Managing a Living Planet: How interactions among Population, Health, Resources and Environment Shape the Stage of Global Affairs

Harvard University -- John F. Kennedy School of Government International and Global Affairs (IGA) 104 (Fall 2010) (Ver. 1.0 August 6, 2010) Managing a Living Planet: How interactions among Population, Health, Resources and Environment Shape the Stage of Global Affairs Instructor: Professor William C. Clark Office: HKS main building (Littauer), Room 360B Website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/william-clark Email: William_Clark@harvard.edu Assistant: Mary Anne Baumgartner, 6-7466; Maryanne_Baumgartner@harvard.edu Meeting Information: Regular class meeting: T/Th 1:10-2:30pm, L230 Section meeting: F 11:40am-1:00pm, Starr Auditorium (Section is optional for MPP2 students; required for others in first weeks of term) Prerequisites: None. Prior training in policy analysis, international relations and governance is recommended (eg. IGA-101, IGA-103). Priority enrollment will be given to IGA concentrators. Objective of the course: This course aims to help students understand how society s interactions with the planet s environment influence both the stage and the play of global affairs. It explores the implications of those interactions for efforts to articulate and promote humanity s common interest in sustainable utilization of the planet s energy, land, water, and biotic resources. Special attention is given to developing a critical appreciation of the most important roles of global actors and institutions in advancing such efforts. Students will learn how i) to assess the risks posed by the globalization of human-environment interactions; ii) to evaluate the consequences of alternative interventions for managing those risks; and iii) to design implementation strategies that effectively allocate roles and responsibilities among global, national, and local actors. Students will also have the opportunity to develop key professional skills in systems thinking, writing succinct policy memos and delivering effective oral briefings. In keeping with actual professional practice in this field, most of the assignments in the course will be conducted by students working in teams; instruction will be provided in how to organize such team work effectively. Motivation for teaching the course: Concerns for how people can increase their well-being in the face of disease, degraded resources and pollution have long been voiced at local and national scales. Increasingly, however, such concerns are escalating to the global stage. Population growth and migration, pandemics, food scarcity, water wars, and climate change are only some of what I will call the living planet issues that have crowded onto the high-level agendas of global affairs that were previously reserved for deliberations about military security and world trade. Such high-profile

worries, however, are all symptoms of a more fundamental transformation in which nature and society are becoming increasingly intertwined as a single complex adaptive system, tightly coupled at all scales from local to global. The power and interests of human actors continue to matter for efforts to shape effective policies to govern that system for the public good. But the globalization of connections between those actors and the rest of the planet s living environment increasingly means that getting to yes is not necessarily getting to where we want to be. Nature may confound even the most brilliantly negotiated political settlement. There is an urgent need for professionals committed to, and capable of, articulating and advancing a global common interest in sustainable management of tightly coupled human-environment systems. Meeting this need poses daunting challenges. For the behaviors of tightly coupled human-environment systems are frequently complex and confusing, exhibiting significant temporal and spatial lags, threshold effects and irreversibilities, emergent properties, and adaptive feedbacks that vitiate purposeful action. More generally, they are replete with surprises that have little to do with the intentions or strategies of human actors. All of these features render such systems difficult or impossible to manage effectively through conventional approaches such as parameterizing history (ie. forecasting the future as a repetition of the past) or muddling through (ie. assuming that whenever we make mistakes we can just step back and try something else). Professionals seeking to promote the common interest through better management of our living planet need new ways of understanding why such system behaviors emerge, and what they mean for the design of policy and institutions that can better handle the complexities of human-environment interactions in a globalizing world. There exists no comprehensive response to this need that can be shown to have produced reliably effective results inthe real world. That said, some helpful tools and perspectives are beginning to be developed and deployed, and some success in the design and implementation of better management approaches has begun to be achieved. This course is intended as a progress report on the state of play, and as an invitation for interested students to bring their own insights, experience and reflections to join in the learning process. Audience and enrollment: This course is intended for individuals seeking to become globally oriented policy players working for national, regional, and local governments, international organizations, multinational corporations, or civil society. It has been designed as one of the core offerings in the Kennedy School s new MPP concentration in International and Global Affairs (IGA). The IGA concentration seeks to provide extensive and intensive training to students preparing for careers addressing global governance challenges arising from concerns for international security, human rights, environment and resource systems, trade and finance and technological innovation. This course provides an introduction to the environment/health/ resource dimensions of IGA. Professional school students who are not IGA concentrators but who are otherwise interested in globally oriented careers especially those students working in development, environment and public health -- are welcome in the course, space permitting. There are no prerequisites for the course, though students would ideally have some prior knowledge of policy analysis (eg. the HKS Spring Exercise), international affairs (eg. IGA-101) and global governance (eg. IGA-103). (Students without such prior training will be required to attend catch up section meetings scheduled over the first weeks of the course). Students are not presumed to have prior training in the analytic methods of complex adaptive systems or natural science. 2

If this course is oversubscribed, priority enrollment will be given to IGA concentrators. Each prospective student will be asked to fill out a form during the first week of class describing his/her program, background and reasons for wanting to enroll in this course. Non-degree students will only be admitted under the following conditions: attendance at all class sessions, completion of the required readings, completion of all assignments, and willingness to have a grade registered with the program director. No auditors will be permitted unless space permits and they agree to the same terms noted above for non-degree students. Both non-degree students and would-be auditors must submit a written application to the instructor, outlining their objectives in taking the class, describing their educational and experience background and what they would bring to the class, and affirming their willingness to abide by the conditions noted above. Final determinations regarding acceptance of non-iga students will only occur after the HKS bidding process, if necessary, has been completed. Relation to other courses: In response to multiple requests, I sketch below some of what I see to be the relationships of this course to other core offerings by IGA and its relatives at HKS: * Interactions of actors and the stage of international affairs: IGA-101 (International relations) focuses on how states interact on the global stage. Several ITF courses (eg. ITF 110, 145) add economies and economic actors to the cast of global characters. IGA-103 (Global governance) and IGA-304 (Human rights and international politics) add perspectives on the role of business and civil society. All of these courses, however, tend to treat the natural environment as part of a largely static stage on which an essentially human drama of conflict, competition and cooperation is played out. This course, in contrast, starts with the empirical observation that human activities undertaken in the pursuit of military security, economic growth and other aims have by now achieved such magnitude that they are transforming the environmental stage on which they are carried out. That transformation has at least two consequences. First, it is altering the threats, constraints and opportunities facing human actors as they seek to pursue their individual and common interests in security and growth. Second, it is threatening the very planetary life-support systems on which all humans depend for their continued sustenance and well-being. This course therefore takes as its defining focus the dynamic interactions between human actors and their environmental stage. * Institutions and rules of the game : IGA-103, Global governance, provides an overview of the main institutions and practices involved in the processes of global governance. This course emphasizes the relationships between global and local institutions in the development and implementation of specific policies for managing problems on the international agenda. The rules of the game addressed by other core IGA courses -- primarily norms, laws, and agreements governing interactions among peoples and states -- are complemented in this course by attention to the rules set by nature (physics, chemistry, and biology) and the constraints those natural laws impose on effective human intervention in global affairs. * The problems and processes addressed: IGA, as conceived at the HKS, encompasses five principal interlinked issue areas: international security, human rights, trade and finance, science and technology, and environment/health/resources. While this course will seek to be sensitive to implications of human-environment interactions for security, humanitarian and economic objectives, our emphasis will be on the consequences of those interactions for how societies can manage the living planet to achieve sustainable improvements in human well-being. This course provides an introduction to -- and context for -- more specialized courses in the 3

environment/health/resources area, including ones on energy (IGA-226, 310; API-164), water (IGA-375), food (IGA-370), health (IGA-230M), climate (IGA-320, API-135) and sustainable development (IGA-904). What this course will cover: I. The challenge: The course begins with an overview of challenge addressed by the course, and the strategy we will pursue in addressing it. In these sessions we will review the evidence for the idea that human interactions with the environment have evolved to constitute a single, global scale, complex adaptive system. We examine the emergence of that idea onto the agendas of leaders in the global arena: politicians, civil servants, business people, and NGOs. We will see that efforts to develop effective institutions to promote the global common interest in manage living planet issues has resulted mostly in failures. But there have been just enough successes to suggest that progress and learning are reasonable ambitions for today s policy professionals. We will review what has been learned from those (partial) successes. We will discuss what makes living planet issues different than many other challenges for policy design and analysis, show how an understanding of those differences can complement and extend classic approaches to promoting the common good taught elsewhere at HKS. II. The analytic approach: In Part II of the course, we will learn how to conduct policy analysis and design that can help with management of the living planet issues that were introduced in Part I. Our approach will be based in classic methods of policy analysis, but we will extend those methods to address the special challenges posed by living planet issues. In particular, we will focus on appropriate methods to i) assess the risks posed by the globalization of human-environment interactions; ii) evaluate the consequences of alternative interventions for managing those risks; and iii) design implementation strategies that effectively allocate roles and responsibilities among global, national, and local actors. We will do so through worked examples of how elements of the approach have been used to address particular living planet challenges. III. Designing better policy: Part III of the course provides an opportunity to practice applying the analytic perspectives on complex human-environment interactions introduced in Part II. We will focus our work on three extended case studies selected to represent the range of human-environment challenges confronting contemporary professionals dealing with international affairs. In particular, we will address the management of disease (with a case on pandemics, focused on SE Asia), of sustainable resource development (with a case on food security, focused on Africa), and of transboundary pollution (with a case on geoengineering the climate, focused on North America and Europe). These cases are cumulative, starting with the (relatively) simple and building to the more complex. IV. Strategies for managing a living planet: Part IV of the class, consisting of the last week, will look back across the issues and methods encountered in the case studies of Part III. Our goal will be to articulate the general implications of our case experience for developing better strategies to manage our living planet. How the course will work: The course will be conducted through a combination of lectures, team-based policy analyses, and class discussions. In keeping with professional practice in this field, most of the assignments for the course will be completed by students working in teams. In keeping with the realities of scheduling at the HKS, teams will be given time in class to meet. 4

* Reading: Students will be assigned and expected to master an average of apx. 40pp. of readings per week. They will be expected to read another 40pp. per week of material located through their own and their classmates research. Assigned and supplementary readings will be posted on the course web site. There are no required textbooks. Students without a good grounding in policy analysis (e.g. who have not yet been though the 1 st year of the MPP program or its equivalent) may want to consult a copy of Eugene Bardach s little gem A practical guide for policy analysis: The eightfold path to more effective problem solving (CQ Press, Washington. Best is the 3 rd edition 2009, though earlier ones are almost as good. Some copies are at the Coop). Those interested in a deeper look at complexity in international affairs may find useful Robert Jervis 1997 book System effects: Complexity in political and social life (Princeton Univ Press). Both are available for <$20 from several internet book sellers. * Expectations for engagement: IGA-104 has been designed as a graduate-level professional course. Students choosing to enroll will be expected to: i) read all assigned materials in advance of class, with a view toward responding to cold calls from the instructor and utilizing material from the readings in the class s live and on-line discussions; ii) perform substantial independent research and reading (ie. locating your own sources) to inform assignments and class discussions; iii) engage classmates and the instructor in those discussions in ways that are respectful of their views, responsive to their positions, but remorselessly critical of their arguments; iv) carry their full weight in team exercises (see below). In particular: Part I will consist mostly of lectures and cold call discussions of the assigned reading. Part II will involve a combination of lecture / demonstrations on how standard practices of policy analysis can be supplemented by the methods of complex adaptive systems. There will be opportunities for students to practice using the methods, and for in-class discussions of the relative strengths and blind-spots of the various methods explored. These explorations will be conducted within the context of the specific policy challenge of meeting society s needs for energy within the constraints posed by the impacts of energy production and use on a finite living planet. Part III, which constitutes the bulk of the course, will turn to the analysis, design and critique of policy solutions for 3 cases that represent some of the most important classes of global human-environment interactions now receiving attention on the international agenda. * Team (work): In keeping with actual practice in this multi-disciplinary field, student work in Part III will be conducted in teams. Students will be assigned to teams based on information collected early in the course, with a view toward providing a mix of background training, skills and experience in each. Students stay in the same team throughout the course. * (team) Work: Each of the 3 case studies considered in Part III will be addressed in a 5-class block. For each block, each team will be responsible for conducting and documenting a full policy analysis and design on an assigned question. Each team will summarize its conclusions in a short policy memo, or an oral briefing to the class, or another written assignment depending on the actual size and composition of the class. (Students from previous years have called these assignments mini-spring Exercises ). * Sequencing: The first class in each block will introduce the specific policy problem on which student teams are expected to provide analysis and recommendations. I and/or guests will then provide a global overview of the broad issue within which the specific problem is set, eg. the global interactions between agricultural activity and the environment. In the second class of each unit we will turn our attention in lecture and discussion to some of the 5

special challenges of policy analysis and design posed by the particular case. This will involve some deeper training in analytic methods particularly important to the case, building on the general material from Part II. The third class of each unit will be primarily given over to students meeting with their teams to advance their analysis and design work on the case at hand. In the 4 th class of each unit, selected teams will present their results in oral briefings to the rest of the class, advancing recommendations and defending their positions in the face of questions from the class and the instructor. Finally, in the 5 th session we will turn to a comparative critical discussion of how each of the teams dealt with the principal challenges of the case. We will aim to extract from these discussions broader lessons on the applicability and limitations of the complex systems approaches and living planet knowledge we have mobilized for the case. * Part IV of the class, consisting of the last week, will provide students with an opportunity to reach back across the issues and methods reviewed in the course to debate their general implications for managing a living planet. * Assignments and Grading: Each student will be expected to contribute to 6 team assignments plus one individually authored take-home final exam. The final grade in the course will reflect these assignments plus students participation in their team projects and in class discussions. Specific assignments, due dates, student responsibilities, and the weight accorded to each of those responsibilities in the final grade are summarized below: Assignment Details Due date(s) 12-Oct 3 (one for each case); team authored; ~6pp. 28-Oct each 18-Nov * Policy analysis & design * Summary presentation of findings & recommendations * Quality participation * Take home final exam 3 (one for each case), team authored; specific assignment will be for a policy memo (~2pp. each), or an oral briefing (5-10 mins. each), or another summary exercise (~2pp. each) [details depend on class size] individual contribution to team work (peer evaluation) and class discussions individually authored (~5pp); distributed last class day; may be submitted electronically 12-Oct 28-Oct 18-Nov % Grade 50% 15% Ongoing 20% 9-Dec 15% The detailed assignments will be issued closer to the due dates. In the meantime, here are some more general things you may want to know about the assignments: - Policy analysis and design: The heart of the course is learning to address the particular challenges of human-environment systems within the framework of policy design and analysis taught elsewhere at the HKS and other policy schools. For each case, student teams will be expected to carry out end to end policy analyses, following the basic template taught in Part II of the course. Each team will be expected to submit a short report (ca. 6pp) on its methods and findings for each case. One logical and acceptable approach would be to divide up the analysis 6

and design tasks taught in Part II among the team members, and have each member take the lead in writing up the results of one or two tasks for the final report. - Summary presentation of findings: However sophisticated the analysis, a team s likely influence is only as good as its summary for decision makers. The course will explore both the strategic and tactical aspects of preparing effective presentations for decision makers. In general, each team will be assigned one particular means of summary presentation for each case. Some teams will be asked to provide classic 2-pg. policy memos summarizing their analysis and design work. Others will be asked to present oral briefings (5-10 mins) to the class. The approach to summary presentation assigned to each team will be rotated from case to case. All students will be asked to submit to the course web site brief critiques of other groups oral presentations. - Participation quality: This will be evaluated in two ways. - For work within the teams, the challenge is to provide incentives to support a fair sharing of the work. To accomplish this, for each case, each member of each team will anonymously evaluate the relative contributions of her/his team members to the team s final products. (I hope to see even distributions, indicating an even sharing of the work. But this system provides a means for individual team members to reward colleagues who put in extra effort, and punish those who shirk. Consistent with the real world, my assumption is not that all members of a successful team will do the same work, but rather that the team will sort out how each of its members can best contribute to the final product). - For contributions to discussions in the full class meetings, both I and my teaching fellow will keep notes on responses to cold calls, volunteered comments, written comments on oral briefings, and submissions to the web site discussions. Our emphasis will be on quality, not quantity, of an individual s contributions. Generally speaking, it will be hard to lose points for asking any brief question, and easy to gain points by making focused comments that critique or extend or connect to what s going on in the classroom in a way that contributes to our collective understanding. Point loss is likely to occur in response to long speeches or irrelevant harangues, and for not taking seriously the distinction between critique of another s view, and abuse of another s person. - Take home final exam: This will be an individually authored, short answer exam focused on the basic approach to policy analysis of living planet issues taught in Part II and applied in Part III of the course. In particular, the exam will ask you to adopt a position as a recently employed graduate of the HKS, tasked by your new boss with leading an analysis team that will determine which living planet issues pose the highest priority threats to the organization you work for, and will recommend strategies for managing those risks. In your exam you will be asked not to perform that analysis, but rather to explain to your team of newbie analysts in a short (< 5pg) memo how they should go about the job. I will expect you to address what needs to be done, why its hard, and to point to specific examples from this course s readings and case studies that illustrate what they should, and should not, do. In the interests of time and efficiency, I won t ask you to address all the dimensions of analysis introduced in Part II of the course, but only some of them. (Which ones will be the surprise part of the exam). A premium here will be on how well you can draw on class readings and case presentations to illustrate your points. I will provide a more detailed précis of the final exam at the end of Part II of the course so that you can use it in organizing your note taking for Part III. Since there are not yet any global policy solutions to the issues we will be exploring, there can be no question of evaluating students on whether their contributions are right or wrong. 7

Students will, however, be expected to avoid extemporaneous editorializing, and to develop rigorous arguments well grounded in the (incomplete) theory and empirical evidence available. This is a course in policy analysis, not op-ed production. * Section meetings and skills training: Students come to this course with a wide range of backgrounds and skills. Optional section meetings will be held throughout the course with the goal of providing students help where they think they want it. The exception to the optional character of section meetings occurs in the first month of the course, when students who have not completed the MPP1 core sequence or equivalent will be required to attend catch up section meetings so as not to slow down the rest of the class (see below). Early in the semester, we will offer sections on the basics of policy analysis, writing policy memos, presenting oral briefings, and working in groups. Most students who have been through the MPP1 core and Spring Exercise, or who have comparable professional experience, should not need to attend these sessions but may do so. Any student who has not taken the MPP1 sequence or its equivalent will be required to attend these sessions (perhaps 4 or 5 during the first month of classes). Materials distributed at these sessions will be made available on the course web site. During Part II of the course, the optional section meetings will provide an opportunity to further explore some of the approaches to policy analysis of complex adaptive systems that have been introduced in class. In Part III, the scheduled section time will be available for groups that are preparing joint products to meet if they so desire. The instructor and teaching fellow will post regular office hours outside of the scheduled section meeting times for those who wish to make use of them. How the Fall 2010 version of the course is different from earlier offerings: 1) As recommended by last term s students, I have shifted syllabus to emphasize more depth over breadth. In particular, students are now being asked to do 3 cases (rather than the 4 of last year). The time for each case has been extended to allow more extensive briefing, debriefing and discussion. 2) I have shifted the emphasis in the cases towards more analysis and design of policy, with less to the presentation of the results of the analysis. This comes in part in response to student requests, but also because the course is now positioned to build on the basic skills and approaches of policy taught in the first year MPP curriculum. I therefore assume that I can now spend less time on teaching the basics of policy memos and briefings, and more on being sure that the analysis behind those summary presentations grapples effectively with the special challenges posed by living planet issues. 3) I have reduced what was judged by last term s students to be the least rewarding parts of the workload. In particular, there are no mandatory problem sets, and policy memos as well as briefings are now team projects. I trust that these changes will help make the course more useful. I will nonetheless use several methods for getting, and using, input from this year s class to adapt the course as we move through it. Version history for this document: V 1.0 100809 Original posted to web. 8