques joins the PHR from Boston where she worked as research coordinator for the Cost of Inaction Project at the François-Bagnoud Xavier Center for Health and Human Rights based at the Harvard School of Public Health. Working for the Cost of Inaction Project, Marques was responsible for researching and analyzing the cost of inaction of public programs and actions that help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Angola.

"Nadejda Marques' training as an economist, her 15 years of work in human rights, including her work in the field in Angola and in founding the Brazilian human rights NGO Justiça Global bring valuable experience and expertise to the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law," said PHR director Helen Stacy. "Even more importantly, Nadejda's commitment to bottom-up human rights reform means that she is acutely aware of human rights practice as a multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary activity. I am thrilled to welcome Nadejda to the Program on Human Rights as a thought partner to expand the reach and scope of our programming."

Marques holds degrees in economics (UNA, Brazil) and international finance (FGV, Brazil). She has worked as a special correspondent for the Washington Post in Latin America, and has taught languages and Latin American culture at Harvard, Bentley College, and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For the past decade, Marques has worked in the field of human rights, most notably with Human Rights Watch in Brazil and Angola. Marques is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She serves as a consultant and board member for leading human rights NGOs in Brazil and Angola.

All News button
1

Politics, Child Mortality, and Health System Development in Tanzania and Uganda

-

Kevin Croke recently defended his PhD dissertation in the International Development program at Johns Hopkins-SAIS.  His dissertation, "Foreign Aid, Child Survival and Health System Strengthening in Tanzania and Uganda, 1996-2009," is based on fieldwork conducted in Tanzania and Uganda in 2009 and 2010.  He has previously worked with the World Bank, PEPFAR, Management Sciences for Health, Results for Development, and the East African NGO Twaweza.  He is currently working with the World Bank and Twaweza to develop a mobile phone survey platform for high frequency public service delivery monitoring in Tanzania.  At SAIS, Kevin has taught Introduction to Development and Comparative National Systems.

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Kevin Croke Doctoral student Speaker SAIS - The John Hopkins University
Seminars

The European and Global Economic Crisis: "The Eurozone Crisis and Prospects for Future European Integration or Disintegration"

-

Synopsis:

Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, delivered the following talk in The Europe Center series “The European and Global Economic Crisis”.

With measured optimism about the prospect for a way out of the current Eurozone crisis, Dr. Niblett argues that the introduction of the common Euro, seen by many in past years as a vanguard tool for European integration, is now potentially a functional wedge between ‘debtor’ and strongly capitalized nations.  

Dr. Niblett, arriving directly from participating in the World Economic Forum in Dubai, and based on Chatham House research, described the “perfect storm” of the past two decades of credit-driven growth, divergence within the EU, rising debt-to GDP ratios of member nations especially in the cases of Italy and Greece.  His analysis combines these economic details with the following:

  • Demographics – high levels of unassimilated immigrants
  • European welfare economies still distributing resources at twentieth-century levels now in the twenty-first century
  • The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade populist parties
  • The weakening of Europe’s center parties
  • The “Russification” of Europe’s East – especially in recent events in Ukraine
  • The stalled integration of Turkey into the EU

The totality of the above paints a grim portrait of Europe under the weight of nearly impossible conditions.   And yet, Dr. Niblett underlines evidence for measured optimism:

  • Ireland is making strides to reform its economy
  • Ireland’s educated and yet unemployed workforce does have the possibility to immigrate to Europe
  • The UK is finally rebalancing its state budget and market liberalization
  • France is facing, albeit with massive labor protest, its state budget levels
  • Spain will likely turn over its government in the face of its massive youth protest
  • Italy is evaluating in its political process a series of budget reforms

These are the structural side of what Dr. Niblett sees as Europe’s tools for recovery.

On the side of European practice, the Franco-German proposals for European Central Bank “bailout funds” include new rules for transparency of internal government operations. This promises innovation to make the EU into an area of political and financial transparency, and to enable the EU to engage in direct investment, as evidence is beginning to show, in the world’s emerging economies.  In this sense, Dr. Niblett sees for Europe a competitive edge over the US in engaging in world markets.

Perhaps most sanguine of Dr. Niblett’s analysis is his reading of the Eurozone crisis as a force to push the member nations of Europe further towards supra-national economic strategies.  In order to participate in the investment in emerging markets, the Benelux countries, not to mention France, Germany, and neighboring European states, are responding to the crisis by considering policy that promotes investment and outsourcing for service-sector employment, instead of export commodities which have been undercut in recent years.

There is a risk, in Dr. Niblett’s view, that Europe will respond to the Eurozone crisis by fracturing into rival “clubs” of small and large or debt-restructuring and creditor nation-states.  But the European nations, especially those currently participating in the Eurozone, have untapped capacities for growth:

  • Educated youth
  • Underemployed female laborers
  • Outstanding higher educational institutions
  • Pent-up small- and medium-enterprise markets
  • Potential for growth in the service sector labor market
  • Room for more tightly integrating and rationalizing the region’s energy market.

Those interested in further detail and analysis are invited to visit the work and productivity at:

The Europe Center, at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies: http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu

Chatham House, at the Royal Institute for International Studies: http://www.chathamhouse.org/

 

Speaker bio:

Robin Niblett became the Director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs) in January 2007. Before joining Chatham House, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Niblett
was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Washington based
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). During his last two years at CSIS, he
also served as Director of the CSIS Europe Program and its Initiative for a Renewed
Transatlantic Partnership.

Most recently Dr. Niblett is the author of the Chatham House Report Playing to its
Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World (Chatham House, 2010) and
Ready to Lead? Rethinking America’s Role in a Changed World (Chatham House,
2009), and editor and contributing author to America and a Changed World: A Question
of Leadership (Chatham House/Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also the author or
contributor to a number of CSIS reports on transatlantic relations and is contributing
author and co-editor with William Wallace of the book Rethinking European Order
(Palgrave, 2001). Dr Niblett is a frequent panellist at conferences on transatlantic
relations. He has testified on a number of occasions to the House of Commons Defence
Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee as well as US Senate and House
Committees on European Affairs.

Dr Niblett is a Non-Executive Director of Fidelity European Values Investment Trust. He
is a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute, a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Global Institutional Governance and the
Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Europe.

He received his BA in Modern Languages and MPhil and DPhil from New College,
Oxford.

CISAC Conference Room

Robin Niblett Director Speaker Chatham House, Royal Institute for International Affairs
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series

The European and Global Economic Crisis: ''Europe's Crisis / Europe's Future''

-

Audio Synopsis:

First, Professor Joffe asserts that the introduction of a common European currency was politically rather than economically motivated, pursued on the basis that it would protect Germany's strong export-oriented economy and ensure monetary discipline throughout the Euro zone without the need for heavy political management. However, good political intentions were not enough, and a disregard for sound economic principles has led to the current crisis.

In discussing causes of the crisis, Professor Joffe cites high spending and rapidly growing labor costs in the Mediterranean countries.  A common currency gave an impression to lenders of equal risk between Euro zone countries, who had little incentive for responsible monetary policies when they could borrow cheaply. Although northern countries like France and Germany also violated deficit rules prior to the crisis, they were better able to "devalue from within," cutting costs and wages, and lengthening work weeks to control unemployment. Professor Joffe uses the analogy of a steam-powered train to illustrate the challenges of the monetary union: each country represents a train car, and to move together there are three options - 1) drivers can impose discipline on other cars to ensure they don't burn too much coal; 2) when one car runs out of coal, others can share their resources; or 3) the cars can break apart, forcing out those who don't follow the speed limit.

Professor Joffe then offers several insights for the future. He reflects that the dominant system in the EU lately has been a “transfer union” (option #2 in the above train analogy). He predicts that this system will likely prevent a default until at least Spring 2012. While the crisis suggests that the monetary union should not have been forced, Joffe asserts that the desire to save the Euro is universal and a complete collapse is unimaginable. In conclusion, Professor Joffe discusses the different political challenges facing Europe and the United States, and cites several encouraging factors, including that democracy remains stable even during the economic crisis.

A discussion session following the talk address issues such as: the potential for the continued political integration of Europe to force less disciplined countries to "shape up"; how the EU hierarchy may change after the crisis; Ireland's role in the crisis; the validity of proposals to strengthen the European Parliament and implement a transactions tax;  the potential for an "Arab Spring" uprising among Greek youth; and prospects for transatlantic relations.

*NEW LOCATION*
Due to the number of RSVPs, this event has been moved to a larger venue:

Gunn - SIEPR Building
The Koret-Taube Conference Center, Room 130
366 Galvez Street
Stanford University

Josef Joffe Hoover Institution Research Fellow, and publisher/editor of the German weekly Die Zeit Speaker
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series
Subscribe to Governance