Charting The Financial Crisis: U.S. Strategy and Outcomes

Part of a series of XX papers -RESPONDING to the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS: What We Did and Why We Did It- presented on September 11-12, 2018, at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and co-sponsored by the Yale Program on Financial Stability, in light of the 10th Anniversary of the Global Financial Crisis

The post-2015 debate and the place of education in development thinking

As the end date for the Millennium Development Goals approaches so the focus on goals, visions and policies for development after 2015 becomes ever heightened. However, there has been relatively little engagement by educational research community in these debates. What then is being written about education in the key post-2015 documents? How is education's role in development conceptualised by those most central to shaping new accounts? I explore these issues through an analysis of a key text on post-2015, the High Level Panel Report of May 2013 (UN-HLP 2013), and an exploration of a year's worth of posts on 30 prominent blogs and websites discussing post-2015 matters. This leads me to two further, interlinked questions: what are the implications of potential marginalisation and irrelevance from these debates for the field of international education and development research? What are the potential dangers for the field of closer engagement in these debates and their growing use of social media? The academic international education and development community may be more comfortable in keeping these policy debates at a distance, but this may play against the strong educational research drive to engage in social science that makes a difference. If there is to be engagement with post-2015 then alternative ways of developing practices of research, action and dialogue need further strengthened. This may include interdisciplinary dialogues around such issues as early childhood development, the role of professions in development or environmental sustainability. Engagement with the post-2015 debate would also require a careful analysis of how best to engage with the instrumentalised accounts of education that are dominant in the policy-advocacy arena. This would entail more strategic positions on the uses and dangers of social media. At the same time, engagement with development studies as well as the development policy community requires a reappraisal of epistemological and methodological stances

Addressing Literacy Issues: Dan Wagner

The following is a video archive of All Children Reading: An International Literacy Day Event

Reconstructing Authoritarianism: The Politics and Political Economy of Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Syria

This memo was drafted for POMEPS Studies 30,“The Politics of Post-Conflict Resolution.” Policy and academic debates about Syria and other war torn countries in the Middle East routinely invoke the concept of reconstruction. In the literature on conflict resolution and development, post-conflict reconstruction is regularly defined in terms of transformation.[1] The aim of post-conflict reconstruction is not to return war-torn societies and states to their pre-war conditions, but to make use of the space that violent conflict is presumed to create to put in place institutions, norms, and practices that address the causes of violence and provide a basis for effective governance and sustainable peace. This includes transforming frameworks of economic governance so that conditions of economic “normalcy” can be established—conditions that differ from those that operate during conflict. In this literature, reconstruction succeeds by “transforming post-conflict countries into functioning states that can offer their citizens basic public services.”[2] We know reconstruction is working when “the main features of an economy no longer stem from the war but from the normal conditions of the economy.”[3

Addressing Literacy Issues: Dan Wagner

The following is a video archive of All Children Reading: An International Literacy Day Event

Preserving our Institutions: The Continuity of the Presidency (Second Report)

The report addresses Presidential succession after a terrorist attack