The Environmental Ethics Working Group has embarked on two distinct and experimental approaches to environmental ethical research. One approach explores the normative dimensions of quantitative environmental research. The other approach seeks either to integrate scientific data into normative arguments or to examine the real world quantitative implications of such arguments. The combination of quantitative and normative work is an exciting new interdisciplinary adventure.

Last quarter's environmental ethics working group kicked off with Marilyn Cornelius (1st year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources -- IPER) presenting a paper on global identity and climate justice. Last quarter's presentations were made by graduate students and post-docs in Education, Public Policy, Global Justice, Ethics and Society, Philosophy, and IPER on topics including national savings and sustainability, national obligations to prevent catastrophic climate change, how moral and political values affect research, the security impacts of climate change, who should bear the costs of Indian energy policy changes and what drinking water standards are appropriate for rural areas.

The group meets once a week to discuss a member's research and is funded through Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project and the Program on Global Justice Program. Debra Satz, Joshua Cohen and Kenneth J. Arrow serve as faculty advisors. Aside from eventually publishing the papers, the group is organizing a workshop for Winter 2009.

One of Stanford's many remarkable attractions is the Rodin sculpture garden. And perhaps the most extraordinary Rodin sculpture is his Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante’s “Inferno.” In his Divine Comedy, Dante tells us that the inscription over the Gates of Hell is “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

For hundreds of millions of people, that sad admonition belongs over their workplace. Abandon all hope … and not only your hope. Abandon your health and your right to associate; and don’t expect to be paid much.

That problem — the terrible unfairness of so many people having to sacrifice so much simply to make a living — provides the focus for the Just Supply Chains project of the Program on Global Justice (PGJ). Because of resistance to such working conditions, and pressure from movements against sweatshops, many companies have adopted codes of conduct for themselves and their suppliers over the past decade. But studies of these “private voluntary codes” have generated considerable skepticism about their effectiveness in improving compensation, working conditions, and rights of association. The aim of the project is to explore how codes and monitoring for compliance might be improved and also to consider some alternatives to private voluntary codes for regulating global labor markets.

PGJ has held two meetings, with participation from academics (from Stanford and elsewhere), NGOs (Fair Labor Association, Ethical Trading Initiative, Workers Rights Consortium), companies (Ford, Nike, Gap, Coca-Cola, Apple, HP, and Costco), and unions (including the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation). Through wide-ranging discussions, participants identified a set of research topics: whether consumers are willing to pay more for goods produced under decent conditions, whether there is a “business case” for improved labor standards, what the effects on labor standards will be of current reorganizations of supply chains in response to growing transportation costs, and how national labor-inspection systems might work better under conditions of globalized production. The next step is to establish working groups, combining academics and practitioners, to refine these topics and start to answer open questions about how to promote more decent working conditions in global supply chains.

In addition to the Just Supply Chains project, PGJ has been working to launch some other interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research initiatives. Along with colleagues in the School of Earth Sciences, the Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Resources, FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), the Ethics Center, and the Woods Institute, PGJ is a partner in an NSF proposal aimed at establishing a training program for graduate students in social sciences and climate science on the differential vulnerability of human-environment systems to climate change, the ethical implications of such differential vulnerability, and the role of institutions in shaping the adaptive capacity of communities.

PGJ is also working on a project on Liberation Technology, bringing together social scientists with researchers in applied technology interested in economically, socially, and politically constructive uses of new information technologies (to enable producers to learn more about markets, citizens to monitor elections and hold officials accountable, and public service providers to identify where those services are most needed). Finally, the Program on Global Justice is launching a Human Rights project, with support from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies, for historical and comparative research on the roles of political mobilization and legal protections in securing human rights.

“Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society.”

If the big global story of the 1980s and 1990s was the remarkable expansion of democracy, the bad news of this decade is that democracy is slipping into recession. In the two decades following the Portuguese revolution in 1974, the number of democracies tripled (from 40 to 120) and the percentage of the world’s states that are at least electoral democracies more than doubled (to about 60 percent). Since the late 1990s however, there has been little if any net progress in democracy. To be sure, significant new transitions to democracy took place in countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. But globally, the democratic wave has been neutralized and is now at risk of being overtaken by an authoritarian undertow, which has extinguished democracy in such states as Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bangladesh and Kenya. In fact, two-thirds (15) of all the reversals of democracy (23) since 1974 have taken place just in the last eight years, since the October 1999 military coup in Pakistan.

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Two other negative trends are important to note. One is the implosion of democratic openings in the Arab world. Under pressure from the George W. Bush administration beginning in 2003, several authoritarian Arab regimes liberalized political life and held competitive, multiparty elections. Then, Islamist political forces made dramatic gains in Egypt and Lebanon and won a majority of seats in Palestine and Iraq — and suddenly the Bush Administration got cold feet. Arab democrats who had surfaced and mobilized felt abandoned and betrayed. The liberal secular politician Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to challenge President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s first contested presidential election, languishes in prison three years later. The country’s political opening is now frozen, while more than a billion dollars in American aid continues to flow to the regime.

The second negative trend is that authoritarian states have, unfortunately, learned some of the lessons of democratic breakthroughs of the past decade, particularly the color revolutions that brought down neocommunist autocracies in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. As a result, they have closed political space, swallowed up or arrested independent media, crushed independent political opposition, sabotaged or shut down innovative uses of the Internet, and sought to block or sever external flows of democratic assistance. Vladimir Putin’s Russia (with its sinister cabal of savvy Kremlin “political technologists”) has blazed the trail in this authoritarian pushback, but China, Belarus, Iran, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and other “post” communist and Middle Eastern dictatorships have followed suit. To make matters worse, China and Russia have drawn together with the Central Asian dictatorships in a new club, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to formalize and advance their authoritarian pushback.

To renew democratic progress in the world, we must understand the reasons for the democratic recession. Authoritarian learning is one. Another has been the inconsistent and often unilateralist policies of the United States. Although President Bush has done much to put democracy promotion at the center of American foreign policy and has substantially increased funding for U.S. democracy assistance programs, he has also alienated potential allies in the effort to advance democracy globally by associating democracy promotion with the use of (largely unilateral) force, as in Iraq; by promoting democracy with a tone that was often self-righteous and a style that was too often poorly coordinated with our democratic allies; and then by failing to sustain pressure for democratic change when the going got rough in the Middle East.

Structural factors have also driven the recession of democracy. One has had to do with the global political economy. As the price of oil has gone up, the prospects for democracy have receded. Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela have all seen their democracies slip back into authoritarianism as oil prices have skyrocketed, sending huge new infusions of discretionary revenue into the hands of autocratic leaders, which they have used to buy off opponents and strengthen their security apparatuses. In Iran and Azerbaijan, surging oil revenues have shored up authoritarian states that once seemed vulnerable.

A second and more pervasive factor has had to do with the performance of the new democracies. Some new democracies are holding their own (like Mali) and even making progress (like Brazil and Indonesia) in the face of enormous accumulated problems and challenges. But the general reality, even in these countries, is that democracy often does not work for average citizens. Rather, it is blighted by multiple forms of bad governance: abusive police and security forces, domineering local oligarchies, inept and indifferent state bureaucracies, corrupt and pliant judiciaries, and ruling elites who routinely shred the rule of law in the quest to get rich in office. As a result, citizens grow alienated from democracy and become susceptible to the patronage crumbs of corrupt political bosses and the demagogic appeals of authoritarian populists like Putin in Russia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

“If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives.”Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society. If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives. Struggling democracies must be consolidated, so that all levels of society become enduringly committed to democracy as the best form of government and to the country’s constitutional norms and restraints. Western governments and international aid donors can assist in this process by making most foreign aid contingent on key principles of good governance: a free press, an independent judiciary, and vigorous, independently led institutions to control corruption. International donors also need to expand their efforts to assist these institutions of horizontal accountability as well as initiatives in civil society that monitor the conduct of government and press for institutional reform.

The only way to stem the democratic recession is to show that democracy really is the best form of government — that it can not only provide political freedom but also improve social justice and human welfare.

With more than a million dollars in committed new funding, CDDRL’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development marches into its fifth year with a sustainable future and also a new name: the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. The program’s new name recognizes the generous commitments of William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills to fund the program and enable it to continue its bold vision.

William Draper made his gift to honor his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr.; Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills made her gift in honor of her late husband, Reuben W. Hills.

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Reuben W. Hills was a San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee. He was also vice president and director of the San Francisco Opera and trustee of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. In 1992 he and his wife Ingrid started a nonprofit organization, The Hills Project, to connect inner-city youth with visual and performing arts. The project reaches out to 3,300 children in San Francisco and Berkeley schools, offering field trips to the San Francisco Ballet, museums, artists’ studios, and other cultural institutions as well as visits by artists.

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The generous support of Bill Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills enables CDDRL to continue to create a community of democratic activists dedicated to building new linkages among democracy, sustainable development, good governance, and the rule of law in transitioning nations.

WASHINGTON, June 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leading global development experts today called on Congress and the President to elevate development as a key component of the U.S. foreign assistance system to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The international and domestic challenges of the 21st century -- including transnational threats such as economic instability, terrorism, climate change, and disease -- cannot be met with a foreign assistance apparatus created to confront the challenges of the 20th century, said the experts in a report released today. The report, New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century, contains various proposals of this coalition of experts, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN).

Foreign assistance and other investments in developing countries are vital tools for strengthening U.S. foreign policy, restoring American global leadership, and fighting global poverty, said MFAN co-chair Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development. Foreign policy experts on both sides of the political aisle now recognize the importance of strong foreign assistance programs. But they also recognize that our foreign assistance programs are out of date and badly in need of modernization to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The report lays out the importance of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool which includes defense, diplomacy, and development. It makes the case that it is in the countrys national interest to elevate development assistance and makes specific recommendations such as better accountability, a national strategy for the coordination of the entire U.S. foreign assistance system, and making development a sustainable piece of Americas long-term investments overseas.

"By giving development a seat at the foreign policy table we can narrow the gap between the world's haves and have nots, tackle the challenges posed by climate change, the global food crisis, and the world's weak and failing states and, most importantly, strengthen the moral foundation from which we lead, said MFAN co-chair Gayle Smith of the Center for American Progress.

The report was released today during the launch of MFAN in Congress. Speakers included Rep. Howard L. Berman, chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Nita Lowey, chair, State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee; and Sen. Chuck Hagel, member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Members of MFAN include: Steve Radelet (Center for Global Development), Gayle Smith (Center for American Progress), Brian Atwood (Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota), David Beckmann (Bread for the World), Lael Brainard (Brookings Institution), Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution, Stanford University), Sam Worthington (Interaction), Francis Fukuyama (The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University), Carol Lancaster (Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University), George Ingram (Academy for Educational Development), Larry Nowels, Charles MacCormack (Save the Children), Michael A. McFaul (Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University), Ray Offenheiser (Oxfam America), Stewart Patrick (Council on Foreign Relations), and William Reese (International Youth Foundation).