ISS offers reformers experiences, support

Those interested in social, economic and political issues will be pleased to find a rapidly expanding pool of research and support beyond the stacks of Firestone Library.

Created in 2006, Innovations for Successful Societies is a research program for public servants, policy makers and scholars alike — and not necessarily just University students. The program is directed by University faculty hosted jointly by the Wilson School and the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice.

Before the creation of ISS in 2006, University faculty members had been receiving numerous requests from public sector reform leaders for assistance in strengthening the structure of their communities, Bobst Center director and Wilson School professor Jennifer Widner said. Foreign policy makers were concerned with building more effective government centers, city management, dampening violence during election campaigns and increasing police responsiveness to community needs, among other improvements.

“We didn’t have good answers, then, but now, as a result of the program, we can help people share experiences and we can point out the pros and cons associated with some of the options available,” Widner explained. She added that she hopes the program will soon become one of the go-to places for practical and scholarly work on the political economy of institutional reform.

Currently, the program’s audience lies in large part outside the FitzRandolph Gates. ISS provides an online idea bank for policy makers looking to create effective institutions in the midst of conflict in environments with limited resources. The database contains access to case studies of worldwide reform efforts, interviews with those involved and related research.

According to Widner, ISS currently has 62 case studies posted online, with about 50 others in progress. The database also includes around 300 oral interviews with public sector reformers. Both case studies and interviews are available to the public free of charge.

Widner herself has used ISS-published case studies in her MPA courses, and she hopes to use them in future undergraduate courses.

Recent publications on the ISS website bear titles that span numerous fields and countries, from “Building the Police Service in a Security Vacuum: International Efforts in Kosovo, 1999-2011” to “Cooling Ethnic Conflict Over a Heated Election: Guyana, 2001-2006.”

Meanwhile, those looking for work experience can be part of the ISS internship program, which takes on about eight University undergraduate interns a year. ISS currently employs three interns for the school year who work 10 hours per week conducting background research for the program.

Past interns include Rachel Jackson ’11, who interned at the organization her senior year and said its resources were helpful in her thesis work on the development of post-colonial and post-conflict governments in sub-Saharan Africa — particularly given the fact that the University did not approve or fund her thesis research trip to Somalia. Fortunately, two ISS researches had conducted interviews in Somalia, and she was able to use their materials in her thesis.

But while the case studies and other academic resources ISS provides are helpful, the organization’s potential lies beyond academic support, Jackson said.

“The real value is in what they can do for potential reformers in other countries,” she said.

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Melina Meneguin-Layerenza ’11, also a former ISS intern, said that ISS taught her the value of narratives and tracing processes to reformers themselves, and that it prompted her to look beyond quantitative and theoretical politics courses.

ISS “demonstrates that you can be somewhere in the middle, producing research that is understandable and useful for the audiences that are tackling complexities on the ground instead of locked up in an ivory tower,” Meneguin-Layerenza said.

But ISS isn’t just about academia, Associate Director Laura Bacon said — it also supports public servants in many countries and interacts with non-profit organizations such as the World Bank, USAID and the Africa Governance Initiative. These parties often use ISS case studies in their work and will also alert ISS to interesting reform cases about which it may wish to write studies. And the program won’t stop there, she said, noting the possibility of the program expanding its presence on campus in the future.

“One of the contributions [of the program] to the University is curriculum development,” Bacon said.