Stanford University

Global Democracy Leaders Gather Virtually for the 2021 Draper Hills Summer Fellowship

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Nora Sulots
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This week we launched the long-awaited 17th year of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's Draper Hills Summer Fellowship Program. Founded in 2005 with generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, Draper Hills is an executive training program for world leaders striving to promote democracy. For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

Fellows in the class of 2021 were selected from among thousands of applicants for their ground-breaking work to defend democracy. These 34 leaders drawn from 30 countries around the world are pioneering new approaches and models to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. Representing business, government, and the nonprofit sector, our fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. In countries moving towards democracy, our fellows are working to institutionalize new systems and practices to support democratic transitions.

An Unconventional Year


Traditionally, Fellows would travel from their home countries to the U.S. and spend three weeks on campus at Stanford learning together. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the program is currently taking place virtually for the first time (for the same reasons, the program did not run in 2020). The shift to online programming posed a number of logistical obstacles – from what time to run virtual sessions when participants span over a dozen time zones to how to foster the sense of belonging and personal connections that occur more naturally in in-person settings.

To begin addressing the latter, Fellows were sent welcome packages to build excitement and foster community both within the program and at Stanford. Upon receiving hers, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria shared, "I am so excited at the different people I'll be meeting from all over the world, and also learning from different people, lecturers, professors... It's going to be quite interesting, and, for me, that is what I am most looking forward to."

"One of the most important things I have ever been involved with."


Opening against the backdrop of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the importance of the Draper Hills program and the need to promote democratic change is now more evident than ever.

The inaugural session for the 2021 cohort began with Francis Fukuyama introducing the fellows to several of the esteemed faculty they will be learning from over the next two weeks, including Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and Michael McFaul. McFaul shared that not only did he found the program, but "it is one of the most important things I have ever been involved with." Jensen later added that "participating in this program is one of the great pleasures I have every year."

More to Come


Throughout the next two weeks, our Draper Hills Fellows will examine the political development, democratic transitions, and the relationship of law to economic development, public administration, administrative law, transitional justice, food security, and global health policy, among others. The group is eager to learn, and we look forward to seeing the many great things the training they receive here will enable them to do in their home countries and beyond.

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For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

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LAD Course: LBSNAA Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration

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This five day intensive program for a select group of mid- and high-level Indian government officials and business leaders is designed to address how government can encourage and enable the private sector to play a larger, more constructive role as a force for economic growth and development. A driving principle of this LAD-LBSNAA program is that policy reform is not like engineering or other technical fields that have discrete skills and clear, optimal solutions. Instead, successful reformers must be politically aware and weigh a broad range of factors that influence policy outcomes. This program is designed to provide participants with an analytical framework to build these leadership abilities and operate effectively under adverse conditions. 

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LBSNAA Campus

Mussoorie, India

Workshops
Leadership Academy for Development Workshops
Leadership Academy for Development

Power from Doing Nothing: Why Some Government Agencies Start with Autonomy

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Why do some government agencies start with more autonomy than others? Conventional studies of autonomy at genesis are few and far between, with most of this sparse literature focusing on why a single founder—usually a politician—unilaterally chooses to delegate power to the new agency. In this article, I suggest that the decision to bestow autonomy to a new agency is not always made by a single founder alone. Instead, politicians must sometimes rely upon other actors to create a new government agency. When multiple founders collaborate to create an agency, they can either agree to share power or they can seek to prevent one another from controlling it. When they pursue the second option, the founders often compromise by empowering the new agency with autonomy from its start. I term this process “contestation,” as multiple founders seek to insulate the new agency from those whom they had to initially work with. I proceed to examine the creation of several government higher education systems in India, finding that contestation best explains why some of these systems start with more autonomy than others. I then consider the generalizability of this process, suggesting that it might explain variation in autonomy across many kinds of government agencies as well as variation across private universities. This work carries important implications for international engagement in higher education reform, specifically where we should expect outsiders to be able to create universities with greater autonomy. 

 

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Dinsha Mistree

When Law Matters: the Everyday Life of the Indian Constitution

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This event is sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for South Asia.

 

When the Indian Constitution was adopted in 1950, its egalitarian and inclusive spirit was widely seen as ahead of its time and out of sync with India’s many entrenched inequalities. Due to the efforts of its main author, the renowned Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar, the Constitution contained multiple safeguards of cultural, religious and political rights as well as the most ambitious affirmative action program in the world. Over the following six decades, the Constitution shaped Indian society in numerous ways but its most profound impact was in framing public discourse and the way citizens and communities present their claims and demands in public. Despite deep and often violent social and political conflicts, the Constitution and many of its key provisions – religious tolerance, uplift of the historically disadvantaged, recognition of the rights of distinct communities, unity of the nation – are invoked and claimed by all sides in these conflicts. At the same time, the Supreme Court of India has emerged as an active and activist court that is widely respected as the guardian of the Constitution.

 

In this seminar, two distinguished speakers will highlight and analyze why and how the Indian Constitution acquired this key role in the nation’s life.

Professor Rajeev Bhargava is a renowned political theorist who has published seminal studies of Indian secularism and law, and the Director of the well known Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. 

Dr. Rohit De is a legal scholar and Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. His forthcoming book is entitled Litigious Citizens, Constitutional Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic.

 

The two presentations will be followed by shorter commentaries from:

Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at FSI and Director of CDDRL

Erik Jensen, Professor at the Stanford School of Law

Dr. Vivek Srinivasan, Program Manager for CDDRL's Program on Liberation Technology

 

Rajeev Bhargava Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies
Rohit De Assistant Professor of History at Yale University Assistant Professor of History at Yale University
Seminars
CDDRL Special Events

Empowering Women Leaders

Sweeping reforms of Indian government institutions created space for women’s political inclusion at an unprecedented scale. As of 1993, one-third of all positions in Panchayats (local government councils) are reserved for women, and in some states as much as half the positions are reserved for women. Evidence shows that women’s presence in local government improves women’s access to justice and public goods and reduces corruption.

Journalism from below in the Digital Age with P. Sainath

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The People's Archive of Rural India combines text, audio, video, and photographs to present what is both a living journal and a growing online archive. It's a unique and ambitious movement to document the diversity of rural India, home to 833 million people speaking 780 languages. PARI, http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/, is aimed at recording the everyday lives of everyday people, to document the stories from what Sainath has called the “continent within a sub-continent”.

The site was launched in December 2014. The website is not-for-profit, free to view and all the contributors – journalists, writers, film-makers, editors, translators, engineers, lawyers and accountants –  are volunteers. The website hopes to grow by public participation.

About the speaker
Over a career spanning 34 years, Sainath has won over 40 awards for his reporting, including the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award and the first Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in 2000. His book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, has remained a non-fiction bestseller for decades and was declared a Penguin Classic in 2012. He is currently teaching two courses in the Program for South Asian Studies at Princeton University.
 
The People's Archive of Rural India, http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/, combines text, audio, video, and photographs to present a living journal and a growing online archive. It's a unique and ambitious movement to record everyday lives and to document the diversity of rural India, home to over a billion people speaking 780 languages. Launched in December 2014, the website is not-for-profit and free to view.  All the contributors – journalists, writers, film-makers, editors, translators, engineers, lawyers and accountants –  are volunteers. The website hopes to grow by public participation.
 
More on the archive:
 

The event is organized by Asha at Stanford and a similar event will be organized at UC Berkeley by the School of Information.

7:00 PM | Tuesday, May 5, 2015

"The Great Room"

Donald Kennedy Commons
Escondido Village
Comstock Circle, Stanford University
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/rde/cgi-bin/drupal/housing/frontdesk/kenn…


6:30 PM | Wednesday, May 6, 2015
210 South Hall
School of Information
UC Berkeley

Free and open to the public.
 

7:00 PM | Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Donald Kennedy Commons
Escondido Village
Comstock Circle, Stanford University

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/rde/cgi-bin/drupal/housing/frontdesk/kenn…

Design Thinking, Social Change and Governance Revolution in India

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ABSTRACT
Delivering public services effectively by Vivek S.

Tamil Nadu is among the few states in India that provides basic public services such as schools, water, electricity, primary healthcare and transport almost universally.  These services function remarkably well, making a significant difference to the lives of people. In many cases, the state has achieved better outcomes than other states of India, but with comparable budgets. 

In this talk, Vivek will argue that the effectiveness of Tamil Nadu's administration can be linked to underlying processes akin to 'human centred design' that has been popularized by the Design school at Stanford, among others. This form of design thinking is slowly but surely making its way to other parts of India leading to a small revolution in governance in India today.

The talk will be based on his recently published book, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu & Beyond.

 

SPEAKER BIO

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Vivek Srinivasan joined the CDDRL Liberation Technology Program as the program manager in February 2011 after completing his Ph.D. in social sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, he worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences Srinivasan has written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).  

In working with these campaigns, he realized the widespread disparities in the provision of basic public services in India. This led him to examine how Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, developed extensive commitment to providing such services to all its residents in his doctoral dissertation.  Oxford University Press published Srinivasan’s book based on the dissertation entitled, "Delivering services effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond" in 2014.

As a full-time activist, he also experimented with various IT platforms to make the campaigns effective. This interest brought him to the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford where Srinivasan is currently leading a research project entitled "Combating corruption with mobile phones".

Vivek Srinivasan

Encina Hall
Office C149

(650) 561-6039
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picture-4171-1416339295.jpg PhD

I joined the Liberation Technology Program as the Manager in February 2011 after completing my Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, I worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences I have written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).  

In working with these campaigns, I realised the widespread disparities in the provision of basic public services in India. This led me examine how Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, developed extensive commitment to providing such services to all its residents in my doctoral dissertation.  Oxford University Press published my book based on the dissertation entitled, "Delivering services effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond" in 2014.

As a full-time activist, I also experimented with various IT platforms to make the campaigns effective. This interest brought me to the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford. I am currently leading a research project entitled "Combating corruption with mobile phones".

Visiting Scholar
Former Academic Research & Program Manager, Liberation Technology
Academic Research & Program Manager, Program on Liberation Technology Academic Research & Program Manager, Program on Liberation Technology
Seminars
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