Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:30am - 8:30am (Jakarta time)

Dr. Alatas will discuss her research on promoting vaccination in Indonesia and the impact of the pandemic on Indonesia’s society and economy more generally, including on poverty, human capital, and development.

Vivi Alatas is an  economist with passion for evidence-based solutions.  She is CEO of Asakreativita, a consulting and Edtech company that she established in 2020. Formerly she was a Lead Economist of the World Bank, where she led a team of seasoned local and international economists in producing several flagship reports for national and global audiences, including ‘Targeting Poor and Vulnerable Households in Indonesia’, ‘Making Poverty Work in Indonesia’ , ‘Indonesia’s Rising Divide’, ‘Indonesia Jobs Report’ and “Aspiring Indonesia – Expanding the Middle Class”. She has presented various of these research findings to the President, Vice President, Ministers and Deputy Ministers. She also has written several journal articles on poverty, inequality and labour issues. Some of the papers were written in collaboration with Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton (who was also her advisor at Princeton).

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us at the weekly Cyber Policy Center (CPC) seminar on Tue, October 12th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Soojong Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet. This session will be moderated by Co-Director of the CPC, Nate Persily. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

There has been growing concern about online misinformation and falsehood. It has been suspected that the proliferation of misleading narratives is especially severe on Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, but there has been a lack of large-scale systematic investigations on these issues. This talk will introduce a series of ongoing research projects investigating online groups promoting misleading narratives on Facebook, including anti-vaccine groups, climate change denialists, countermovements against racial justice movements, and conspiracy theorists. The presentation will discuss the prevalence, characteristics, ecosystem of misleading narratives on Facebook, and implications for potential interventions.

Speaker Profile:

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around digital media, social networks, and information propagation. As a former computer scientist, he is also interested in developing and applying computational methods, including online experiments, large-scale data analysis, and computational modeling.

 

The Taliban’s shock takeover of Kabul in August 2021 has implications for South Asia far beyond Afghanistan’s borders. The Taliban does not have transnational political ambitions, but it is closely tied to the Pakistan security establishment, and its victory will resonate among other networks of terrorists. This webinar will explore the regional geopolitical consequences of the Taliban takeover. It will examine the Taliban victory’s impact on Pakistan’s regional strategy, on security in disputed Kashmir, on the role of China in the region, and on the trajectory of Islamist groups across the region.

Javid Ahmad is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and was, until recently, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UAE. He was previously a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point and worked with U.S. defense contractors, where he provided counterterrorism/economic analysis to U.S. government and business clients on South Asia/Central Asia. He has worked for the Pentagon’s AfPak Hands, the German Marshall Fund in Washington, and NATO in Brussels. He has written for Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Hill, and CNN. He studied at Beloit College and Yale University.

C. Christine Fair is a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her most recent book is In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (OUP, 2019).  She has authored or co-edited several books, inter alia: Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (OUP, 2014); Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges (UPenn, 2015), Policing Insurgencies (OUP, 2014); Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010); Treading on Hallowed Ground: (OUP, 2008); The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States (GlobePequot, 2008).  She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilization. She causes trouble in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

Avinash Paliwal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute. He specialises in South Asian strategic affairs. He is author of the much-acclaimed book My Enemy’s Enemy - India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (2017), and is currently authoring a strategic history of India's near east. Avinash holds an MA and PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, and a BA (Hons) in Economics from the University of Delhi.

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included an operational deployment to Afghanistan. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

North Carolina time: 19 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30 pm; Singapore time: 20 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30am

Viewed alongside other world regions, Southeast Asia is uniquely vulnerable to major damage by global warming. Its coastlines are lengthy and subject to searise. Its urban centers of economic and political gravity are mainly riverine or deltaic. Its agriculture requires optimal levels and rhythms of waterflow, as do its polluted main veins, the Mekong and the Irrawaddy.  In already tropical conditions, heatwaves are especially enervating.  Nor has the region escaped extreme weather events.  The ten most afflicted countries worldwide in that regard include Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.  With this background in mind, Angel Hsu and Melissa Low, two scholars with deep regional and policy knowledge will consider questions such as:  What has been and is being done, by whom, and with what chances of success?  Can currently worsening trends be reversed?  Mitigated?  Or is adaptation the sole plausible recourse?  Who will represent the interests of the unborn generations who will suffer the long-term consequences of present-day indifference and delay?  Will effective policy require authoritarian politics?  Given that the largest current and historical emitters of greenhouse gases are, respectively, China and the US, what roles should and will they play?  And how, if at all, will global versions of these questions be addressed and answered in November in Glasgow at COP26?

Angel Hsu founded and heads the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues.  Her research into the causes and consequences of climate change explores the interfacing of science and policy.  Her many publications include coverage of Malaysia, Viet Nam, and especially China.  In February 2021 she spoke on global climate trends before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, having addressed US-China climate relations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.  Illustrating Prof. Hsu’s commitment to public outreach was her selection as a TED 2018 Age of Amazement Speaker and earlier as an inaugural member of the Grist 50, an annual list of “emerging leaders” working on “fresh, real-world solutions” to the world’s “biggest challenges,” global warming included.  She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy from Yale University.

Melissa Low has published, presented, and advised on climate change in multiple forums.  She is currently researching the relative transparency of climate action and reporting in Southeast Asia.  She provides policy analyses and conducts workshops to improve understanding of the Paris Agreement and track whether countries are keeping their promises.  For that work, in 2021, she received Singapore’s EcoFriend Award and its Public Service Medal.  Having taken part in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties for many years, she is now on the steering committee that coordinates NGOs under the UNFCCC. She holds a University of Strathclyde LLM (with distinction) in Climate Change Law and Policy and an MSc in Environmental Management at the National University of Singapore, where is pursuing a PhD in geography.  Her master’s thesis on the run-up to the Paris Agreement won NUS’s Shell Best Dissertation Award.

This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Professor Mobarak will discuss his research on COVID-19 response in Bangladesh and beyond, including masking, vaccine equity, and appropriate pandemic response policies in low and middle income countries.

He will provide an overview of the coauthored MaskNorm study, a randomized-trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 that demonstrates a scalable and effective method to promote mask adoption and reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. He will also discuss efficient last-mile vaccine delivery in low-income countries and related research on the lower epidemiological and welfare value of social distancing in lower-income countries.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics.

Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE.

Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Malawi and Sierra Leone. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. For example, he is scaling and testing strategies to address seasonal poverty using migration subsidies or consumption loans in Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Mobarak is collaborating with the government of Bangladesh, NGOs and think-tanks such as BRAC and BIGD, the major Bangladeshi telecom providers, Innovations for Poverty Action, UNDP, other economists, epidemiologists, computer scientists, and public health researchers to devise evidence-based COVID response strategies for Bangladesh and for other developing countries. The approach and results have been covered by BBC, Foreign Policy, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and media in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, among others.  The work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Givewell.org, the Global Innovation Fund, and Yale Macmillan Center.

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November 9, 4-5 p.m. California time/ November 10, 9-10 a.m. Japan time
(Note:  Daylight Saving Time in California ends November 7)

In April 2021, then Prime Minister Suga announced to the world that Japan will strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, seemingly setting the country on a path toward accelerated energy transition primarily by renewables. Under Prime Minister Kishida, Japan’s commitment may be on a more shaky ground, as demands for steady energy supply by old industries gained more traction and calls for restarting nuclear power plants are becoming louder. In this new political environment, in which Japan’s energy policy seems to be in flux, what is the future of renewables, nuclear energy, and fossil fuels, and what is the best energy mix for Japan considering its unique geopolitical position?

Panelists 

Phillip Lipscy is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, the Chair in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  His research addresses substantive topics such as international cooperation, international organizations, the politics of energy and climate change, international relations of East Asia, and the politics of financial crises.  He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy.  Lipscy's book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations.  Before arriving to the University of Toronto, Lipscy was assistant professor of political science and Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.  Lipscy obtained his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University and received his M.A. in international policy studies and B.A. in economics and political science at Stanford University. 

 

Mika Ohbayashi is the Director at Renewable Energy Institute since its foundation in August 2011.  Before joining the Institute, she worked in Abu Dhabi for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) as Policy and Project Regional Manager for Asia Oceania. She is one of two founders of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) and served as Deputy Director for 8 years following its establishment in 2000. She also worked as Advisor for Climate Change Projects and Policies for UKFCO at the British Embassy to Japan. She started her career in the energy field by joining Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in 1992.  She was awarded the Global Leadership Award in Advancing Solar Energy Policy by the International Sola Energy Society (ISES) in 2017. 

 

Moderator

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2021). 

 

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.