Anastasia Guzenko
The Hoover Institution's Area 45 Podcast: anticipating global insecurity with Amy Zegart
In a world complicated by terrorism, cyber threats and political instability, the private sector has to prepare for the unexpected. Amy Zegart, CISAC co-director, the Hoover Institution’s Davies Family Senior Fellow, and co-author (along with Condoleezza Rice) of Political Risk: How Businesses And Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, explains lessons learned in keeping cargo planes moving, hotel guests protected – and possibly coffee customers better served.
Ertharin Cousin
Ertharin Cousin is a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Food Security and the Environment. She is also a distinguished fellow of global agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
She previously served as executive director of the World Food Programme from 2012 until 2017. In this role, Cousin led the world’s largest humanitarian organization with 14,000 staff serving 80 million vulnerable people across 75 countries. Cousin possesses more than 30 years of national and international nonprofit, government, and corporate leadership experience. She maintains relationships with global government, business, and community leaders. She has published numerous articles regarding agriculture, food security, and nutrition.
In 2009, Cousin was nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as the US ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. In this role Cousin served as the US representative for all food, agriculture, and nutrition related issues. Cousin regularly represented US interest in global leader discussions, including prime ministers, foreign and agriculture ministers, academics and business executives, regarding humanitarian and development activities. Cousin helped identify and catalyze US government investment in food security and nutrition activities supported by the USAID Feed the Future program. Cousin convened foreign media tours resulting in millions of conventional as well social media impressions.
Prior to her global hunger work, Cousin helped lead the US domestic fight to end hunger while serving as executive vice president and chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest (now Feeding America). In this role Cousin led the operations, budgeting, and expenditures as well as the human resources, IT, and training activities of this national confederation of 200 foodbanks across America serving over 50,000,000 meals per year. Previously, Cousin served as senior vice president for Albertson’s Foods. As a corporate reporting officer, Cousin served as the Albertson lead for community relations, customer relations, legislative and regulatory affairs, industry and external relations, including communications serving as the company’s chief spokesperson. While serving at Albertson she was appointed by the US president to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development where she helped oversee US government agriculture research investments worldwide. Before Albertsons, Cousin also served in government as the White House Liaison to the State Department. She received the department’s Meritorious Service award for her work expeditiously and successfully addressing foreign policy issues which arose when the US hosted the Atlanta Olympics.
A Chicago native, Cousin is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Georgia Law School, and the University of Chicago Executive Management Finance for Non-Financial Executives program. Cousin has received honorary doctorate degrees from universities around the globe. She has been listed numerous times on the Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” list, as the Fortune “Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink,” on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list, and as one of the “500 Most Powerful People on the Planet” by Foreign Policy magazine.
Participatory risk network analysis: A tool for disaster reduction practitioners
Disaster risk is the product of a complex set of networked processes. Development professionals often use participatory tools to help understand disasters. However, such tools are not designed to capture the interconnections that shape risk. Using flooding in the slums of Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a case study, this article demonstrates how the tools of network analysis can be employed to develop network maps using participatory datasets and discusses the utility of such displays in designing interventions to reduce risk. The article suggests that networked approa ches to risk analysis are uniquely suited to capturing the intricate processes that shape disaster risk and can provide a path forward for developing policies and interventions that seek to address complex phenomena. The article includes an Appendix A with instructions for those seeking to conduct participatory network analysis.
Organization of Disaster Aid Delivery: Spending Your Donations
This article examines how different organizational structures in disaster aid delivery affect house aid quality. We analyze three waves of survey data on fishermen and fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia, following the 2004 tsunami. We categorize four organizational structures based on whether and to whom donors contract aid implementation. Compared to bilateral contracting between donors and implementers, donors that vertically integrate and do their own implementation offer the highest-quality housing as rated by village heads and have fewer counts of faults, such as leaky roofs and cracked walls, as reported by fishermen. However, they shade in quality as they lose dominance as the leading aid agency in a village. Domestic implementers and the government agency that was responsible for significant portions of aid delivery provide significantly lower-quality aid. We also examine how the imposition of shared ownership, the primary social agenda for boat aid agencies, affects boat aid quality. We find that village and fishing leaders steer poor-quality boats toward those whom shared ownership was imposed upon, often lower-status fishermen.
Massimo Mannino
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Massimo Mannino is a Visiting Student Researcher from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, under the supervision of Michael Bechtel (University of St.Gallen) and Jens Hainmueller (Stanford University). His dissertation explores the political economy of natural disasters and is part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Economists suggest how to better allocate donations for disaster relief
As people around the world look to support earthquake relief efforts in Nepal, scholars from Stanford and the London School of Economics and Political Science offer new research that can help donors make better decisions about where and how to contribute their money.
“NGO reports tend to focus on quantity in delivery, such as numbers of homes and people served—but not on quality,” write Yong Suk Lee (Stanford) and J. Vernon Henderson (LSE).
In a forthcoming paper, the coauthors evaluate reconstruction efforts in Indonesia following the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, and find two trends: aid agencies that directly execute their services—point-to-point—perform the highest quality work. And, when agencies contract their services, higher quality work is performed when a global, not domestic, implementer completes the work.
Knowing this reality, and with improved disclosure of outcomes, the coauthors hope that donors would be able to make more informed choices.
Fishing village survey

Through fieldwork and three rounds of surveys – in 2005, 2007 and 2009 – Henderson and Lee investigated aid work in Aceh, an area of coastal villages in northern Indonesia (Figure 1).
Humanitarian efforts there focused on “hard aid” such as construction of houses and fishing boats. Total aid delivered amounted to $7.7 billion and was implemented by international and domestic aid agencies—some directly and some as contractors—as well as the Indonesian government.
First, Henderson and Lee conducted a pilot survey, and then with a cohort of surveyors from the University of Indonesia, held interviews with village leaders and fishing families. Participants were asked to rate their housing accommodation, and if applicable, how their fishing activity compared to before the disaster.
“Mostly, we sat with villagers to see how willing they were to talk about aspects of aid,” Lee said. “Since it was several years after the tsunami hit, people were pretty open throughout the process.”
Data from those surveys was combined with information from the Recovery Aceh-Nias relief project database maintained by the government and the U.N., as well as demographic information provided by participants.
Delivering aid: Global v. local
Empirical analysis revealed that aid agencies such as the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services reflected higher quality aid delivery (at a mean quality near 3.00), while agencies such as Save the Children and Concern Worldwide reflected lower quality (at a mean quality between 1.0-1.5).
“What’s surprising is that reputation didn’t really line up with what was expected,” Lee said, citing a few renowned agencies that didn’t receive high marks.
Lee said this could be explained by the fact that aid agencies that specialize in disaster recovery are better equipped, while a learning curve might exist for agencies with wider missions.
Global aid agencies are more likely to have logistical experience given their reach across multiple disaster situations. And while all NGOs face reputational costs for their results, global aid agencies are greater exposed to criticism because, by size, they’re more visible.
Yet, while global aid agencies and implementers may have the raw skills, local implementers have the cultural know-how.
“Local implementers might not have the most experience – like how to construct a house or manufacture a fishing boat – but they will likely know what’s actually desired,” Lee said. “So, there are obvious tradeoffs at play.”
For example, villagers reported bad ventilation in houses. This was because some aid agencies used small windows and concrete instead of wood material more traditionally used in Indonesia. Some boats were impossible to use because of improper design; they sank upon first use or fell apart after a few months.


Logistics and oversight
Aid delivery depends in many ways on the location and scale of the disaster. But, a few main aspects can determine if an aid agency doing its own work or operating as an implementer meets or exceeds expectations.
Henderson and Lee suggest that agencies that were highly supervisory had greater positive outcomes from their workers. In the case of Aceh, better monitoring and insistence on quality by leadership is a likely corollary between construction of better quality homes and boats.
“Rather than just give money, NGOs need to really oversee the projects. Organization and management are essential facets,” Lee said. “And that requires a lot of additional effort on their part.”
Oversight is especially relevant in disaster situations because of the often-overwhelming need for reconstruction. A flood of less-skilled workers enters the market to fill this gap, and on average the quality of work degrades.
“It’s much more difficult to impose quality control at this point,” Lee said. “So the implication that comes out of it is how does the implementer effectively utilize less-skilled workers.”
Getting to know the implementers and evaluating their work in-progress would help ensure quality on behalf of the aid agency. And, better dissemination of information about aid outcomes would help assure donors that their monies are being applied in the best possible way.
Future study
Most “hard aid” delivered to Aceh’s villages had finished by 2010, but “soft aid” such as democracy promotion and women’s empowerment stayed longer.
Henderson and Lee conducted one final survey in 2011. The data has been offered as open source material for researchers along with the larger data set.
Noting this, Lee said, “We’re thrilled that people are looking into the data further. It’s exactly what we wanted.”
Research projects applying the data include the impact of the tsunami on Aceh’s local economies and health effects on the population, among other areas.