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.
Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure
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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
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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
Africa Table: Grassroots Women as Water Champions and Social Entrepreneurs: A Path Towards Effective Leadership and Self Reliance
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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
Seminars
In the Wake of the Sunflower Movement: Exploring the Political Consequences of Cross-Strait Integration
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The Role of the United States in Cross-Strait Economic Integration
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Human Rights Fellows named "best and brightest”
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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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CDDRL honors students recognized for research
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CDDRL congratulates two of its 2014-2015 senior honors students, Stefan Norgaard (Public Policy and Urban Studies '15) and Garima Sharma (Economics '15), after they were featured in a recent article in Business Insider highlighting some of Stanford University's most 'incredibly impressive students.' Both Norgaard and Sharma conducted field research this past summer in foreign countries to collect data for their theses, which they are currently writing under the direction of the CDDRL Senior Honors Program.
Norgaard is currently researching South Africa's active political youth, the "born free" generation, and helped create an innovative community-building tool in Johannesburg's gentrifying neighborhoods. Sharma is examining the culture behind child marriages in India and has interviewed over 80 mothers on their decisions to put their daughters through the practice.
The CDDRL Senior Honors Program aims to provide an opportunity for eligible seniors focusing on democracy, economic development, and rule of law subjects in any university department to earn honors in democracy, development and rule of law (DDRL). To learn more, please visit the program page here.
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Stefan Norgaard (third from the left) and Garima Sharma (fourth from the right) stand with their cohort of 2014-2015 CDDRL honors students with Faculty Advisor Francis Fukuyama in front of the White House.
Didi Kuo
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Legal Education in Developing Countries: Daring to Play the Long Game
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This paper argues that given what we know about the role of law and legal institutions at early stages of development and what we know about the difficulties in creating or reforming public institutions, legal education is one of the most cost-effective areas in which to invest rule of law assistance. We know enough about the rough sequencing of law and legal institutions at early stages of development to avoid big and stupid mistakes. We also know enough about the significant challenges in building credible public institutions generally, and legal institutions specifically, to suggest that all-in funding of the building of formal legal institutions at early stages of development is imprudent. Therefore, in light of what we know about sequencing and the challenges of creating or reforming public institutions, legal education competes well compared with other potential rule of law interventions as a prudent and effective investment at earlier stages of development and beyond.
Speaker Bio:
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Jensen lived for 14 years in Asia and was an active participant in policy dialogues in South and Southeast Asia. From 1996 to 1998, he led the governance section of an Asian Development Bank-funded study called "Pakistan 2010," which examined subjects including judicial and legal reform, countering corruption, governance process, civil service reform, decentralization and empowering the country's citizenry. In September 1999, he served as co-team leader of a 35-member consulting team which prepared an extensive report on "Legal and Judicial Reform in Pakistan" for the Asian Development Bank.
Jensen's recent past activities include: completing a research project funded by the Ford Foundation that surveys Pakistani and Indian perceptions of doing business across their acrimonious border; serving as an outside expert in an evaluation of a World Bank project on judicial reform in Venezuela; designing and teaching a research workshop, at Stanford Law School, on judicial reform in developing countries; and serving on the advisory board of two international rule-of-law projects for the World Bank in Mexico and Argentina.
Among his recent publications are "Confronting Misconceptions and Acknowledging Imperfections: A Response To Khaled Abou El Fadl's 'Islam And Democracy'" published in the Fordham International Law Review (2003), and Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2003), which he edited with Thomas C. Heller. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz endorsed Beyond Common Knowledge with the admonition, "No scholar or policymaker should utter the words 'rule of law' without first reading this volume."
Jensen holds a JD degree from the William Mitchell College of Law and an LLM degree from the London School of Economics.
Erik Jensen
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C144
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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egjensen@stanford.edu
Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School
Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Lecturer in Law, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 35 years and has carried out fieldwork in approximately 40 developing countries. He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Among his numerous publications, Jensen co-edited with Thomas Heller Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003).
At Stanford, he teaches courses related to state building, development, global poverty and the rule of law. Jensen’s scholarship and fieldwork focuses on bridging theory and practice, and examines connections between law, economy, politics and society. Much of his teaching focuses on experiential learning. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort as faculty director to three student driven projects: the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) which started and has developed a law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), an institution where he also sits on the Board of Trustees; the Iraq Legal Education Initiative at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS); and the Rwanda Law and Development Project at the University of Rwanda. He has also directed projects in Bhutan, Cambodia and Timor Leste. With Paul Brest, he is co-leading the Rule of Non-Law Project, a research project launched in 2015 and funded by the Global Development and Poverty Fund at the Stanford King Center on Global Development. The project examines the use of various work-arounds to the formal legal system by economic actors in developing countries. Eight law faculty members as well as scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute are participating in the Rule of Non-Law Project.
Director of the Rule of Law Program, Stanford Law School
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
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Seminars
State Fragility and Extreme Poverty: What Can be Done?
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Please note that this CDDRL seminar will be held on Wednesday.
Abstract:
Recent estimates place half of the world’s poorest people in fragile and conflict-affected states by 2015. As the world moves towards the next phase of global development goals, which includes a central emphasis on eradicating extreme poverty, it will be necessary to understand the challenges for countries in the most difficult contexts. Is addressing and resolving fragility a condition (or precondition) for successfully addressing poverty? Or, are there ways to significantly and sustainably reduce poverty even while countries remain fragile?
USAID is seeking to answer these questions as it recommits to working with its partners to end extreme poverty by 2030. And while we acknowledge that ending extreme poverty will not be easy, progress and gains already achieved over the past couple of decades have made us certain that it is possible. As the global community coalesces around this goal, USAID seeks to increase shared understanding of the nature of extreme poverty, where there has been success and why, and what we are already doing and will need to do differently to catalyze and invest in global solutions.
Speaker Bio:
Alex Thier
Before joining USAID, Thier served with the U.S. Institute of Peace as senior rule of law adviser and director for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2005‐ 2010. While at the Institute, he co‐authored The Future of Afghanistan (2009) as well as The Next Chapter: The United States and Pakistan, the 2008 report of the Pakistan Working Group. Thier also served as director of the Institute’sConstitution Making, Peacebuilding, and National Reconciliation project, during which he advised numerous governments and civil society organizations engaged in ongoing constitutional drafting and national reconciliation exercises. Thier was also a principal staffer on the Institute’s Genocide Prevention Task Force, and a coauthor of its final report, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers. The recommendations from this report formed the backbone of President Barack Obama’s 2011 Directive on Mass Atrocities.
Thier previously served as director of the Project on Failed States at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. From 2002 to 2004, he was legal adviser to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. He has also worked as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a legal and constitutional expert to the British Department for International Development, and as an adviser to the Constitutional Commission of Southern Sudan.
From 1993 to 1996, Thier worked as a U.N. and NGO official in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Afghan civil war. He also served as coordination officer for the U.N. Iraq Program in New York.
An attorney, Thier was a Skadden fellow and a graduate fellow at the U.S. National Security Council’s Directorate for Near‐East and South Asia. He received the Richard S. Goldsmith award for outstanding work on dispute resolution from Stanford University in 2000.
Thier has a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a master’s degree in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Brown University.
Discussion Paper: Ending extreme poverty in fragile contexts
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Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305
Alex Thier
Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning
Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning
United States Agency for International Development
Seminars