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.

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Ayelet Shachar is a professor of law, political science, and arts and science at the University of Toronto. She received her JSD from Yale Law School in 1997. Prior to that, she served as law clerk to former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. She joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1999.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights, winner of the 2002 Best First Book Award by the American Political Science Association, Foundations of Political Theory Section. She is recipient of many academic awards and fellowships, including, most recently, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, the Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Her scholarship focuses on citizenship and immigration law, highly skilled migrants and transnational legal processes, as well as state and religion, family law, multilevel governance regimes, group rights, and gender equality.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, and Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

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Ayelet Shachar Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights Speaker Stanford Law School
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Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Poverty Action Lab, and past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD).

Banerjee received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1988, and has taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining the MIT faculty in 1996. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Malcolm Adeshesiah Award, and was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2000. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is coeditor with Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee of Understanding Poverty and, with Philippe Aghion, coauthor of Volatility and Growth. His areas of research are development economics, the economics of financial markets, and the macroeconomics of developing countries.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

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Abhijit Banerjee Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Poverty Action Lab Speaker
Workshops
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News
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On Dec. 7, 2006, Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Noghaideli met with FSI scholars and students and reported on his administration's reforms, negotiations with the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whether Georgia sought NATO membership, and energy security vis-à-vis Russia. Noghaideli, who became prime minister of the Republic of Georgia in February 2005, was considered a member of a team of young reformists headed by Zurab Zhvania and Mikheil Saakashvili in the years leading up to the Rose Revolution. He also discussed Russian sanctions on Georgian exports, and was optimistic about Georgia's ability to adapt to and rebound from such constraints. As an example he pointed to the success of a recent advertising campaign in neighboring Ukraine, in which billboards advertise, "Promote democracy. Drink Georgian wine."
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Thomas Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He received his BA from Princeton in 1962 and his PhD from Harvard. In between, he studied for a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught at Princeton from 1966 before Harvard in 1984.

Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press in 1988; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop), and the Stanford Philosophy Department.

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Thomas Scanlon Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity Speaker Harvard University
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Jennifer Rubenstein received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago (2005) with a dissertation entitled "Just Samaritans? The politics and ethics of international private aid." In her research, she examines the ways in which humanitarian organizations provide moral justifications for their actions and decisions, and the relationship between these justifications and the conceptual categories through which international aid is understood. Her work, which is informed by extensive primary research, has been funded by grants from SSRC, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Aspen Institute. She specializes in political theory, international politics, democratic theory, and NGOs.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

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Jennifer Rubenstein Lecturer in Politics Speaker Princeton University
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Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul present an argument for continued American efforts to promote democracy and a plan to strengthen policy tools for those efforts. They advocate a concept of dual-track diplomacy and the creation of a new Cabinet-level department of development, with distinct resources and programs for democracy promotion.

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Publication Type
Policy Briefs
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Washington Quarterly
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
Francis Fukuyama
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Proponents of oil-led development believe that countries lucky enough to have "black gold" can base their development on this resource. They point to the potential benefits from enhanced economic growth and the creation of jobs, increased government revenues to finance poverty alleviation, the transfer of technology, the improvement of infrastructure and the encouragement of related industries. But the experience of almost all oil-exporting countries to date illustrates few of these benefits. To the contrary, the consequences of oil-led development tend to be negative, including slower than expected growth, barriers to economic diversification, poor social welfare performance, and high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Furthermore, countries dependent on oil as their major resource for development are characterized by exceptionally poor governance and high corruption, a culture of rent-seeking, often devastating economic, health and environmental consequences at the local level, and high incidences of conflict

and war. In sum, countries that depend on oil for their livelihood eventually become among the most economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most conflict-ridden in the world.

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Working Papers
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CDDRL Working Papers
Authors
Terry L. Karl
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Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalizations have not had as strong an effect as might be expected. To convince outsiders to invest, countries must put in place laws and supporting institutions to protect the rights of minority shareholders. Countries with such protections tend to have larger, more efficient, and more stable stock markets than those that do not.

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Publication Type
Working Papers
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Journal Publisher
CDDRL Working Papers
Authors
Peter Blair Henry
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Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.

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Books
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Cambridge University Press, in "Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation"
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All over the world new ideas and models emerge on how to organize the higher education sector and its institutions. The contributions in this volume identify the most influential transnational models and investigate their origins and mechanisms of dissemination as well as the resulting consequences for national systems. Will global trends in higher education lead to homogeneity or will they result in an increased differentiation? This question is addressed by higher education researchers with very different disciplinary and national backgrounds. Contributors are, among others, Jürgen Enders, John W. Meyer, Christine Musselin and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson.

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Publication Type
Books
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transcript Verlag, in "Towards a Multiversity? Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions"
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