Linking Research to Policy

When one looks at these two problems, youth and preventing deadly conflict, it seems that with regard to both sets of studies, the first step was insight and understanding through research. So in your role as head of a foundation, you have to both support research and find what's out there to come up with a compendium of what we know, where we are, on the particular issue.

Exactly so.

Let's look at the issue of violence, preventing deadly conflict. How did you undertake that responsibility when you decided to focus on that issue?

In the Carnegie years, those fifteen years as president of Carnegie, what we did with respect to children influenced the way I came to structure the problem of preventing deadly conflict. Just as you say, we went to the research evidence and asked, what do we know about the essential requirements for healthy child development? Healthy in the broad sense: for kids to have a decent chance to grow up inquiring and problem-solving, healthy and vigorous, decent and constructive. What do we know about that? And then we asked, to what extent are those essential requirements for healthy development being met under contemporary conditions? And where they're not met, what adjustments can be made by the pivotal institutions that have the power to shape development? What adjustments can they make to be more effective and more constructive? Starting with the family but going on to schools and the health care system and community-based organizations, religious institutions, and the media. And then, how can the powerful institutions surrounding, like government and business and the scientific community, help these pivotal front-line institutions do what's necessary to give kids a decent chance?

That was the kind of intellectual structure, and in the course of that, going from research to social action. Now, like the man who was speaking prose all his life and didn't realize it, I sort of woke up one fine day and thought that that same intellectual structure applies to preventing deadly conflict. What does it take for people to live peacefully together? Partly it's a developmental question, how can they grow up in such a way as to diminish prejudice and ethnocentrism, and learn to live together? Partly it's an inter-group, an international question. But still, what does the research evidence tell us about the conditions under which that can happen? Foster peaceful living, essentially. Overcome conflicts before they become violent. Conflicts are ubiquitous, this is a contentious species, but they don't have to pass the threshold of mass violence. When do they and when don't they pass that threshold? So very careful scholarship on those issues does exist and we tried to strengthen it, fill some gaps.

And then we began to ask, well, okay; if we know that about the favorable conditions and the unfavorable conditions for going toward mass violence, what institutions have something to say about it and how can those institutions be strengthened to prevent mass violence? In this case, the institutions were governments and international organizations, both global and regional, and the institutions of civil society have great potential in this regard. Business and the scientific community, educational institutions, religious institutions, the media and nongovernmental organizations that focus on conflict. We felt that the institutions of civil society have a role to play, greater than in the past, which could augment what governments do and what intergovernmental organizations do. So it's the same kind of logic, from research to social action.

Defining the point of intervention once you have the research, trying to figure out how one can most usefully intervene to create the conditions that you desire.

Right. And one part of it that was brought home to me by our work with children and youth, but also by our work during the Cold War on U.S. - Soviet relations, was that you need to give a lot of attention, perhaps more than most foundations have up until now, to ways of moving toward implementation of knowledge and skill. One way is bringing scientists and scholars and other experts together with policy makers in a systematic way for mutual benefit, so the policy makers can be informed by research evidence of the best available innovations in their field, and on the other hand so that scientists and scholars and other experts can be stimulated to look more deeply into questions that are highly salient for policy makers. So, that linkage of the policy community with the scholarly community was something that we pursued during the Cold War in international relations and have developed further in this latest report on preventing deadly conflict. And so too with children and youth, that linkage.

The other point is to generate public understanding somehow, and it's very hard to do that. That partly means a higher level of attention in colleges and universities, and even in K-12 schools. More serious disciplined education on the critical issues, whether it be child and adolescent development on the one hand or preventing deadly conflict on the other. And it also means, to the extent possible, discussion of these issues by the public at large through community organizations, through the media. The media, of course, have enormous potential for illumination but it's no simple matter, by any means, to get adequate, fair, accurate treatment. But still, it is possible and some good things have happened in that regard.

Those are two issues, enhancing public understanding and linking independent experts with policy makers, which I believe are vitally important if you're serious about translating research to social action for important matters of public good.

On the public education side, there's also an element of trying to build a new political consensus on an issue. Because, at a certain point in both of these issues of youth and deadly conflict, don't you run up against the politics of the issues and interests that are vested and don't want to move in a new direction?

Well, I think from the standpoint of foundations, as they're chartered under American law and as they mainly pursue their activities in practice, they have to do whatever they do in a non-partisan way; at least that's my own view. We address great issues that concern everybody. It's hard to see how, regardless of political party or ideological bent, we wouldn't want children to grow up inquiring and healthy and decent. It's hard to see how that's a partisan matter, fundamentally. Similarly it's hard to see why it would be in anybody's interest to, let's say, blow up the world. It's not obvious that that should be a partisan matter, although I recognize that in every country it's quite possible to turn any important issue into partisan controversy. But we have tried very hard to do whatever we do in ways that would bring the best available information, well documented, to the attention of people right across political lines. Not to avoid the political community. Not to avoid political problems: that's an important part of the human experience and social reality. But to do it in a way that is respectful of different political parties and perspectives and positions. To put it out there to try to build a better factual base on which policy makers of different political backgrounds can make decisions, or on which citizens can make better decisions.

In some ways you got your feet wet on these issues as a foundation director in your early work at the foundation on U.S. - Soviet relations and preventing nuclear conflict.

Yes.

In retrospect, how do you think that work contributed to the ultimate resolution, in the sense that the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union, as we knew it, collapsed?

Dr. Hamburg and others at a Reagan press conference at the White House, June of 1984

Well, I could perhaps best be descriptive. I do believe that we played a useful role. It's impossible I think for me, or probably for anybody, to say how useful it was. There were some distinguished figures in public life who have spoken to the value of the contribution. Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar would be two examples. Gorbachev would be an example. President Clinton is an example. People in public life who have said that the Carnegie contribution on this problem was worthwhile, was constructive. And I'm very pleased. It's such an important problem that if you can make a little contribution at the margin it's worthwhile.

Now, operationally, what we did in that area has lessons for other foundations and for universities and other people at large, beyond the Cold War. We first of all tried to draw together the best available scientists and scholars to work on various facets of the problem: arms control, crisis prevention, the origins of the Cold War, conceivable paths of the Cold War. Maybe the most challenging thing we did was to bring together scientists and scholars from a number of major universities, like Berkeley, and say to them, "Think hard about how a nuclear war could actually start, and then think hard about preventative measures that might be taken in each path to prevent a nuclear war." That, very simple, proved to be very stimulating. Then rather quickly as the work evolved, as some brilliant people on this campus and elsewhere worked those problems, we tried to find ways to bring them together with policy makers in our own country, on neutral turf, to try out these ideas. And then, before long, we brought them together with counterparts on the Soviet side, scientists and scholars, the best we could connect with, not political hacks or KGB types but eminent people matched with ours to think about arms control and crisis prevention, particularly; and later on after Gorbachev, a broader range of issues -- Eastern Europe and Third World flash points, and how indeed we might get out of the Cold War altogether. That was only meaningfully possible after Gorbachev came to power; but arms control and crisis prevention were meaningful earlier. So you had U.S. - Soviet joint study groups working together.

Now one thing that happened was that after Gorbachev came to power, some of the scientists and scholars from the Soviet side had walk-in access to him. They became very important advisors to him in his early years, and through them I met him early and to some degree became a broker for Western people and Western ideas. He wanted that. He had immense intellectual curiosity. And we tried to help him meet that curiosity. On the U.S. side, we also had many feedback loops of this work to presidents, to President Reagan, to President Bush, and to leaders in Congress, both parties and both houses. We tried to find ways in which, not with conclusions or any kind of dogmatism, we could encourage people to open their minds to a wider range of possibilities. At the time of the deepest Cold War confrontation -- I think there's an important general lesson in this -- we and the Soviets were both fixed on a very narrow range of possibilities, like Dorothy Parker's comment on some famous actress on opening night: "Last night So-and-So ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B." With respect to the Cold War, we were running the gamut of policy options from A to B.

I think foundations, by stimulating and supporting work in universities and research institutes, were able to open up a larger number of possibilities, and thoughtful policy makers and an informed, concerned public took that seriously.

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