A Pivotal Moment for Climate Policy

In early May, Israel faced its second major wildfire in a month, as flames tore through the woodlands around Jerusalem, forcing the shutdown of the central region and the cancellation of Independence Day celebrations. Conference Chair, Professor Alon Tal, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies and a leading environmental advocate, explained that once a rare occurrence, such fires have become far more frequent, reflecting a broader international pattern.

“In the past, fires of this magnitude maybe happened once a decade,” Tal noted. “But like California, Israel’s fire service now reports a tripling of high-risk fire days — ultra-dry conditions paired with high winds. This is an international phenomenon. This past year, Canadian fires destroyed 45 million acres of woodlands — seven times the annual average. Israel has received a wake-up call about the impacts of the climate crisis.”

Across two days of programming, the conference will bring together 25 Israeli experts to discuss potential solutions alongside colleagues from Los Angeles and California. “This is not just a policy conversation. This is about how we prepare our communities for an uncertain future,” Tal said. “Both Los Angeles and Tel Aviv are confronting real environmental risks, but they also have the innovation ecosystems and civic infrastructure needed to respond creatively. We have a lot to learn from studying them side by side.”

Comparing Los Angeles and Tel Aviv offers scholars and policymakers unique insights, Tal believes. “These are two of the most creative cities in the world. They both have thriving tech sectors and liberal city governments with resources and professional expertise. At the same time, they face comparable challenges: they are both dryland cities on rising coastlines, where heat waves are becoming more treacherous. Bringing their top experts together at Stanford has tremendous merit.”

Rethinking Climate Governance at the City Level

Tal emphasized that local governments are increasingly bearing the burden of climate adaptation, especially in societies marked by inequality and demographic complexity. “The changing climate brings new challenges that cities need to be ready for. And they aren’t,” he said. “Most people live in cities — they need the tools (and the budget) to reduce new risks. The LA fires have left enormous human suffering in their wake, just like the climate-driven floods in New Orleans, Houston, and New York City did. So, the question is: what steps should cities take proactively to avert disasters and maintain stability?”

While Tal emphasized the immediate environmental threats, Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, framed the discussion within a broader governance context. “It is often said that ‘all politics is local,’ and there is a policy corollary to that. While we need national policies and international coordination to reduce fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the transition to renewable energy, the challenges of climate adaptation and resilience are also deeply local and must be met at that level. This is a great opportunity for all of us to learn from two cities on the front lines of the challenge in our respective countries — Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.”
 

A Vision for Collaborative Learning

The event also reflects the broader goals of Stanford’s Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, launched in 2023 to foster cross-disciplinary analysis of Israel and its unique position as a regional influence and geopolitical actor. The program appoints an Israel-based scholar to serve as a visiting fellow at FSI for a recurring three-year term. The fellow will teach courses related to some aspect of Israel’s politics, society, economy, modern history, technological development, and/or regional or international relations, as well as advise students and collaborate with faculty interested in Israel and the Middle East.

Diamond emphasized the significance of the conference in fulfilling the program’s mission. “One of our key goals in the Israel Studies Program is to engage scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders in Israel, not only individually but collectively based on their expertise. And we seek to promote functional and scholarly interaction and mutual learning. This conference is a historic opportunity to advance this mission in the realm of climate resilience.”

Tal also highlighted the significance of hosting the conference at Stanford. “Stanford has become the world’s leading academic center for researching critical ecological problems like biodiversity and climate change. The Doerr School of Sustainability and the involvement of Nobel laureate Steven Chu as a keynote speaker make this an unparalleled opportunity for collaboration.”

Building a Lasting Impact

Tal hopes the conference will catalyze new approaches to addressing climate impacts. “It’s clear that new environmental conditions require new strategies and technologies. Seeing practical solutions firsthand is crucial, but they don’t matter without policies that enable cities to step up their climate mitigation game. Success stories need to be shared.”

The conference outcomes will be documented in a special issue of the academic journal Sustainability, ensuring that insights resonate beyond the event itself. “By focusing on urban policies and highlighting both successes and failures, we aim to chart pathways for cities to live with global warming while mitigating emissions to address the root causes,” Tal said.

Diamond further expressed his hopes for the conference’s impact. “We hope participants will not only take away specific ideas and strategies from the two cities and countries but also connections that can be of mutual practical value going forward. We want to underscore that Israel and California, with their similar climates and start-up cultures, have a particularly rich set of possibilities for collaboration and mutual learning.”

Community members and members of the public are invited to participate in this pivotal conversation. To view the full agenda and register, visit the conference website.

The "Meet Our Researchers" series showcases the incredible scholars at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Through engaging interviews conducted by our undergraduate research assistants, we explore the journeys, passions, and insights of CDDRL’s faculty and researchers.

How has infrastructure development been used to gain influence in diplomacy? How has our understanding of that tool changed since BRI, and how successful has it been for China?

Infrastructure development has always been a problematic tool for amassing geopolitical influence; it builds friendships when loans are going out, then creates enemies once they’re issued. A recent example is the 1997 Asian financial crisis when Western countries had invested in power plants throughout the continent, only for many countries to default and expropriate. This has happened repeatedly throughout history.

While China’s done quite well at protecting its economic interests in infrastructure projects, it's a mixed bag due to the prevalence of moral hazard, public backlash, and the tarnishing of diplomatic ties. With the state being so heavily involved in BRI, China intervenes when countries want to default or expropriate, protecting its interests and those of state-owned enterprises effectively. However, this can lead to a moral hazard problem because these enterprises feel too protected by China and act without the appropriate caution while building risky projects.

Today, many countries that have received BRI lending have serious relational problems with China, if not at the government level, then among the public. People tend to push back and feel taken advantage of when a foreign country comes in and builds projects, especially with rumor mills churning out narratives about China’s 'debt-trap diplomacy.' These diplomatic challenges were true long before the BRI and persist today.

Why do countries, through BRI or other means, decide to take on infrastructure projects they obviously can’t afford?

Countries often don’t behave rationally — politics, corrupt officials, and conflicting interests all affect policymaking. Also, everyone builds infrastructure projects that may bankrupt them, partly due to an ingrained optimism bias in the infrastructure sector.

We’re in the worst developing country debt crisis in modern history, and countries are having a difficult time navigating a changing infrastructure lending landscape. China is now the largest bilateral lender, and its absence from international organizations like the Paris Club prevents the unified action needed to allow countries to emerge from debt crises. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is struggling to help them, as it is cautious about issuing aid to countries with murky BRI loans to pay back.

Funding for infrastructure development can be used as an incentive for democratization through conditionality on loans. However, many countries are turning away from traditional Western lending institutions in favor of alternative lenders with fewer conditions. How can we balance the importance of conditionality and incentivizing democratization while preventing the decreased reliance on Western institutions?

Conditionality can be positive in promoting democratization, but there have to be limits to it, especially because it becomes less effective when alternative lenders like China exist. Conditionality began as limited to policies that promote democratization, development, and liberalization but has metastasized to the point where lenders are pushing a wide range of policies on borrower countries. Many of these conditions, such as environmental or social protections, are good policies but can be viewed as a manifestation of Western imperialism within these countries. These programs also become futile when countries become simply incentivized to seek Chinese loans instead, which have virtually no conditionality.

Is the turn away from Western lending institutions an inevitable shift, or can policy changes encourage its prodominance again, if that’s something that we want?

Western institutions are better for infrastructure development, as organizations like the World Bank are the best at protecting human rights and preventing environmental disasters. There are also strategic and security reasons for promoting Western institutions — for example, we don’t want Chinese technology companies building telecommunications grids in other countries.

The bigger question is, what would a return to a Western-dominated model of investment look like? Pre-BRI, there was an open, liberal system of direct investment from private companies. BRI represented a pivot to more state-driven investment. Should the US shift to a similar model, or return to private direct investment fueling infrastructure development? The Biden administration’s alternative to BRI for state-driven investment was the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). Despite mutual investment in telecommunications and renewable energy, PGII focuses on developing very different sectors than BRI, building social impact projects like healthcare infrastructure.

What is the most exciting or impactful finding from your research, and why do you think it matters for democracy, development, or the rule of law?

I’m focusing on how liberal democracies can get building again, so I researched flaws in domestic infrastructure projects within the US. It revealed how the judicial system was an engine fueling how infrastructure projects are conducted; I realized the extent to which permitting regulation and environmental litigation had been driving my own incentives when I was a bureaucrat. Decisions are often made in response to case law and to ‘litigation-proof’ projects, which can incentivize inefficient and expensive project management. I believe democracies are perfectly capable of building infrastructure projects well, but problems in current building initiatives, from the California High-Speed Rail to our housing crisis, are rooted in the outsized effects of the threat of lawsuits.
 

How do you see your research influencing policy or contributing to real-world change?

I do research on practical public-private partnership policy in the United States, working with the Build America Center and the Department of Transportation to directly supply the government with research when needed.

There are policy changes that must occur to promote effective infrastructure development. The US will have to reform institutions that predated BRI to adapt to today’s post-BRI world. The three key institutions are the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). I hope that my ideas can influence their restructuring. For domestic development, I’m continuing my work with the Build America Center on how governments can more efficiently procure infrastructure projects and help public officials adopt best practices.

Lastly, what book would you recommend for students interested in a research career in your field?

The first book, which is extraordinarily boring but crucial to infrastructure development, is The Strategic Management of Large Engineering Projects: Shaping Institutions, Risks, and Governance. Written by Miller, Lessard, Michaud, and Floricel, it includes the perspectives of MIT engineers on infrastructure project case studies to understand why so many have failed. For some great history, the economist Raymond Vernon’s book Sovereignty at Bay develops the idea that relationships sour over international investment and that it’s not an effective diplomatic tool.

The second installment discusses the administration’s efforts to cut off funding to democracy-promoting organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, despite congressional approval, which violates the law and undermines democracy. Fukuyama and Diamond highlight how, historically, authoritarian regimes erode the rule of law while claiming democratic legitimacy. They warn that the U.S. is heading toward a constitutional crisis, as Trump's disregard for judicial authority could set a dangerous precedent. Finally, they urge vigilance and legal challenges to uphold liberal democratic principles and institutional checks and balances.

In January, Fukuyama and Diamond also shared their annual review of democracy around the world. Part I focuses on global democracy after the “year of elections,” while Part II examines the state of democracy in the U.S. Both videos can be viewed below.