PolicyCast

Matt Andrews, the faculty director of the Building State Capability program at Harvard Kennedy School, says the reasons why African nations haven’t done better at soccer’s world championships have a lot in common with why much of the continent’s economic promise has also gone unfulfilled. The World Cup, the biggest championship in soccer—or football, depending on where you are from—is currently underway and it's one of the two most-watched sporting events on the planet, the other being the Olympic Games. Yet even though it’s a world-wide event, the list of World Cup champions is dominated by European countries like France, Italy, and Germany, plus a handful of South American ones like Argentina and Brazil. No African nation, meanwhile, has ever made it even as far as the semifinals, although Morocco will have the opportunity to make history tomorrow when they face off against Portugal in the quarterfinals. Some possible reasons for Africa’s lack of success were recently outlined in a research paper by Matt Andrews, the Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at HKS and faculty director of the Building State Capability program. Andrews, who grew up as a soccer fan in South Africa, says the problem isn’t talent—in fact, top professional soccer teams around the world are loaded with African-born players. Instead, Andrews says the reasons Africa’s soccer teams don’t do better look a lot like the reasons their economies don’t do better—they lack the institutional support that would help them realize their latent talent and promise. Matt Andrews is here today to talk football, goals, aspirations, and how to put African on a winning path.

Matt Andrews is the Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has worked in over 50 countries across the globe as a civil servant, international development expert, researcher, teacher, advisor and coach. He has written three books and over 60 other publications on the topics of development and management. He is also the faculty director of the Building State Capability program at Harvard, which is where he has developed – with a team – a policy and management method to address complex challenges. This method is called problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) and was developed through over a decade of applied action research work by Matt and his team. It is now used by practitioners across the globe. Matt holds a BCom degree from the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa), an MSc from the University of London, and a PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team. 

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has a unique perspective on the topic of climate resiliency. He was a city official in 2012 for Superstorm Sandy—which many call the worst disaster in New York City’s history—and in 2021 for Hurricane Ida, which caused $24 billion worth of flooding in the Northeastern United States, making it the costliest and most damaging storm since Sandy nine years before. He was also mayor during most of those nine years, when policymakers, planners, and the citizens of New York tried to grapple with the enormous task of making the city more resilient in the face of ever more destructive and dangerous weather events driven by the man-made climate crisis and global warming. With 520 miles of shoreline, 443 miles of underground railroad and subway tracks, and 14 major under-river tunnels, New York City is a nightmare to protect from rising seas and catastrophic rainfall, and de Blasio and city planners proposed billions in dollars of resiliency projects—including extending Manhattan’s shoreline 500 feet at the island’s vulnerable southern tip. But those plans, he says, encountered some surprisingly strong headwinds, including neighborhood opposition, short political and public attention spans, and competing concerns including the COVID-19 pandemic. So how do vulnerable localities like New York City overcome such obstacles and prepare for an increasingly adversarial climate? de Blasio, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, explores the possibilities with host Ralph Ranalli.

Bill de Blasio is a Fall 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. He served as the 109th mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he held the office of New York City Public Advocate from 2010 to 2013 and started his career as an elected official on the New York City Council, representing the 39th district in Brooklyn from 2002 to 2009. Prior to being an elected official, de Blasio served as the campaign manager for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successful senatorial campaign of 2000 and got his start in NYC government working for Mayor David Dinkins. He launched a campaign for president during the 2020 Democratic primary but ended his bid before the primary election. He holds an A.B. from New York University in metropolitan studies, and a master of international affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team. 

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth and Lecturer in Public Policy Zoe Marks say the parallel global trends of rising authoritarianism and attempts to roll back women’s rights are no coincidence. The hard won rights women have attained over the past century—to education, to full participation in the workforce, in politics, and civic life, and to reproductive healthcare—have transformed society and corresponded with historic waves of democratization around the world. But they have also increasingly become the target of authoritarian leaders and regimes looking to displace democracy with hierarchies controlled by male elites and to re-confine women in traditional roles as wives, mothers, and caregivers. LGBTQ people and others who don’t fit into the traditional binary patriarchal model have become targets not just in places like Iran, Russia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia but also China, Hungary, Poland, and the United States. But Chenoweth and Marks say the authoritarians are also fearful of empowered women—and that their research says they should be. Social movements like the protests currently underway in Iran that include large numbers of women tend to be more resilient, creative, and ultimately successful—which means the future of democracy and the future of women’s empowerment in this pivotal historic era may go hand-in-hand.

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. They study political violence and its alternatives. At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth has authored or edited nine books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression. Their recent book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021), explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. They also recently co-authored the book On Revolutions (Oxford, 2022), which explores the ways in which revolutions and revolutionary studies have evolved over the past several centuries. Their next book with Zoe Marks, tentatively titled Rebel XX: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution, investigates the impact of women’s participation on revolutionary outcomes and democratization.

Chenoweth maintains the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe. Along with Jeremy Pressman, Chenoweth also co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. since January 2017.

Foreign Policy magazine ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance and they are a recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research.

They are also a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where Chenoweth and Zoe Marks co-chair the Political Violence Workshop. They hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton.

Zoe Marks is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics. In addition to her research on peace and conflict, Professor Marks is committed to creating space for conversations about ethical research praxis and making academia more inclusive. She has convened workshops related to decolonizing the academy and with colleagues at the University of Cape Town edited a related special double issue of the journal Critical African Studies. Her research has been published in leading journals in the field, including Political Geography, African Affairs, and Civil Wars, and in peer-reviewed books and edited volumes from Oxford University and Palgrave press. Her dissertation received the Winchester Prize for the best dissertation in Politics at the University of Oxford. She serves on the editorial boards for the journals Critical African Studies and Civil Wars, and on the editorial committee of the Journal of Peace Research. Dr. Marks holds a DPhil in Politics and MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Government and African American Studies from Georgetown University. She has previously worked for UN and non-governmental organizations in Ethiopia, France, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the UK, and the US.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team. 

During his 7 years leading Sweden’s government from 2014 to 2021, Stefan Löfven had a front row seat to observe the rise of right-wing and neo-fascist political parties both at home and around Europe. A former welder, and union leader from working class roots, Löfven earned the nickname “the escape artist” during his years as prime minister for his knack for holding together governments despite his country’s increasingly fractious and polarized politics. But this year the Sweden Democrats—a party with its roots in fascist and white nationalist ideology—became the second leading vote-getter and were embraced as part of a ruling coalition government by other conservative and centrist parties. Löfven says the Sweden Democrats, who were once politically radioactive, are now the tail wagging the dog of Sweden’s new government. And he says the rise of far-right parties is a trend all over Europe, most recently in Italy, but also in Poland and Hungary, where they have fanned fears of economic insecurity, cultural displacement, and crime to scapegoat immigrants and offer authoritarianism as a cure-all, which has enabled them to steal followers from more mainstream parties and take power. Löfven says Europe’s democratic multilateralists are now on the back foot, trying to sell democracy and tolerance in a social-media-driven communications culture that favors the simplistic slogans and memes favored by the right. In this tumultuous era in European politics, he says only time will tell whether the rapid pace of societal change will keep driving voters into the arms of extremist parties, or whether the unpopular Russian war on Ukraine being prosecuted by the Godfather of the continent’s strongmen, Vladimir Putin, will take some the shine off authoritarianism’s allure. 

Stefan Löfven grew up as foster child in a working-class family in the small town in northern Sweden. He studied social work at university and worked as a welder for a manufacturer of railcars. In 1981 he began taking an active role in the Swedish Metalworkers’ Union, ultimately become the president 2006–2012. In 1973 he started a local Swedish Social Democratic Youth League club. In 2012 he became leader of the party. In the parliamentary election in September 2014 Löfven won, and his party is still the leading and largest party in Sweden. He stepped down as a prime minister in November 2021. Today, Löfven is chairman of the board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, as well as chairman of the board of the Olof Palme Memorial Fund. A staunch supporter of the United Nations and multilateralism, he was appointed to lead the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism by Secretary-General António Guterres in February.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team. 

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Danny Schneider says research shows that even as they were being lauded as heroes during the COVID-19 pandemic, working conditions for hourly workers were deteriorating. Eight years ago,  Schneider co-founded The Shift Project, which has built an unprecedented repository of data on scheduling and working conditions for hourly service workers. But if there was silver lining to the pandemic, it was that it also put a spotlight on the plight of workers who had been largely invisible as they dealt with low pay, ruthlessly unpredictable algorithmic scheduling, and health problems related to stress and overwork. And, as evidenced by recent successful efforts to unionize at places like Starbucks and Amazon, Schneider says hourly workers may even have found a voice in shaping their own working environments. The question, he says, is, "Are corporate executives and policymakers are actually listening?"

As healthcare policy navigates what is widely seen as a historic inflection point, Harvard Kennedy School professors Amitabh Chandra and Soroush Saghafian say policymakers need to pursue change with care, deeply analyzing the weaknesses the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and using that data to design intelligent policy that can create truly transformational change.  COVID stretched the U.S. health care system and health care systems across the world to the breaking point and beyond, buy if there’s a silver lining, it may be that there is now the urgency and will among politicians and policymakers to pursue meaningful changes that could result in improved access to healthcare services that are both more affordable and higher quality.  But Saghafian and Chandra say quick-fix policy changes—even those that are well-intentioned—may be destined to fail, including the health care provisions in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which were hailed as a breakthrough if for nothing else other than finally breaking the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold on any attempt to control prescription drug prices. Professor Chandra is the director of Health Policy Research at the Kennedy School, and his research focuses on innovation and pricing in the biopharmaceutical industry and value and racial disparities in health care delivery. Professor Saghafian is the founder of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard and his work combines big data analytics, health policy, and decision science to discover new insights and provide new solutions to various existing problems. They’re here to talk through this important historic moment in healthcare policy, both in terms of challenges and opportunities.

New Center for Public Leadership co-director Deval Patrick ascribes bad leadership as a root cause of many of the huge problems facing human society and the world, including the climate crisis, and threats to democracy and human rights. But are bad leaders flawed because of their personal shortcomings or are they an inevitable product of the flawed systems they operate within? And what makes a good leader? Is it their ability to get people to follow them? Or is it choosing the right things to lead those people toward? Patrick recently became co-director with Hannah Riley Bowles of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, or CPL, as it’s usually referred to here in Cambridge. Transcending his humble beginnings growing up as the son of a single mother on the South Side of Chicago, Patrick has built an impressive—and impressively varied—leadership resume, including serving as governor of Massachusetts, becoming the first Black man to do so. He also served as the Assistant US Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Bill Clinton, as a top corporate executive at Texaco and Coca-Cola, and even launched a brief bid for the White House in 2020. Patrick says that too many of today’s leaders are focused on getting into leadership positions and keeping them—with all the power and perks that entails—but have lost track of the greater meaning of what they can achieve for the common good. He joins us to talk about how good, values-based leadership can help turn things around—and the role he hopes CPL can play in that effort. 

For more than a quarter century, economist and Harvard Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik has been ringing alarm bells about the dangers of globalization. And for a long time, it didn’t seem like a whole lot of people were listening. Now as record economic inequality, a climate in crisis, and global financial shocks from to the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of unchecked globalization and neoliberal orthodoxy about the primacy of markets, Rodrik may be having the world’s least-satisfying “I told you so” moment. But while the temptation might be to look backward for vindication, Rodrik is choosing to look toward solutions instead. He says that finding a way forward for the world economy will require two kinds of thinking: small picture—about how to create good jobs in an equitable way in specific settings—and big picture: imaging possible futures and what a more inclusive, post-globalization economy might look like. And he says it will also mean freeing political and economic discourse from what he calls a “prison of ideology” that rigidly limits policymakers’ ability to consider solutions outside of market-centric approaches. Rodrik recently launched a new project called Reimagining the Economy with fellow professor Gordon Hansen, supported by a $7.5 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The initiative will be based at the Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. 

As war rages in neighboring Ukraine, Moldovan President Maia Sandu talks to about fighting corruption, moving her country toward the European Union, and the half million refugees who’ve crossed the border since February. Sandu is a popular choice on lists of up-and-coming world leaders, including a recent one that nicknamed her “the tightrope walker.” Sandu’s task has been daunting—preserving her country’s young democracy while fighting endemic corruption; modernizing Moldova’s economy and turning its focus toward the European Union and away from Russia; and dealing with the pro-Russian breakaway region of Transnistria. And she’s had to take on all of those challenges in the context of the COVID pandemic and the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine, which has sent an estimated 500,000 refugees over the country’s eastern border, of which 100,000 have taken up temporary residence in Moldova. Sandu has shown resilience in the face of challenges and setbacks—as education minister she was frustrated by the corruption she found in the country’s education system, so she and some allies founded their own political party, the party of Action and Solidarity. She lost her post as prime minister in 2019 after just five months, but a year later she was elected president and helped her party sweep into power in parliamentary elections. Sandu says the key to her success has been convincing ordinary Moldovans, who she says are weary from decades of pervasive corruption and scandal in government, that political reforms and an economic and political alignment with Europe hold the key to a better future.

Rema Hanna is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies and Chair of the International Development Area at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She also serves as the Faculty Director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at Harvard University’s Center for International Development and is the co-Scientific Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South East Asia Office in Indonesia.  In addition, Professor Hanna is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). 

Her research revolves around improving the provision of public services in developing and emerging nations, particularly for the very poor.  She combines economic theory, qualitative field work, extensive data collection, and cutting-edge empirical analysis to offer insights into how governments function and how they can do better.  Part of her work focuses on how to improve overall service delivery, as well as understanding the impacts of corruption, bureaucratic absenteeism, and discrimination against disadvantaged minority groups on delivery outcomes.  She is particularly interested in how governments can improve and strengthen social protection, tax collection, and environmental safety. 

Prior to joining the Harvard Kennedy School, Hanna was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a B.S. from Cornell University with Honors and Distinction.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.