Event Details:

Join us for an engaging conversation with Jennifer Pahlka (Code for America), Ingrid Pappel (Tallinn University of Technology), and Andrew Grotto (Stanford University) on

Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Just when we most need our government to work – to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats – it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.

But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.

SPEAKER: Jennifer Pahlka is the author of Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. She founded Code for America in 2010 and led the organization for ten years. In 2013, she took a leave of absence to serve as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and helped found the United States Digital Service. She served on the Defense Innovation Board under Presidents Obama and Trump. At the start of the pandemic, she also co-founded United States Digital Response, which helps government meet the needs of the public with volunteer tech support. She received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and was named by Wired as one of the 25 people who has most shaped the past 25 years. Jennifer is a graduate of Yale University.

DISCUSSANT: Ingrid Pappel is the 2023 Global Digital Governance Fellow at Stanford University, Associate Professor at the Department of Software Science and Vice-Dean for Master's studies at the School of IT, Tallinn University of Technology. She has more than 20 years of experience in different development projects related to e-governance solutions in Estonia and abroad. She is the head of the Digi-State Technologies and Architecture research group, which addresses the complexity related to how governments can satisfy the demands of their citizens in times of need. Her research focuses on digital government ecosystems by investigating technologies that support digital transformation. Her research topics are related to the development activities in launching paperless management by creating interoperability with state registries and external and internal systems.

MODERATOR: Andrew J. Grotto is a William J. Perry International Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. He is also Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (FSI). Grotto’s research interests center on the national security and international economic dimensions of America’s global leadership in information technology innovation, and its growing reliance on this innovation for its economic and social life. 

The event is free and open to the public. RSVP is requested.

This event is part of Global Conversations, a series of talks, lectures, and seminars hosted by Stanford University Libraries and Vabamu with the goal of educating scholars, students, leaders, and the public on the benefits of but also challenges related to sustaining freedom.

Sponsored by

• CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
• Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)
• Stanford University Libraries

Albert Park: China’s Economy and Asia’s Rise

Date & Time: Wednesday, November 15, 2023     |    4:30 - 6:00 PM PT
Location: John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA

Join us on Wednesday, November 15, as SIEPR, SCCEI, and the King Center co-host a discussion with Dr. Albert Park. Dr. Park will assess the cyclical and structural factors affecting China’s growth prospects and how China is impacting economic dynamism in the region. Topics include the implications of China’s recent property sector downturn, how geopolitical fragmentation is affecting China’s trade and investment relationships and growth prospects in the region, and the potential for China to contribute positively to the development of other countries through its Belt and Road Initiative and by leading on climate change action.

Park’s presentation begins at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, November 15th, followed by a Q&A moderated by SIEPR Director Mark Duggan. You’re invited to a welcome reception at 4:30 pm.

Watch the Recored Event

About the Speaker
 

Image

Albert F. Park is Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Director General of its Economic Research and Development Impact Department. He is chief spokesperson on economic and development trends and leads the production of ADB’s flagship knowledge products and support for regional cooperation fora. Mr. Park has more than 2 decades of experience as a development economist. A well-known expert on the economy of the People’s Republic of China, he has directed a number of large-scale research projects in the country. He has also served as an international consultant for the World Bank and a member of the steering committee for the Asia -Pacific Research Universities’ Population Ageing Hub. Mr. Park has worked on a broad range of development issues including poverty and inequality, intergenerational mobility, microfinance, migration and labor markets, the future of work, and foreign investment. Mr. Park is Chair Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Economic Policy at HKUST (on leave). Previously, he served as a founding director of HKUST’s Institute for Emerging Market Studies, professor at the University of Oxford, and associate professor at the University of Michigan. He has also held editorial positions at a number of leading economic journals. A national of the United States, he received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and his doctorate in applied economics from Stanford University.

This is an invitation-only event. 

Questions? Contact aleen@stanford.edu

2023 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture
Date & Time: Thursday, September 28, 2023     |    4:30 - 6:30 PM PT 
Location: Green Library, Bing Wing, 5th floor, Bender Room

Lessons of History: The Rise and Fall of Technology in Chinese History 

Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions are pleased to present the 2023 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture featuring Professor Yasheng Huang who will be speaking on Lessons of History: The Rise and Fall of Technology in Chinese History.

China was once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. Ancient Chinese achievements in technology are simply staggering. China led Europe in metallurgy, ship construction, navigation techniques, and many other fields, often by several centuries. The Chinese also invented gunpowder, paper, the water clock, the moveable printing press, and other consequential technologies way ahead of the West. For example, the Chinese invented the seismograph 1,700 years before the French.

But China’s technological development stalled, stagnated, and eventually collapsed and its early technological leadership did not set the country on a modernization path. This lecture examines the factors behind the rise and the fall of Chinese historical technology and draws lessons for today’s China.
 

Watch the Recorded Lecture

About the Speaker 
 

Image

Professor Yasheng Huang is the International Program Professor in Chinese Economy and Business and a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Huang founded and runs China Lab and India Lab, which aim to help entrepreneurs in these countries improve their management skills. He is an expert source on international business, political economy, and international management. In collaboration with other scholars, Dr. Huang is conducting research on human capital formation in China and India, entrepreneurship, and ethnic and labor-intensive foreign direct investment (FDI). Prior to MIT Sloan, he held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School. Huang also served as a consultant to the World Bank.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

Request Disability Accommodations and Access Info

Please join us on Wednesday, May 31, for a talk by Indian politician Rahul Gandhi.

Mr. Gandhi will offer his unique perspective on the changing world order and India's crucial role within it. Following his talk, Mr. Gandhi will engage in a conversation with CDDRL Affiliated Scholar Dinsha Mistree.

Registration is required. Please note that large bags will not be permitted into the venue, and all bags are subject to search.

Rahul Gandhi was a Member of Parliament from 2004 until earlier this year. In March 2023, he was disqualified from Parliament pursuant to a court verdict that is currently under challenge in a higher court. He last represented the constituency of Wayanad in Kerala in the Lok Sabha and, prior to that, served three terms as MP from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. In 2007, he was named General Secretary of the Indian National Congress in charge of the youth and student organizations of the Party. In January 2013, he assumed office as Vice President of the Indian National Congress. He was the President of the Indian National Congress from December 2017 to July 2019.

Rahul was born on June 19, 1970, to Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. He has attended St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, Harvard College, and Rollins College, Florida, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. He went on to receive an M. Phil. in Development Studies from Trinity College, Cambridge University. Thereafter, he joined the Monitor Group, a strategy consulting group in London, where he worked for three years.

In the past, Rahul was a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committees on Home Affairs, Human Resource Development, External Affairs, Finance and Defence and the Consultative Committees for the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Ministry of Rural Development, the Ministry of Finance & Corporate Affairs and the Ministry of External Affairs.

Rahul has championed the development of a self-help group movement and a non-profit eye care provider in North India.  He also serves as a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.

Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages the Program on Strengthening US-Indian Relations. He is also a research fellow in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School and an affiliated scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a regional focus on India. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL and was a visiting scholar at IIM-Ahmedabad.

Since 2009 the European Union (EU) has seen a sequence of crises which have rocked its very institutional structure. It is noteworthy that 2009 was also the year that the Lisbon Treaty, the last of the treaties approved, came into force. The idea with that Treaty was to close the long and troubled period of the EU’s institutional consolidation exemplified by the major enlargement in 2004-2007. So, while the Lisbon Treaty thought it had completed the consolidation stage, the crises reopened it. In August 1954 Jean Monnet said something which became an unchallengeable truth in pro-European thinking, i.e., “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for these crises.” The EU has certainly responded to the crises, proving itself reactive and resilient. However, its responses have also highlighted the weakness of its system of governance, in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy. The representational deficit in the EU has long been discussed, in reality the crises have shown that the EU has a governability deficit.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sergio Fabbrini is Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Intesa Sanpaolo Chair on European Governance and Head of the Political Science Department at the Luiss Guido Carli in Rome. He was the Pierre Keller Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government 2019-2020 and Recurrent Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. He was Jemolo Fellow at the Nuffield College, Oxford University and Jean Monnet Chair Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence. He lectured in several international universities and won several prizes. He published twenty books, two co-authored books and twenty edited or co-edited books or journals’ special issues, and several hundred scientific articles and essays in seven languages in the most important peer-reviewed international journals. His recent publications in English include: Europe’s Future: Decoupling and Reforming, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019; Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015; Compound Democracies: Why the United States and Europe Are Becoming Similar, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010 (second and revised edition); America and Its Critics: Vices and Virtues of the Democratic Hyperpower, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008.He is considered one of the most authoritative scholars on European and comparative politics and institutions.

Questions? Please contact vlathia@stanford.edu.

This event is co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Via the SDGs and COP, the world is committed to tackling the big global crises of poverty and climate change. But the policies for fostering net zero emissions, universal access to energy, and full employment are confused when it comes to Africa, a region that will soon be home to one in four people. Todd Moss will lay out the shortcomings to the dominant approaches and outline more effective ways to support both a greener planet and prosperity for everyone. 
 
Todd Moss is Executive Director of the Energy for Growth Hub, a think tank in Washington DC. He is also a nonresident fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute, the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines, the Institute for Progress, and the Center for Global Development. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (under Condoleezza Rice) and has worked at the World Bank, Georgetown, and the London School of Economics. 

Hicham Alaoui, Robert Springborg, Lindsay Benstead, Glenn E. Robinson, and Sean Yom join ARD to discuss their recently released book, Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges ... and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). To order, click here.

Why, given the enormous resources spent by the US and Europe on security assistance to Arab countries, has it led to so little success? Can anything be done to change the disheartening status quo? Addressing these thorny questions, the authors of this state-of-the-art assessment evaluate the costs and benefits to the main providers and recipients of security assistance in the MENA region and explore alternative strategies to improve outcomes for both.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region. In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, were published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and have since been translated into several languages. He is also co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record.

Robert Springborg is a Scientific Advisor of the Istituto Affari Internazionali and Adjunct Professor at SFU School for International Studies (Vancouver). Formerly he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations; the holder of the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute; the Director of the American Research Center in Egypt; University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London; and the University of Sydney. In 2016 he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, Harvard University. His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt. Fragmentation of the Political Order (1989); Family Power and Politics in Egypt (1982); Legislative Politics in the Arab World (1999, co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (2001 and 2010, co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq (2007); Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives(2009) and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003.

Lindsay J. Benstead is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and Director of the Middle East Studies Center (MESC) at Portland State University. Her research on women and politics, public opinion, and survey methodology has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Governance, and Foreign Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and served as a doctoral fellow at Yale University and a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. For more on her research, see https://pdx.academia.edu/LindsayBenstead.

Glenn E. Robinson is Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, and is also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  He retired from NPS after 30 years in December 2021. He has authored or co-authored four books on Middle East politics as well as over 150 journal articles, book chapters, government reports and conference papers.  His most recent book, Global Jihad: A Brief History, was named by both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy as a "Best Book of 2021."  He has won awards for his teaching at both Berkeley and NPS.  Robinson has been active in policy work, especially for USAID and DOD, and in his professional work for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and (as a Founding Board Member and Treasurer) for the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS).

Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC.  He is a specialist on regimes and governance in the Middle East, especially in Arab monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco. His research engages topics of authoritarian politics, democratic reforms, institutional stability, and economic development in these countries, as well as their implications for US foreign policy. His publications include the books From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016); the co-edited volume The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings (Oxford University Press, 2022); and articles in print journals like Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Journal of Democracy.

Image

Maricruz Rivera-Hernandez, PhD, is an assistant professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University. She is a gerontologist and health services researcher focused on health and health-care disparities research, examining disparities for vulnerable older adults, and advocating for diversity and inclusion. Her goal is to develop and test interventions that will improve care and decrease any disparities detected.