Stanford University

Policy Analysis

Bottom-up Entrepreneurship for Democracy and Development

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Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship in developing countries. In the 1990s, Quadir founded GrameenPhone, which provides effective telephone access throughout Bangladesh.

Quadir is an accomplished entrepreneur who writes about the critical roles of entrepreneurship and innovations in improving the economic and political conditions in low-income countries. Quadir is often credited as having been the earliest observer of the potential for mobile phones to transform low-income countries. His work has been recognized by leaders and organizations worldwide, as a new and successful approach to sustainable poverty alleviation.

For four years, Quadir taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the impact of technologies in the politics and economics of developing countries. In 2005, he moved to MIT. His particular research interest is in the democratizing effects of technologies in developing countries.

Earlier in his career, Quadir served as a vice president of Atrium Capital Corp., an associate of Security Pacific Merchant Bank, both in New York, and a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC. He received an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.

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Iqbal Quadir Founder and Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship Speaker MIT
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PESD releases new working paper on a climate change policy framework for India

Authors
Varun Rai
David G. Victor
News Type
News
Date
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India has been famous for arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change. The West caused the problem and it should clean it up. That argument is increasingly untenable-both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, which is a problem that is impossible to solve without developing country participation, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. India's own public is also demanding more.

The Indian government has outlined a broad plan for what could be done, but the plan still lacks a strategy to inform which efforts offer the most leverage on warming emissions and which are most credible because they align with India's own interests. This paper offers a framework for that strategy. It suggests that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India's own self-interest, and with three case studies it suggests that leverage on emissions could amount to several hundred million tonnes of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030. (For comparison, the Kyoto Protocol has caused worldwide emission reductions of, at most, a couple hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.) We suggest in addition to identifying self-interest, which is the key concept in the burgeoning literature on "co-benefits" of climate change policy, that it is also important to examine where India and outsiders (e.g., technology providers and donors) have leverage.

One reason that strategies offered to date have remained abstract and difficult to implement is that they are not rooted in a clear understanding of where the Government of India is able to deliver on its promises (and where Indian firms have access to the needed technology and practices). Many ideas are interesting in theory but do not align with the administrative and technological capabilities of the Indian context. As the rest of the world contemplates how to engage with India on the task of controlling emissions it must craft deals that reflect India's interests, capabilities and leverage on emissions. These deals will not be simple to craft, but there are many precedents for such arrangements in other areas of international cooperation, such as in accession agreements to the WTO.

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Leadership in Transition: Heterodox Pathways to Good Governance in Post-Suharto Indonesia

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What makes some governments perform better than others? With rising levels of decentralization and local democracy, the focus of "good governance" is increasingly shifting from national to subnational levels. While much of the existing development literature remains preoccupied with formal institutional and society-centered explanations, there is growing evidence that local policy reforms are strongly affected by informal norms and elite-centered processes.

Post-Suharto Indonesia, a country with one of the most pronounced shifts to democratic decentralization anywhere in recent history, is a case in point. Drawing on empirical comparisons across ten districts (comprising 1000 business surveys and 150 interviews), Dr. von Luebke argues that societal pressures are often less significant in explaining policy differences than the quality of local government leadership. In the early transition to democracy, local firms, associations, and district councils continue to be constrained by collective action and political incentive problems. Local government leaders, on the other hand, have wielded historically strong formal and informal powers and stand, for better or worse, at the gateway to local policy reform. Motivated by direct elections and prospective donor funding, some district heads have become catalysts for better governance by introducing informal public-private dialogues, innovative monitoring instruments, and meritocratic promotion schemes. In response to current development debates, these findings highlight the importance of government leadership as an often underestimated policy determinant that can compensate for weak societal checks in periods of transition from authoritarian rule.

Christian von Luebke is completing a book manuscript titled “Heterodox Governance: The Political Economy of Local Policy Reform in Post-Suharto Indonesia.”  He has been awarded a 2009-2011 German Science Foundation Fellowship for a follow-up project incorporating cases from the rest of Southeast Asia and China.  In 2001-2006 he worked in rural Indonesia as a technical advisor for the World Bank and the German Development Agency. He holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University.

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Christian von Luebke

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 726-0685 (650) 723-6530
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Visiting Scholar, 2009-12
CvL_APARC_Photo_-_Oct_2010_2.jpg MA, PhD

Christian von Luebke is a political economist with particular interest in democracy, governance, and development in Southeast Asia. He is currently working on a research project that gauges institutional and structural effects on political agency in post-Suharto Indonesia and the post-Marcos Philippines. During his German Research Foundation fellowship at Stanford he seeks to finalize a book manuscript on Indonesian governance and democracy and teach a course on contemporary Southeast Asian politics.

Before coming to Stanford, Dr. von Luebke was a research fellow at the Center of Global Political Economy at Waseda (Tokyo), the Institute for Developing Economies (Chiba), and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Jakarta). He received a JSPS postdoctoral scholarship from the Japan Science Council and a PhD scholarship from the Australian National University.

Between 2001 and 2006, he worked as technical advisor in various parts of rural Indonesia - for both GTZ and the World Bank. In 2007, he joined an international research team at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) analyzing the effects of public-private action on investment and growth.

Dr. von Luebke completed his Ph.D. in 2008 in Political Science at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, the Australian National University. He also holds a Masters in Economics and a B.A. in Business and Political Science from Muenster University.

His research on contemporary Indonesian politics, democratic governance, rural investment, and leadership has been published in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asian Affairs, Asian Economic Journal, and ISEAS. He regularly contributes political analyses on Southeast Asia to Oxford Analytica.

Christian von Luebke 2008-2009 Shorenstein Fellow Speaker Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Bonnie Nixon Director of Environmental Sustainability at HP, and member of the GSCP Executive Board Speaker Hewlett Packard
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NATO expert Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall named to national security posts

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News Type
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Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a senior research scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has been named special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council.

Prior to her appointment, Sherwood-Randall served as a founding senior adviser to the Preventive Defense Project (PDP), a Stanford-Harvard initiative that focuses on security problems and threats. She also was an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"We are delighted that President Obama has asked Liz to advise him on European issues critical to our mutual political, military, and economic security, particularly during these challenging economic times," said Coit D. Blacker, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies.

"Liz brings a wealth of experience and knowledge that will help strengthen effective, constructive relationships between this country and our friends and allies in Europe."
- Coit Blacker

This is the second time Sherwood-Randall has served in the executive branch. From 1994 to 1996 during the first Clinton administration, she was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. In this role, she developed and implemented regional security policy toward the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and also established defense and military relationships. Sherwood-Randall was instrumental in extending NATO's Partnership for Peace program across Eurasia and in building the foundation for cooperation between Russia and NATO in the joint peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. For her work at the Pentagon, she was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal by then-Secretary of Defense William Perry, who now co-directs the PDP at Stanford.

"I am delighted that Liz has been selected for this important job," Perry said. "Her achievements during her tenure at the Pentagon while I was secretary of defense were significant and far-reaching.  I expect in her new role at the National Security Council she will make equally powerful contributions."

From 2007 to 2008, Sherwood-Randall was a member of the Review Panel on Future Directions for Defense Threat Reduction Agency Missions and Capabilities to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction. In 2008, she served on the National Security Strategy and Policies Expert Working Group that advised the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, which Perry also leads.

Prior to her service in the Department of Defense, Sherwood-Randall was co-founder and associate director of Harvard's Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project. She also has served as chief foreign affairs and defense policy adviser to then Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and as a guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. 

Sherwood-Randall earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar in 1981.

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Climate Change and the Energy Challenge: A Pragmatic Approach for India (Working Paper)

Paragraphs

India has been famous for arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change.  The west caused the problem and it should clean it up.  That argument is increasingly untenable-both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, which is a problem that is impossible to solve without developing country participation, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. India's own public is also demanding more. 

The Indian government has outlined a broad plan for what could be done, but the plan still lacks a strategy to inform which efforts offer the most leverage on warming emissions and which are most credible because they align with India's own interests.  This paper offers a framework for that strategy.  It suggests that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India's own self-interest, and with three case studies it suggests that leverage on emissions could amount to several hundred million tonnes of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030.  (For comparison, the Kyoto Protocol has caused worldwide emission reductions of, at most, a couple hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.)  We suggest in addition to identifying self-interest, which is the key concept in the burgeoning literature on "co-benefits" of climate change policy, that it is also important to examine where India and outsiders (e.g., technology providers and donors) have leverage. 

One reason that strategies offered to date have remained abstract and difficult to implement is that they are not rooted in a clear understanding of where the Government of India is able to deliver on its promises (and where Indian firms have access to the needed technology and practices).  Many ideas are interesting in theory but do not align with the administrative and technological capabilities of the Indian context.  As the rest of the world contemplates how to engage with India on the task of controlling emissions it must craft deals that reflect India's interests, capabilities and leverage on emissions.  These deals will not be simple to craft, but there are many precedents for such arrangements in other areas of international cooperation, such as in accession agreements to the WTO.

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Publication Type
Working Papers
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, Working Paper #83
Authors
Varun Rai
David G. Victor
External URL

Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats

Paragraphs

The post-World War II fabric of global security, designed and maintained by the United States, has dangerously frayed. Built for a different age, current international institutions are ill-equipped to address today's most pressing global security challenges, ranging from climate change and nuclear proliferation to civil strife and terrorism.

Revitalizing the institutions of cooperation will require a new conceptual foundation for global security. The "national sovereignty" of the twentieth century must give way to "responsible sovereignty"-a principle requiring nations not only to protect their own people, but also to cooperate across borders to safeguard common resources and tackle common threats. Achieving this will require American leadership and commitment to a rule-based international order.

In Power and Responsibility Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen Stedman provide the conceptual underpinnings for a new approach to sovereignty and cooperation. They present ideas for the new U.S. administration, working with other global powers, to promote together what they cannot produce apart-peace and stability. Recommendations follow more than a year of consultations with policymakers and experts all over the world. They reflect the guidance of the Managing Global Insecurity Project Advisory Group, composed of prominent figures from the United States and abroad. They call for the new president and key partners to launch a 2009 campaign to revitalize international cooperation and rejuvenate international institutions.

As Washington prepares for a presidential transition, the time has arrived for a serious rethinking of American policy. For the United States, this is no time to go it alone.

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Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Brookings Institution Press
Authors
Stephen J. Stedman
Number
978-0-8157-4706-2

Supply Chain of the Future

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This daylong discussion, attended by roughly 40 scholars and practitioners from universities, labor organizations, corporations and NGOs, focused on how companies can move beyond monitoring and compliance to build socially and environmentally responsible supply chains.

At two workshops in 2008, the group discussed a few key strategies, leading Josh Cohen and Rick Locke to seek funding for a new research center. These included:

  1. Scaling up codes of conduct
  2. Reinvigorating national regulation
  3. Combining labor standards and trade rules

The event on January 29th covered the following topics, summarized below:

Panel 1.   Recent research on ethical consumption

  • Michael Hiscox, Jens Hainmueller, Sandra Sequeira (Harvard)
  • Margeret Levi (University of Washington)
  • Yotam Margalit (Stanford University)
  • Dara O’Rourke (GoodGuide, UC Berkeley)

Selected findings:

  • The Average “Fair Trade” effect is 9%, based on a coffee experiment with Whole  Foods
  • Consumers are willing to pay some premium for social labels (7.3-13.1%)
  • Berkeley: Personal health and wellness and the environment outrank labor concerns for consumers of products listed on GoodGuide.com

Panel  2.   Best practices in the environmental area that might be carried over to labor/trade

  • Edgar Blanco (MIT)
  • Bonnie Nixon (HP)
  • Erica Plambeck (Stanford)
  • Charles Sabel (Columbia)

Selected discussion points:

  •  Compliance-based regulation no longer works; there are new roles for NGOs, government, and public-private partnerships in creating incentives for suppliers
  • Suppliers care most about volume and length of contracts; since not everyone is Wal-Mart, buyers may need to come together to encourage ethical behavior

Panel 3.   New regulatory strategies in labor markets in emerging economies

  • Salo Vinocur Coslovsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan
  • Andrew Schrank, University of New Mexico
  • Rick Locke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Selected discussion points:

  • Evidence from Brazil shows that law enforcement operates in parallel with private auditors in monitoring suppliers, becoming “shock troops of sustainable development”; some issues require state regulation
  • There may be trade-offs between bureaucratic efficiency and equity in a compliance system, as in the Dominican Republic
  • In some cases, the state’s role is to delegate work so private sector can police more effectively

Panel 4.   Looking Forward

  • Caitlin Morris (Nike)
  • Marcela Manubens (Phillips-Van Heusen)

Selected discussion points:

  • Key issue is how to tie labor and environmental agenda together; for some companies, environmentalism is self-interest—materials like bamboo often resonate with designers. But who makes the bamboo shirt is less of an issue. One option is to derive cost savings from environmental policies and direct that money to programs for workers.
  • Big question: in an entry-level sector, how far across the spectrum from minimum or entry-level to living wage do we go? How do we measure progress? Is it a 3% increase in labor value /product each year?
  • Another issue in need of further exploration: where upgrading doesn’t reach lower down in the supply chain. There’s got to be a virtuous circle where technical upgrading and labor issues can be joined
  • Environmental issues have won the battle because regulatory environment incents companies to care about it, and consumers care, too—it’s become hip. Maybe what’s needed is to institutionalize the “triple bottom line” approach to business such that companies with good labor policies get tax breaks.

» Notes and Presentations (password protected)

Co-sponsored with the Global Supply Chain Management Forum

Panel Discussions

Evaluating International Influences on Democratic Transitions: A Cross-National, Longitudinal Approach

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Before coming to CDDRL, Miriam Abu Sharkh was employed at the United Nation's specialized agency for work, the International Labour Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. As the People's Security Coordinator (P4), she analyzed and managed large household surveys from Argentina to Sri Lanka. She also worked on the Report on the World Social Situation for the United Nation's Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. Previously, she had also been a consultant for the German national development agency (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Germany where she focused on integrating core labor standards into German technical cooperation.

She has written on the spread and effect of human rights related labour standards as well as on welfare regimes, gender discrimination, child labour, social movements and work satisfaction.

Currently, she holds a grant by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to study the evolvement of worldwide patterns of gender discrimination in the labor market, specifically the effects of international treaties. These questions are addressed in longitudinal, cross-national studies from the 1950´s to today.

This research builds on her previous work as a Post-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL as well as her dissertation on child labor for which she received a "Summa cum Laude" ( Freie Universität Berlin, Germany-joint dissertation committee with Stanford University). After discussing various labor standard initiatives, the dissertation analyzes when and why countries ratify the International Labour Organization's Minimum Age Convention outlawing child labour via event history models. It then examines the effect of ratification on child labor rates over three decades through a panel analyses. While her dissertation employed quantitative methods, her Diplom thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) builds on extensive fieldwork in South Africa examining the genesis, strategies, and structures of the South African women's movement.

She has traveled extensity, both professionally and privately, loves to dive and sail and speaks German, Spanish and French as well as rudimentary Arabic.

Her current research interests include labor related international human rights, especially child labour and (non-)discrimination, social movements and work satisfaction.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Miriam Abu Sharkh

John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Visiting Scholar 2007-2010
Miriam_web.jpg PhD

Before coming to CDDRL, Miriam Abu Sharkh was employed at the United Nation's specialized agency for work, the International Labour Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. As the People's Security Coordinator (P4), she analyzed and managed large household surveys from Argentina to Sri Lanka. She also worked on the Report on the World Social Situation for the United Nation's Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. Previously, she had also been a consultant for the German national development agency (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Germany where she focused on integrating core labor standards into German technical cooperation.

She has written on the spread and effect of human rights related labour standards as well as on welfare regimes, gender discrimination, child labour, social movements and work satisfaction.

Currently, she holds a grant by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to study the evolvement of worldwide patterns of gender discrimination in the labor market, specifically the effects of international treaties. These questions are addressed in longitudinal, cross-national studies from the 1950´s to today.

This research builds on her previous work as a Post-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL as well as her dissertation on child labor for which she received a "Summa cum Laude" ( Freie Universität Berlin, Germany-joint dissertation committee with Stanford University). After discussing various labor standard initiatives, the dissertation analyzes when and why countries ratify the International Labour Organization's Minimum Age Convention outlawing child labour via event history models. It then examines the effect of ratification on child labor rates over three decades through a panel analyses. While her dissertation employed quantitative methods, her Diplom thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) builds on extensive fieldwork in South Africa examining the genesis, strategies, and structures of the South African women's movement.

She has traveled extensity, both professionally and privately, loves to dive and sail and speaks German, Spanish and French as well as rudimentary Arabic.

Her current research interests include labor related international human rights, especially child labour and (non-)discrimination, social movements and work satisfaction.

Miriam Abu Sharkh Visiting Scholar Speaker CDDRL
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