Katie Kuruc
How can governments, businesses, and scientists reduce brick kiln pollution in South Asia – estimated to kill 5,000 children a year in Dhaka alone? How can the United States design a safe, scientifically sound, and cost-effective nuclear waste management system? How can global powers bolster European security in the face of Russian challenges to regional stability?
Stanford faculty ask questions of tremendous geopolitical and social import, and their research findings bear implications worldwide. Yet examining international policy while trying to improve it is a complex commitment, especially as faculty develop long-standing relationships with diverse policymakers and navigate opaque policy-making mechanisms.
While unique and substantial challenges characterize these remarkable projects, until recently, Stanford had little infrastructure to support them. To meet this need, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) founded the Stanford International Policy Implementation Lab in 2014. Through funding, the creation of a community of scholars, and dedicated space and staff, the Implementation Lab expands Stanford’s capacity to address vexing international issues by bridging research, student engagement and policy formulation and implementation.
Click here to access the Implementation Lab's original concept note, and here for an article about the Lab.
Impact Evaluations of Social Media Dissemination Activities by CDDRL and FSI (Marcel FafChamps)
Public Opinion, Ethics, and Nuclear Weapons Use (Scott Sagan)
Mapping Militant Organizations (Martha Crenshaw)
“Reset” of America’s Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy (Rod Ewing)
Leadership Academy for Development (Francis Fukuyama)
Institutional Foundation for Innovation-Based Economic Growth (Takeo Hoshi)
The Rwanda Legal Development Project (Erik Jensen)
Reducing Brick Kiln Pollution in Bangladesh (Stephen Luby)
Curbing Violence in Latin America (Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros)
Stanford India Health Policy Initiative (Grant Miller)
Improving Vision for China’s Poorest Children (Scott Rozelle)
Measuring Public Opinion on Nuclear Weapons and War (Scott Sagan)
Russia's Anti-Tobacco Campaign (Kathryn Stoner)
Developing Country Energy Market Design (Frank Wolak and Mark Thurber)
Populations in Crisis (Paul Wise, Tino Cuéllar)
The purpose of this research, funded by an IPIL grant, is to study the impact of dissemination activities pursued by CDDRL and FSI on the internet and social media. The focus is on people accessing content generated by CDDRL and FSI, and on people sharing content with others.
There are three reasons for studying the dissemination efforts of CDDRL and FSI. First, unlike many academic departments and institutes that mostly produce findings relevant only for a highly specialized audience, CDDRL and FSI are engaged in research activities that have an immediate bearing on policy. Hence they naturally produce messages and content that are potentially relevant for a broad audience, both within and outside academia. Second, we need to be able to experimentally vary the form, target audience, and content of messages in order to identify their causal effect on access and sharing. While we could in principle use messages specifically produced for this research as basis for our analysis, working directly with CDDRL and FSI maximizes the external validity of our findings: we are using the same kind of messages that academic departments and research institutes disseminate every day, hence our findings should have external validity. Finally, we are interested in generating scientific knowledge that can be used to circulate in-house policy-relevant messages widely and effectively – especially to ‘post-truth’ audiences.
Policymakers and researchers know little about the extent to which university students learn academic and higher order thinking skills and how skill gains compare across national systems of higher education. They also lack generalizable knowledge about which factors help students develop skills. The absence of evidence in these critical areas hinders efforts to improve the quality of higher education worldwide. As such, the goals of this project are to measure gains in these types of skills among nationally representative populations of university students in a number of countries, examine which factors (e.g. institutional, faculty, instruction, curriculum, peer behaviors) affect students' learning outcomes, and finally understand how and why learning outcomes differ for students of various social and economic backgrounds. The project is currently being carried out in China, India, Korea, Russia, and Japan with the support and collaboration of key government agencies and research institutes.
Many scholars and political figures argue that the decline in public support for the use of nuclear weapons since 1945 constitutes compelling evidence of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo” or that the principle of non-combatant immunity has become a deeply held norm. Surprisingly and disturbingly, however, we found that large segments of the U.S. public does not have a strong inhibition against using nuclear weapons and that the public’s understanding and acceptance of the principles of proportionality and non-combatant immunity is shallow. In real world conflicts with diverging practical and ethical considerations, how does the public view the use of nuclear weapons and how far would they go?
As part of a two-year project to measure public opinion on nuclear issues and to understand the social, political, and psychological sources of those opinions, FSI Senior Fellow Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino (Dartmouth College) will conduct survey experiments in the U.S., the U.K. and Israel, and explore factors that could reduce public willingness to support nuclear use and give confidence in nuclear deterrence and counter proliferation.
With support from FSI’s International Policy Implementation Lab, the project will engage with a wider set of policy makers, military officials, and the public in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and discuss the implications of the research findings and their potential impact on policies, postures and political rhetoric. Through policy outreach, new crisis scenarios and potential constraints on nuclear use can be identified. By engaging in the public debate about the future of nuclear weapons and their potential use, the project seeks to elevate attention given to ethics and law in future conflicts. The Lab also supports follow-on polling, based on the feedback and questions of policy makers and military officials, in order to increase the policy relevance of the research and to address the issues that are deemed most pressing and interesting to the policy making community.
New York Times published an article by Sagan and Valentino about U.S. public opinion on nuclear weapons use.
In many developing countries and some developed ones (like Japan), policymakers are considering implementing competitive electricity markets for the first time. A number of emerging economies—China notably among them—are planning to implement carbon markets. As illustrated by the California Electricity Crisis of the early 2000s, market design is a case of “what you don’t know will hurt you.” The prerequisites for smooth operation of energy and environmental markets are generally known, and yet they are often poorly understood by policymakers and regulators, who are at a significant resource disadvantage relative to market participants.
We have developed a game simulation of energy and environmental markets that has proven highly effective in teaching principles of sound market design. This project seeks to make our game simulation widely available and useful to policymakers and regulators as a web-based training tool. We will provide single-player and multi-player game scenarios on the web that are customizable for a country’s particular electricity grid configuration. We will also follow up with policymakers and regulators to ensure they are obtaining maximum value from the tool and incorporate their feedback. (Anyone may follow our efforts and access the tools we develop at http://energymarketgame.org.)
Resolving many modern cybersecurity incidents requires a diverse set of capabilities held by both state and non-state actors---what this project calls combined capabilities. Preliminary instances of the employment of combined capabilities have been identified, but these have historically emerged only for extreme cases, based on informal pre-existing relationships, where the magnitude of the incident demands both sets of capabilities. In day-to-day operations, state and non-state actors working in this space frequently misunderstand one another, and the deployment of combined capabilities all too often occurs on an infrequent and ad hoc basis. To understand effective strategies for reliably and consistently combining actors’ capabilities, this project convenes state and non-state actors engaged at the operational level of cybersecurity incident response.
This project’s immediate objective is to establish common ground through an ongoing dialogue around known successes and failures. Long term, this project will inform the development of practical models of combined capabilities that can (1) address the evolving sociotechnical character of incidents and (2) provide an evidence-based foundation for emerging cybersecurity policy. This project is not another exercise in developing consensus among policymakers or fostering “cyber norms” among states, but rather an effort to provide community validated inputs to policy actors on how to best foster such combined capabilities. Over a series of workshops, participants will reason about what constitutes success and failure, identify successes (and associated lessons) that are transferable to other instances of operational Internet security, and, perhaps most importantly, begin to identify the barriers to durable, robust combinations of state and non-state actors’ cybersecurity capabilities.
The “mapping” project identifies patterns in the evolution of militant organizations in specified conflict theatres and provides interactive visual representations of these relationships. Conflict landscapes that are mapped include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria/Maghreb, Colombia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Italy and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as Northern Ireland. It also maps the global Al Qaeda network. The maps are accessible on the project website mappingmilitants.stanford.edu.
The project, funded at the outset by the National Science Foundation through the Department of Defense Minerva Initiative (2009-2012), builds on the premise that relationships among militant organizations are critical to understanding the effectiveness of government policies and to the outcomes of conflicts. With support from the Lab, ‘Mapping Militants’ is bringing on additional student researchers, performing increased policy outreach, and updating its website to include more conflict areas and policy-relevant variables.
The U.S. nuclear waste management program is at a stalemate, with no clear way forward for the selection and development of a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) or high-level nuclear waste (HLW). SNF and HLW are now stranded at generator sites across the nation. Any new legislation should be informed by a thorough understanding of the history of the U.S. nuclear waste program, as well as the scientific, technical, social science and policy challenges required to “reset” the U.S. program. In order to inform the development of future nuclear waste management policies, the FSI Policy Implementation Lab supports a series of meetings on the core issues that should be addressed by scientists, engineers, social scientists, policy makers and the public. The first meeting took place in February 2015.
The Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) trains government officials and business leaders from developing countries to help the private sector be a constructive force for economic growth and development. Led by Professor Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, the Academy teaches carefully selected participants how to be effective reform leaders, promoting sound public policies in complex and contentious settings
LAD operates through partnerships with academic institutions in developing countries, which recruit students and share in the research and teaching of the program. So far, LAD programs have been run in Costa Rica, South Africa, Kenya, Burma, and Singapore. With support from the Policy Implementation Lab, the project hopes to expand its range of partner institutions around the world, as well as to make use of FSI to expand its curriculum, faculty, and teaching opportunities.
Innovation is essential for the growth of a matured economy. An important reason for the economic stagnation for Japan in the last two decades can be found in the failure to transform the economic system from one suited for catch-up growth to one that supports innovation based economic growth. The project aims to examine the institutional foundation to innovation based economic growth, to suggest policies to encourage innovation based growth in Japan, and to help implementing those. The project is carried out in close collaboration with the National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA), a major think tank in Japan that has close ties to the central government.
Rwanda presents a unique case study in the world today. After a period of massive upheaval in the 1990s, the country is undergoing rapid economic and social development. Under its current president, it has halved infant mortality, doubled life expectancy, and has scored a rare “hat trick” in development: sound rates of economic growth, poverty reduction, and reduction of income inequality.
Nonetheless, substantial challenges remain, particularly in implementing deeper institutional and systemic reforms that are critical to sustainable development. Legal development has not kept apace with Rwanda’s economic and political ambitions. Many colonial-era laws remain in force, creating legal uncertainties around critical issues like land rights and political process. Judges are inadequately trained, or were trained outside of Rwanda under different legal systems or in different languages. Complicating these challenges is Rwanda’s mandate to update and harmonize its legal system to facilitate integration into the East African Community, a process that will involve transitioning from a civil law tradition to common law.
The Rwanda Legal Development Project (RLDP), spearheaded by Erik Jensen, Senior Research Scholar at FSI, is a collaborative effort among FSI, Stanford Law School, and key Rwandan legal institutions. RLDP is committed to realizing three mutually reinforcing goals: first, to strengthen the connections between policy formulation and law-drafting and law-making; second, to ensure that laws are better researched, reasoned and written; and third, to build Rwandan capacity and habits that strengthen linkages between governmental and academic institutions in policymaking, law-drafting, and implementation.
Stephen Luby, a professor of medicine and senior fellow at FSI and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, aims to develop interventions to reduce the air pollution generated by brick kilns in Bangladesh and ultimately across South Asia.. Efforts to introduce modern brick kilns in Bangladesh that generate less pollution have failed to displace the dominant small producers, because the modern kilns require high capital investment, skilled labor, and produce bricks that cost 40 percent more than traditionally fired bricks.
With colleagues, Professor Luby is advancing three lines of technical research to develop interventions that have the potential to reset the equilibrium that would allow brick manufacturers to remain profitable, but would produce bricks with much reduced environmental and health consequences
Support from the Stanford International Policy Implementation Lab allows the project to engage students in this effort and advance the conversation regarding the development and testing of these innovations in Bangladesh with key stakeholders including the Bangladesh Brickmakers Association, and the Department of Environment of the Government of Bangladesh. These conversations are crucial to shape technical efforts so they are appropriate to the local environment and also to build the support for associated policy change required for successful deployment.
The Stanford International Policy Implementation Lab supports Beatriz Magaloni, political science professor and senior fellow at FSI, and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, senior fellow at FSI, in their effort to generate scientific knowledge that facilitates action to improve security. Their research has produced compelling empirical evidence that criminal violence has devastating economic consequences, that it reduces human capital formation, and that it disproportionately harms the poor. Magaloni and Diaz-Cayeros have partnered with local police, NGOs, schools, and government agencies in Mexico and Brazil to design and evaluate innovative solutions to improve policing and restrain their use of lethal force, generate opportunities for the youth at risk, and strengthen communities vs. organized mafia extortion and violence. See here for more.
The Stanford India Health Policy Initiative aims to identify institutional and behavioral obstacles that prevent health policies and programs from reaching their full potential. The initiative joins Stanford with Indian health policymakers and professionals, and creates a protected space to discuss common successes and failures in health delivery from which an India-led agenda investigating the social, behavioral, and institutional obstacles to health policy success is generated. Currently, Miller’s team is applying this approach to the question of why women in rural India are not giving birth in hospitals, despite the existence of government incentives for institutional deliveries.
Importantly, these projects create collaborative opportunities for students in India and the US to develop new skills and acquire new perspectives on the challenges of developing and deploying new health care delivery mechanisms. The initiative’s insights and relationships will also pave the way for larger, longer-term, extramurally funded research projects on the most pressing contemporary policy challenges for health care in India. The initiative ultimately aims to serve as a catalyst for advancing the health care sector in India, in times when reaching vulnerable and marginalized populations is increasingly prioritized.
The Implementation Lab funding will enhance ongoing policy engagement in India and the training of Stanford students, and will enable the initiative to engage a wider and more diverse community of India policymakers and health care practitioners than would otherwise be possible.
In October 2013, the Chinese State Council approved, in principle, a plan to improve vision care for impoverished, rural, elementary school and junior high school students as a way to enhance educational performance. The new policy initiative was based on three years of research conducted by Stanford’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP), headed by economist Scott Rozelle, the Helen S. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and guided by a policy brief REAP had produced.
But, in China’s decentralized system of government, policy change requires more than directives from above. REAP’s work in one province in China’s poor northwest region is moving vision care one step closer to becoming a reality in China’s schools. In March 2014, the Shaanxi Province Department of Education issued a new, more concrete policy directive on vision care in China's schools. Using a policy statement written by REAP, and based on REAP research in the province, the head of the Shaanxi Department of Education committed to making high-quality vision care a more integral part of every public school’s mandated activities. Step one in this effort is the provincial government’s decision to establish a state-of-the-art vision care model county in the province. The aim is to learn from the model county’s experiences and, if successful, roll out vision care to all 1,800,000 million rural students in the province as well as to all 30,000,000 students in rural China. Shaanxi Province has asked REAP to set up and run (jointly with the local county school district and eye care hospital) the vision care model county pilot, which will be officially launched in the 2014-2015 academic year. REAP will also evaluate the vision care model county pilot project.
The Stanford International Policy Implementation Lab funds enable REAP to continue to engage with policy makers in China and to build a set of activities— with aid from both REAP’s academic and implementation partners inside China and faculty and students from Stanford—that will convert REAP's evidence based, policy research into policy action. Hence, the funds not only support change in the field that will potentially affect the lives of millions of children in China’s poor western province, but also facilitate learning and research opportunities for students and faculty from Stanford and Stanford’s partners in China.
FSI Senior Fellow Scott Sagan, in collaboration with Benjamin Valentino (a former visiting scholar at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and now an associate professor of political science at Dartmouth), is leading an international project entitled "Atomic Aversion-- Public Opinion, Nuclear Weapons, and Just War Doctrine." The project first identifies specific scenarios in which, according to Washington and New Delhi nuclear doctrine statements, the U.S. and Indian military have contingency plans to use nuclear weapons. The authors then use public opinion survey experiments to assess the degree to which just war doctrine principles of non-combatant immunity and proportionality influence public attitudes toward potential uses of nuclear weapons.
Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, uses the FSI funds both to involve Stanford students in the project, as they will help run trial opinion surveys, and to brief the findings of the study at think tanks, universities, and government agencies in Washington, D.C. and in New Delhi, India. Sagan and Valentino hope that the briefings will encourage officials in both governments to address just war doctrine principles more thoroughly and consistently in policy statements and nuclear doctrine in the future.
Two premises motivate the “Immigration and Integration” project, which received seed money from the FSI Policy Implementation Lab. First, there is compelling evidence of systematic discrimination, integration failure, and growing hostility towards immigrants throughout Western Europe. Second, while there is a range of innovative policies developed across Europe in the past decade to address this compelling public concern, existing research falls short in providing rigorous evidence on the success or failure of these policies. The goal of the laboratory is to mobilize research teams in Europe and the US that involve students as well as faculty, to provide the best evaluations possible on policies seeking to address a compelling public concern.
This project is a study of a key, preventable public health emergency in Russia: smoking. Russia has hovered at negative population growth over the last decade, only recently crossing into positive territory. The working age population of Russia is decreasing rapidly, and this will have long term effects on labor productivity and ultimately rates of sustainable economic growth. Russian health problems are not just related to heavy “hard” alcohol consumption, but also extraordinarily heavy tobacco usage. The Russian state is highly motivated to cut tobacco consumption through this complex program of regulations and laws governing both supply and demand of tobacco. We have a unique opportunity now to study the initiation and continued progress of the policy. In doing so, I hope to get a glimpse into Russian state capacity. Russia has the second highest per capita consumption of cigarettes in the world (second by a hair to Greece). Russia’s anti-tobacco laws and regulations were introduced in two phases over the last year. Although the policy is late in coming relative to other European countries in both the east and west, Russia's tobacco policies are distinct comparatively for their breadth and ambition. Although many other countries have introduced anti-tobacco interventions, few have attempted to do so much and so quickly. As a result, the anti-tobacco “campaign” represents a unique opportunity to evaluate the extent to which the Russian state can address a policy problem about which its leadership cares a great deal. We know the Russian state under Vladimir Putin has a strong repressive capacity over society, but we know relatively little about its administrative capacity. This study hopes to fill that gap.
A number of developing countries are seeking to improve the functioning of their markets and institutions to deliver more energy, more reliably, at lower cost, and with fewer environmental impacts. Ghana, for example, hopes to implement a wholesale power market that would help incentivize construction of new generation capacity. Mexico is in the middle of massive energy reform on multiple fronts, with both petroleum and electricity sectors being opened to private participation and even some movement in the direction of a carbon market. However, there are significant pitfalls for countries that seek to upgrade their energy and environmental markets and institutions. Reforms based on hollow emulation of “best practices” of perceived industry leaders can produce disastrous results.
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) and Policy Implementation Lab at FSI are collaborating to help developing country policymakers learn how to improve their energy and environmental markets, taking into account the political economy and institutional obstacles they face. The project has two main components. First, we are refining a game-based market simulation tool originally developed at PESD so that it can be used to help policymakers and regulators understand the implications of different market rules. A key part of these improvements will be to expand access to the game by making it remotely playable without intervention by Stanford researchers. Second, we are finding and engaging policymakers around the world who are seeking to learn from the best academic research on market design in electricity, oil and gas, and environmental markets. Our first activity in this area was an intensive three-day workshop on electricity market design for energy officials from Ghana that took place at Stanford in spring of 2014. The workshop proved the educational value of interspersing lectures on electricity market design with simulation games demonstrating key concepts from the lectures. We plan to set up a number of other such workshops at Stanford as well as possibly in countries of interest.
Professor Cuéllar became a California Supreme Court justice in January 2015, but aspects of his project continue under the leadership of Stanford Professor Ran Abramitzky. Professor Wise’s initiative remains active.
People in crisis – living in a war zone, a barely functioning nation, or a refugee camp – face daunting obstacles to having their basic human needs met. The world community tries to address many humanitarian crises, but chronic political instability, pervasive poverty, and enduring violence present formidable barriers to providing better services to those most in need. A second set of challenges arises from bureaucratic hurdles, insufficient funding, and inadequate infrastructure.
Professor Paul Wise (Medicine and FSI), approaches these problems through research, long-term engagement with external partners, and student involvement.
Wise leads the “Global Health and Governance” initiative. A large percentage of preventable deaths in the world occur in areas of conflict and political instability, including almost half of all preventable child deaths. Integrating expertise on governance, delivery of medical care, and global economic development, Wise’s initiative develops new strategies to provide critical health services in areas plagued by violent conflict or poor governance. Wise and his colleagues – both fellow faculty members and undergraduate and graduate students – draw on his years of experience leading a child health and nutrition program in Guatemala. The project provides direct, clinical care to poor, indigenous communities while creating new, evidence-based innovations in health service delivery that can be adopted in other low-income settings. The prevalence of life-threatening malnutrition in the participating Guatemalan communities has been cut in half since the program was fully implemented in 2009. On-the-ground activities in Guatemala inform the broader effort to provide public goods in areas of weak governance or armed conflict worldwide.
From 2012-2014, Cuéllar headed Stanford’s “Rethinking Refugee Communities” project, focused on how humanitarian innovation is spurred in large, complex organizations like UNHCR, and how humanitarian innovation can be encouraged or stifled. Currently, most refugees in camps have little or no means of earning a livelihood. Villages near refugee camps often are impoverished, with too few opportunities for their own residents. Working with Ennead Architects of New York and other partners, Stanford supported the development of camp design features (such as a shared marketplace) to foster mutually beneficial economic interactions between refugees and surrounding communities. The project generated a new Stanford class on refugees, teaching on refugee issues in the School of Earth Sciences, and the creation of three Stanford student fellowships at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The American Institute of Architects (New York) honored the Ennead project with an award in 2015. Under the leadership of Professor Ran Abramitzky, Stanford continues its robust relationship with UNHCR and research on refugees.