January 8
– 15, 2010: An intensive January
session addresses how to leverage scenario planning and
research to anticipate crisis and proactively prevent
failures of public policy. This course invites you to join
in a continuing research initiative based at the Kennedy
School and extending across the University. Since 2006,
teams of Harvard scholars have been asking the question:
Why
do societies and their governments fail so often to act
intime
to avert crises that appear in plain sight?
On subjects as diverse as
climate change, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics,
and genocide, the same pattern recurs. Governments can see
a crisis coming and the appropriate responses are
relatively well understood. The costs of acting now appear
substantially less than the costs of acting later, when the
crisis has already hit. Yet we don’t act. We want to
understand the nature of these acting-in-time problems; we
want to understand the obstacles that prevent societies and
their governments from acting; and we want to devise
solutions that allow us to act more effectively in specific
instances. Even better, we want to know how to organize
ourselves to act in time across the whole class of these
problems. The larger acting-in-time research program is
interdisciplinary, drawing faculty from many Harvard
faculties and schools. We have designed this course the
same way, engaging faculty from across the campus, and
inviting students from every part of the University to join
in.
The course is jointly taught by David Ellwood, Scott M.
Black Professor of Political Economy, Dean of the Harvard
Kennedy School; Julio Frenk, Angelopoulos Professor of
Public Health and International Development, Dean of the
Harvard School of Public Health; and Professor Christopher
Stone, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of the
Practice of Criminal Justice, Director of the Hauser Center
for Nonprofit Organizations.
The seminar is open to all
Harvard, MIT and Fletcher School Graduate Students.
The seminar is for 0.50 credit hours.
Cross-registration is actively encouraged by
completing a Cross Registration Petition form which can be
accessed online:https://crossreg.harvard.edu/OASIS/CrossReg/petitionpin.jsp
HKS students have the opportunity to register for the
course up by completing a paper add/drop petition. The
paper add/drop petition can be picked up at 124 Mt. Auburn
Street or from the Program Director.
Registration is open until
January 8, however, early registration is strongly
encouraged due to the significant amount of
pre-reading.
David
T. Ellwood, the Scott M. Black
Professor of Political Economy, has served as Dean of
the John F. Kennedy School of Government since July 1,
2004. As Dean, Ellwood sets the strategic direction of
the Kennedy School and leads its efforts to advance
the public interest. Ellwood joined the Kennedy School
faculty in 1980 and served two separate terms as the
School's Academic Dean. In 1993, he was named
Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
where he served as co-chair of President Clinton's
Working Group on Welfare Reform, Family Support and
Independence. At HHS, Ellwood played a key role in the
Administration's development and implementation of
critical social policy. Recognized as one of the
nation's leading scholars on poverty and welfare,
Ellwood's work has been credited with significantly
influencing public policy in the United States and
abroad. A labor economist who also specializes in
family change, low pay and unemployment, his most
recent research focuses on the changing structure of
American families. Ellwood is the author of numerous
books and articles, including Welfare Realities: From
Rhetoric to Reform, co-authored with Mary Jo Bane. His
book, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family,
was selected by theNew York Times
Book Reviewas one of the notable
books of 1988 and by the Policy Studies Organization
as the outstanding book of the year. Ellwood was
recipient of the David N. Kershaw Award, given by the
Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management
to outstanding individuals under the age of 40 who
have made a distinguished contribution to the field of
public policy. He also received the Morris and Edna
Zale Award for Outstanding Distinction in Scholarship
and Public Service from Stanford University. Ellwood
is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, a Research Associate at the National Bureau
of Economic Research, and a Senior Research Affiliate
of the National Poverty Center at University of
Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He
is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Joint Center for
Poverty Research at Northwestern University/University
of Chicago and serves on the Board of Abt Associates
and the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation. Ellwood
graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1975 and
earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University in
1981.
Dr.
Julio Frenkbecame Dean of the
Faculty and T & G Angelopoulos Professor of Public
Health and International Development at the Harvard
School of Public Health on January 1, 2009. Dr. Frenk
is an eminent authority on global health who served as
the Minister of Health of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. He
pursued an ambitious agenda to reform the nation’s
health system, with an emphasis on redressing social
inequality. He is perhaps best known for his work in
introducing a program of comprehensive national health
insurance, known as Seguro Popular, which expanded
access to health care for tens of millions of
previously uninsured Mexicans. Dr. Frenk was the
founding director-general of the National Institute of
Public Health in Mexico, one of the leading
institutions of health education and research in the
developing world. In 1998, Dr. Frenk joined the World
Health Organization (WHO) as executive director in
charge of Evidence and Information for Policy, WHO’s
first-ever unit explicitly charged with developing a
scientific foundation for health policy to achieve
better outcomes. Most recently, he served as a senior
fellow in the global health program of the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation and as president of the Carso
Health Institute in Mexico City. He is chair of the
board of the Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation at the University of Washington. Dr. Frenk
holds a medical degree from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico, as well as three advanced
degrees from the University of Michigan: master of
public health, master of arts in sociology, and a
Ph.D. in medical organization and sociology. In
addition to his scholarly works, which include
articles in academic journals as well as many books
and book chapters, he has written two best-selling
novels for youngsters explaining the functions of the
human body. In September of 2008, Dr. Frenk received
theClinton Global Citizen
Awardfor changing “the way
practitioners and policy makers across the world think
about health.”
Christopher
Stoneis Daniel and
Florence Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of
Criminal Justice and faculty chair of theProgram in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management. His work focuses on
two distinct subjects: the improvement of criminal
justice systems, particularly through the use of
performance measurement and empirical research,and the
leadership and governance of nonprofit
organizations.From 1994 to 2004, he served as director
of theVera Institute of
Justice, having joined the
Institute in 1986 as head of its London office. In 2006,
he was awarded an honorary OBE for his contributions to
criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom. Stone
serves as the founding chair ofAltus, an alliance of
nongovernmental organizations and academic centers in
Russia, India, Nigeria, Chile, Brazil, and the United
States that are jointly pursuing justice sector reform.
In all, he has guided the start-up of eight nonprofit
organizations pursuing justice from Johannesburg to Los
Angeles and New York. Stone received his AB from
Harvard, an MPhil. in criminology from the University of
Cambridge, and his JD from the Yale Law School. He
became faculty director of the university-wideHauser Center for Nonprofit
Organizationsin January 2008.
