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.

Using Mixed Methods to Improve the Quality and Relevance of Impact Evaluation

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It is now widely recognized that a rigorous, policy-relevant impact evaluation embeds the counterfactual analysis of impact in a wider analysis of the underlying program theory (theory of change) of the intervention, also referred to as causal chain analysis. Unpacking the causal chain requires a combination of factual and counterfactual analysis. The seminar will present examples of causal chains. The types of data collection and analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – to analyze the different links in the chain will be discussed. A major challenge in mixed methods is to truly integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches.

About the speaker

Howard White formerly led the impact evaluation program of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, where he was responsible for impact studies on basic education in Ghana, health and nutrition in Bangladesh, rural electrification, rural development in Andhra Pradesh and a review of impact studies of water supply and sanitation.

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Howard White Executive Director Speaker International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ieimpact.org)
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Mobile Money - Realizing the Potential for Impact

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Mobile payment systems launched in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now offer anyone with a mobile phone the ability to store money electronically and send it to other phone users, without visiting a bank and sometimes without even having a bank account. Over a billion people with a mobile phone are now closer to financial services. 

But will these systems become vehicles of financial inclusion, or will they remain simply a convenience for the urban elite? 
 
Nathan Wyeth, the director of FrontlineSMS:Credit in Nairobi, Kenya, will speak on examples and the potential of mobile money empowering people at the base of the pyramid in East Africa and around the world.  FrontlineSMS:Credit builds lightweight software that enables enterprises serving the poor - like microfinance institutions, co-ops, health organizations, community organizations, and businesses - to transact using mobile payments.  

Nathan will touch on the architecture of these systems, the sector-wide decisions made by mobile networks that will determine if these systems open up or remain closed and proprietary, the hurdles to realizing the promise of mobile money, and how new people can become involved in this sector and answering these questions. 

CISAC Conference Room

Nathan Wyeth Director of FrontlineSMS:Credit in Nairobi, Kenya Speaker
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Government is key to understanding China's future

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Over the past three decades, China's government, economy, and society have been undergoing a transformation, the momentum of which has intensified in recent years. Stanford sociologist Xueguang Zhou has been conducting a detailed ethnographic study in a rural township a few hours' drive from Beijing in order to understand these changes, especially in terms of China's political institutions. He is also beginning research about the behavior of urban government organizations and about the trajectory of personnel mobility in the Chinese bureaucracy.

Xueguang Zhou, FSI senior fellow and Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development
Zhou (PhD '91), a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development with the Department of Sociology, chose to conduct his ethnographic research project in a rural township because it afforded him a chance to stay in one place over a long period of time and to get closer to the everyday life of local residents. "It is easier to conduct this kind of research in rural areas because people are always there and once they get to know you, you can gain access to and make sense of their experiences, feelings and views, and their coping strategies in response to large-scale social changes," he notes.

Zhou's rural governance study branched out into three interrelated directions. He has been studying agricultural markets, including: how they have been taking shape and evolving over time, how harvests are conducted, and where local elites and farmers interact with large outside companies. China's rural election system, which Zhou suggests has become more institutionalized in the past six to eight years, has been another area of focus. He has examined how the system was first established, and how it has evolved into its current shape. Finally, he has followed patterns of government behavior within the context of the significant changes now underway in China.
"From a research point of view, this is really a critical moment in the Chinese economic transformation.

-Xueguang Zhou

FSI Senior Fellow and Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development
Gradually shifting his focus to the study of China's urban political institutions, Zhou has been working with a doctoral candidate from Peking University to study the behavior of urban government bureaus for the past three years, and they are now working on articles highlighting the major findings from this research. In addition, Zhou is in the process of selecting urban sites in which to conduct a more prolonged and detailed study similar to his rural township project. He is also working with a Stanford master's student to analyze twenty years of government personnel data, tracing the movement of specific individuals across offices and bureaus as they have been promoted through the bureaucratic system. "It is all a public record," says Zhou, "but once you piece these trajectories together, they shed light on the inner working of, and dynamics in, the Chinese bureaucracy."

China's overall transformation has greatly accelerated in the past decade, and even as urban life is changing, life in rural areas around China's coastal megalopolises is perhaps changing even more quickly. Zhou suggests that within the next five to ten years the contribution of China's shrinking rural areas towards the country's GDP will become quite insignificant. "The speed is really just astonishing," he emphasizes. As cities expand, local governments purchase up land from rural residents for commercial development projects like shopping centers and apartment complexes. Real estate is a huge source of income for city governments and so there has been an aggressive push toward urbanization. As a result, says Zhou: "Millions of rural residents lost their land and became urban overnight without any relevant work skills." Although they are compensated to various degrees for their land, the bigger question is how this will affect the new city dwellers and their families in the future as they must develop new skills and adapt to the social and environmental conditions of urban life.

"From a research point of view," states Zhou, "This is really a critical moment in the Chinese economic transformation: the way that they deal with the process of urbanization will have tremendous consequences for the years to come because it is creating so much tension and social conflict." Even away from coastal areas, government-driven urbanization is taking place everywhere in China—even in provinces with vast expanses of remote land like Xinjiang. "This is exactly why you want to study government," maintains Zhou. "Because they play a key role in this process." Understanding China's government institutional structures, its decision-making processes, and the way that resources are mobilized will lead the way to better understanding about the future impact of these decisions that are now so rapidly changing both the rural and urban landscape.

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A grape harvest in rural China | Courtesy Xueguang Zhou
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Digital Townhall from Cairo

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Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Participant Profiles

Sabah Hamamou is one of Egypt’s most acclaimed new media journalists.  A 36-year-old whose Youtube channel has some 370,000 upload views, she is also a deputy editor at Al Ahram, the country’s most prestigious newspaper. Sabah initially joined the protests as a reporter, but when the protesters came under attack on the first evening of the revolution, she posted the videos she had taken from Tahrir Square, and instantly had 90,000 hits.  Sabah then led an in-house revolt at Al-Ahram over the newspaper’s insistence on reporting regime propaganda about the revolution.  When Al Ahram started reporting the truth about the protests in early February, people throughout Egypt began to realize how much the Mubarak regime had lost popular support.

Mona Shahien is a founder of the Revolutionary Youth Union, a group formed out of the masses in Tahrir Square that sparked initiatives to treat wounded protesters and to clean up the Square, two activities that went viral and demonstrated the new sense of civic engagement that underlies Egypt’s revolution.  She recently founded Tahrir Lounge as a space to bring activists together to communicate, train and collaborate.

Abdel Rahman Faris is a one of three independents on the Revolutionary Youth Council, the coordinating group of youth movements that planned the January 25 protests that set off the revolution.  Frustrated by censorship in the mainstream media, Faris set up the blog www.abdofares.blogspot.com, which he uses to mobilize online communities to engage in political activity.

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Conferences

How is Obama doing on Human Rights?

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Please join the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in welcoming Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch for a special event on the topic of President Obama's human rights record. Mr. Roth will speak about the US response to human rights abuses around the world, including recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

The event will be chaired by Professor David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus in the Stanford department of Political Science.  

How is Obama doing on human rights?
Executive Director Kenneth Roth will assess the Obama Administration's human rights record. How has the president done in addressing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa? How has he performed on legacy issues, such as Guantanamo and torture? How has he handled competing national interests in places like China? Has his greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy, especially at the United Nations, helped or hurt the promotion of human rights? 

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 80 countries. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch in 1987, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.

Recent Publications  

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Kenneth Roth Executive Director Speaker Human Rights Watch
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SPRIE executive training session offers Chinese enterprise leaders insights into innovation

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From how failure drives innovation to the role of government in supporting entrepreneurship, two expert professors at Stanford led a training session for executives from Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOE) as part of the 2011 Cisco China 21st Century Enterprise Leader Program (ELP) hosted by Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) on March 22, 2011.

Professor William F. Miller, Co-Director of SPRIE, kicked off the session with a stimulating presentation on Silicon Valley's habitat for innovation. He pointed out that turning technology into business was the essence of Silicon Valley, and a favorable business, social and political environment in the region had facilitated the process. Despite the emergence of other venture capital locations, Silicon Valley scooped up almost 40% of venture deals and dollars across the U.S. in the last quarter of 2010, according to the MoneyTree Report.

The "restless pioneer spirit" of Stanford had always played a crucial role in the effective interaction between research institutes and industry, Miller argued.

Following Miller's discussion of features of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial habitat, William Barnett, Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, shared his thoughts on how to discover successful business models.

"Having great technologies is not enough," said Barnett. "Entrepreneurs are like scientists. Successful business models are learned from failures." Barnett encouraged the leaders present to create a working environment within which failure would be tolerated. He further urged them to accelerate the learning process by asking what might go wrong.

The purpose of the SPRIE session, which is part of a 12-day US-based program organized by Cisco Systems and China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), is to help the SOE executives understand how to foster innovation and to drive operational excellence. The delegation is composed of SASAC officials, Peking University professors and leaders from 17 SOEs in China, including Southern Power Grid, Three Gorges Corporation, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, China FAW Group, Harbin Electric Corp., Anshan Iron and Steel Group, Baosteel Group, China Ocean Shipping Company, China Eastern Airlines, China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, State Development and Investment Corporation, China Merchants, China Railway Group and China Railway Construction.

 

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Professor William Barnett at 2011 Cisco China 21C Enterprise Leader Program training session hosted by SPRIE on March 22, 2011.
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A Tribute to Warren Christopher

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Warren M. Christopher, a highly respected attorney, former Secretary of State and former chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees died on March 18, 2011, at the age of 85.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Warren Christopher attended Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Law Review and was a member of the Order of the Coif.

Upon graduation, Mr. Christopher joined the Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny& Myers LLP. He would blend a highly regarded and very distinguished law career with an equally distinguished record of public service to several American presidents.

From 1997 to 1982, Mr. Christopher served President Jimmy Carter as Deputy Secretary of State of the United States. President Carter awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in January of 1981 for his role in negotiating the release of 52 Americans hostages in Iran. Mr. Christopher then rejoined O'Melveny & Myers in 1981, serving as chairman of the firm until 1992.

In 1991, Mr. Christopher was Chairman of the Independent Commission of the Los Angeles Police Department, which proposed significant reforms in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident. Mr. Christopher headed the search for a running mate for both Governor Clinton's and Vice President Gore's presidential campaigns and served as Director of the Presidential Transition Process for President Clinton.

Mr. Christopher was called on by President Clinton to serve as Secretary of State. He was sworn in as the 63rd Secretary in January of 1993 and served until January 1997. As Secretary of State, he helped bring peace to Bosnia and to parts of the Middle East. He rejoined his firm, O'Melveny & Myers, as its senior partner in 1997.

Mr. Christopher's activities have included service as President of the Board of Trustees of Stanford and as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has been a Director and Vice Chairman of the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a co-chair, with James Baker, of the National War Powers Commission, convened to determine the respective roles of the president and the congress in taking the nation to war.

He authored four books: In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (Stanford, 1998), Chances of a Lifetime (Scriber 2001), Diplomacy, the Neglected Imperative (published privately in 1981) and Random Harvest (published privately in 2005).

"Warren Christopher was a distinguished attorney, an outstanding diplomat, an astute statesman and a wonderful person,"In 2008, O'Melveny & Myers and a number of its current and retired partners committed $1.5 million to endow the Warren Christopher Professorship of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, a joint appointment between Stanford Law School and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"Warren Christopher was a unique and a very special person," said Law School Dean Larry Kramer. "He was brilliant and thoughtful, generous, modest, and unselfish to the core. In everything he said and did, he embodied what we mean when we talk of someone as classy.

 "Warren Christopher was a distinguished attorney, an outstanding diplomat, an astute statesman and a wonderful person," said Coit D. Blacker, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. "How appropriate it is to have a gift that lives on for the next generation of leaders and public servants that honors his talent, his prescience, his leadership and his remarkable career in both the law and diplomacy. We will miss him and his wise counsel."

 

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Janine Zacharia was born in New Hyde Park, New York and received her bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. In 1995, she became a correspondent for the Jerusalem Report in Israel, covering Yitzhak Rabin's 1995 assassination and Israeli elections. She became a news-wire reporter for Reuters in Jerusalem in 1998. She moved to Washington in 1999 to serve as the bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post. She reported on a series of Middle East summits starting with the Shepherdstown, West Virginia Syrian-Israeli peace talks in 2000. She also regularly wrote for The New Republic during this time and was a cable news analyst. Bloomberg News hired her as its diplomatic correspondent in 2005. Over the past several years, she has reported on U.S. diplomacy abroad and traveled to more than 40 countries with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior administration officials. In October 2007, she accompanied Benazir Bhutto on her return to Pakistan where militants killed 140 of her supporters during an attack on the former prime minister

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Janine Zacharia Diplomatic Correspondent Speaker Bloomberg News, Washington
Seminars

Resisting Europe: Protest and opposition in the EU

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Protest, street demonstrations and social unrest have been increasingly prevalent across the European Union. European citizens appear ever more discontent with their national governments and with ‘Europe'. Reforms and policies aimed at countering the challenges of the economic crises and increased global competition are met by strong public opposition. Recent student movements protesting against educational reforms, strikes and massive anti-austerity demonstrations in many European capitals, protest votes for extreme right or left political parties are just some of these manifestations. What translates dissatisfaction to protest and drives these collective actions? How is protest expressed in European politics and in the public sphere today? Who is protesting and against what? Is this growing opposition the result of socio-economic insecurity felt by European citizens due to Europe's increasingly strained economic security and prosperity? Or, has Europe hit the limits of how much integration and diversity it can digest? As the current model of European economic liberalism is attacked by protest groups and populists from both left and right, how does this affect European democracy and the future of the European project?  

Ruby Gropas is Lecturer in International Relations at the Law Faculty of the Democritus University of Thrace, and Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens, Greece. She studied political science and international relations at ULB (Belgium), management at the State University of Maryland, and holds a PhD from Cambridge University.

Her main research interests lie in European integration and foreign policy, human rights, migration and multiculturalism. She has taught at the University of Athens and was Managing Editor of the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (2006-2009). She was Southeast Europe Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC (2007, 2009) and a Member of the Organizing Committee of the 3rd Global Forum on Migration and Development (2009). Ruby is Vice-President of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholars' Association and is currently working on an EU-funded research project on history, identities and modernity.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Ruby Gropas Lecturer in International Relations at the Law Faculty of the Democritus University of Thrace (Komotini) and Visiting Scholar Speaker FSI
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