Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

Access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments is a nagging problem for millions of Latin Americans. In several countries of the region, judicial actions for the protection of basic rights have proved to be instrumental for gaining access to such goods. Brazil and Colombia are, allegedly, the two Latin American countries with the largest number of right to health cases. Everaldo Lamprea suggests that dismantling right to health litigation in order to reduce public costs--as was recently proposed by the Colombian government-- would be a catastrophic event for many Colombians, trapped in a heavily privatized and deregulated health system where many life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are out of the reach of most pockets. Lamprea will suggest that a more reasonable governmental reaction should include an analysis of the role played in the current health-sector crisis by global actors such as International Financial Institutions and BigPharma companies

On November 5-6  2010, the global Network of Democracy Research Institutes (NDRI) convened a conference in Quito, Ecuador, on "Political Clientalism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America, Lessons from Other Regions." The meeting was cosponsored by three NDRI member institutes: the Washington-based International Forum for Democratic Studies (IFDS) of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Ecuador's Grupo FARO, and the Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

The conference aimed to explore, in comparative framework, the modus operandi of political clientalism in the realm of social policies as well as the strategies that might be employed to combat it. The conference brought together 21 scholars and practitioners from around the world, including several from South America, particularly the Andean region. Participants from CDDRL included; Larry Diamond, Beatriz Magaloni, Francis Fukuyama, and Simeon Nichter.

Please see the attached conference report, which summarizes the main issues and key findings discussed at the meeting. The papers presented at the conference will be compiled into a volume edited by Diego Abente, deputy director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at NED.

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that undergraduate senior honors student, Anna Barrett Schickele, received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This university award is given to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering.

Schickele's thesis entitled, "One Drop At A Time," examines the factors that inform farmers' decisions to use modern irrigation systems in the Lurín Valley of Peru, where she spent several months conducting fieldwork with a Lima-based NGO. Schickele — a public policy major —was able to collect primary data through interviews with farmers and fieldworkers to inform her research study that includes policy recommendations to the NGO community and government officials.

Anna Schickele (center) with Francis Fukuyama (left) and Larry Diamond (right).

Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, served as Schickele's thesis advisor together with Rosamond L. Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at FSI.

"Ana's thesis is an important contribution to our understanding of the barriers and openings for stimulating agricultural development among subsistence farmers," said Carnoy. "Her original insights make the thesis particularly valuable for those addressing development issues in the world’s poorest regions."

In August, Schickele will begin a research position at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CDDRL's best thesis award was given to Kabir Sawhney, a management science and engineering major, who wrote his thesis on the effect of regime type and the propensity to default on sovereign debt. Advised by Professor of Political Science Gary Cox, Swahney cited the cases of Romania in the 1980s and more recently of Greece to conclude that the quality of government — rather than regime type alone — determines whether a country chooses to default. 

After graduation. Sawhney will join the consulting firm Accenture as an analyst in their San Francisco office.  

Three honors students' received fellowships from Stanford's Haas Center of Public Service to pursue public service-related work after graduation. Keith Calix and Imani Franklin both received the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy and will be working in New York for grant-making foundations, and Lina Hidalgo received the Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship to work with an international organization.     

The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program is an interdisciplinary honors program led by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. The program recruits a diverse group of talented students interested in writing original theses on topics impacting the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law. During the year-long program, students write their thesis in consultation with a CDDRL faculty member, participate in research workshops, and travel to Washington, D.C. for "honors college."

The nine members of the graduating class of 2013 CDDRL undergraduate honors students include: