International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

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This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 27, 2015 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the CDDRL Senior Honors Program, please click here.

 

CDDRL Class of 2015 Class of 2015 in front of the White House with Francis Fukuyama.

 


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Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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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)

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Honors Program Director

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Abstract

Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide investors with credible commitments to protect property rights. This book argues that this maxim does not hold for infrastructure privatization programs. Rather, differences in firm organizational structure better explain in the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors – or, if contracts are granted subnationally, domestic investors with diverse holdings in their contract jurisdiction – work most effectively in the volatile economic and political environments of the developing world. They are able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their contracts with host governments because cross-sector diversification provides them with informal contractual supports. The book finds strong empirical support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water and sanitation privatization contracts in Argentina and a statistical analysis of sector trends in developing countries.

Book published by Cambridge University Press, 2014

 

Speaker Bio

[[{"fid":"216992","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":233,"width":870,"style":"line-height: 1.538em; width: 150px; height: 199px; margin: 15px; float: left;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]Alison Post is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies.  Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, with a regional focus on Latin America.  It examines several related themes: the politics of regulating privatized infrastructure, the varying ability of subnational governments to provide infrastructure services effectively following the decentralization wave of the 1990s, and the politics of urban policy more broadly.  She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and other outlets.  She has been named a Clarence Stone Scholar (an early career award) by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her doctoral dissertation, “Liquid Assets and Fluid Contracts: Explaining the Uneven Effects of Water and Sanitation Privatization,” won the 2009 William Anderson award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state or local politics. She has served as a a Marshall Scholar, a postdoctoral research scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, a Visiting Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad in Buenos Aires and the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (E.C.L.A.C.) in Santiago, and as a Researcher at L.S.E. Urban Research in London.


This event is co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Y2E2, Room 300 (Engineering Quad)

473 Via Ortega, Stanford

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Join the Center for African Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's (CDDRL) Program on Social Entrepreneurship (in partnership with the Haas Center for Public Service) for a special lunchtime seminar.

Three leaders from the Global Women’s Water Initiative (GWWI) will share their work in East Africa transforming women from being water bearers to water providers and social entrepreneurs. GWWI is training and building a cadre of women water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) specialists steeped in a holistic set of technical and entrepreneurial skills to lift themselves from poverty and create self-reliance. Women have developed the capacity to construct technologies, provide health education and generate revenue by professionalizing their services. Come to Africa Table for an engaging hour listening to the stories of these three incredible leaders.

Gemma Bulos is a multi award-winning social entrepreneur, water champion and musician. As Director of the Global Women's Water Initiative, she trains women to be technicians and entrepreneurs who are able to build clean water and sanitation solutions in their communities. Her work has provided over 200,000 people with clean water in Asia and Africa.

Rose Wamalwa manages GWWI in-country logistics as Kenya/Tanzania Regional Coordinator. She was named one of the '8 African Water Women to Watch' by WASH Advocates alongside President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and President Joyce Banda of Malawi. She is currently an IREX Community Solutions Fellow sponsored by the US State Department.

Godliver Businge, Head Technology Trainer is a trained mason, welder, bricklayer, and a candidate for a Civil Engineering degree in Uganda. She is admired for her ability to train women with no background in construction. Godliver received a scholarship from the Uganda Rural Devlop-ment Trust, and was recently featured in Reuters trust.org as a Female Water Role Model. 

Lunch will be served.

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Room 202, Encina Hall West

616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA

Gemma Bulos Director Global Women's Water Initiative
Rose Wamalwa Kenya/Tanzania Regional Coordinator Global Women's Water Initiative
Godliver Businge Head Technology Trainer Global Women's Water Initiative
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Three former Human Rights fellows have been listed as Business Insider’s “15 Incredibly Impressive Students.” Garima Sharma, Nicholle Richards, and Lara Mitra were highlighted for their passionate and innovative work as undergraduate Stanford leaders.

All three were awarded the Human Rights Fellowship by the Stanford Program on Human Rights and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This fellowship is awarded each year to a small group of highly competitive applicants.

Sharma worked with Apne Aap: Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Forbesganj, India. She spent two quarters designing an interactive human rights education curriculum focused on sex trafficking, which she used in Forbesganj to engage with at-risk girls who are the daughters of sex workers in the red light district, as well as 12-14 year-old girls belonging to the Nutt (lower-caste) community. Simultaneously, she worked with older men, women and community leaders, with the goal of making preliminary headway into a community-wide anti-trafficking strategy.

Richards traveled to Guatemala to work with Kids Alive, a nonprofit that works to rescue orphans and at-risk children. In Guatemala, she helped at a care home for girls who have been abandoned or abused – often in the form of forced labor and/or physical and sexual abuse. She evaluated a program that works to continue supporting the girls who have returned home, and established a micro-loan project to help encourage business development and women’s empowerment in the region.

Mitra worked with Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a union of 1.4 million informal economy workers, which provide community-driven socioeconomic services, including healthcare, local banking, social security, and housing to marginalized groups in Ahmedabad, India to. She focused on SEWA’s initiatives responding to people's inherent right to a healthy life, and worked with the health team to analyze and document the changing role of front-line health workers who deliver care to expecting mothers.

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