IIS Research and Training Programs

Institute of International Studies; University of California, Berkeley

Research and Training Programs

The New Era Foreign Policy Project is part of the Center for America's Global Strategic Challenges, a recently established Berkeley-Duke collaboration based at the Institute of International Studies (IIS) at Berkeley and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke.The Center's name reflects its approach and focus -- on strategic challenges that are global in scope, and the role to be played and policies to be pursued by the United States. The core rationale is that responsible U.S. global engagement should be systematically proactive, seeking to understand significant medium and long-term global changes, and to influence strategically the impact of such trends on U.S. interests and those of the rest of the world.

The Green Governance, Green Peace Program fosters international exchange between the University of California, Berkley, and research institutions in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil addressing the question of new approaches to environmental policy and law, conflict resolution, and local resource management. Substantively, the project focuses on three common strategic resources: forests, minerals/energy, and water. Green Governance brings together two innovative lines of thinking about the environment and environmental policy. The first concerns environment and conflict and the second focuses on decentralized and community-based resource control. Our project links both threads through localized green governance, namely, the panoply of new resource management institutions and legal solutions emerging all over the world. This program is an outgrowth and continuation of the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics.

MacArthur Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance, chaired by Professor Pranab Bardhan (Economics) and Samuel Bowles (Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst), serves as a magnet for international research on economic inequality. Traditional debates about equality pitted one incomplete viewpoint against another: egalitarians favored an idealized conception of government interventions and downplayed incentive problems in the public sector, while their adversaries opposed these interventions in favor of an idealized view of the private economy, overlooking the incentive problems posed by inequality in the process of private exchange. This project's goal is to create a better framework for understanding the consequences of economic inequality and the constraints facing attempts to alleviate it. The program brings together economists, political scientists, and sociologists from the United States, India, and Europe with expertise ranging from field work in economic anthropology to microeconomic theory. The research network is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Berkeley APEC Study Center promotes multidisciplinary research activities on the Berkeley campus related to APEC -- the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, created in 1989 by countries in the Asia-Pacific. BASC focuses on the dynamic interplay between governments and business, on environmental policy standards, and on the management of health policy in the context of changing forms of regional and international cooperation efforts. Professor Vinod Aggarwal (Political Science and the School of Business) serves as director of BASC.

The Program in Population Research is a lively center of demographic research, functioning as an intellectual communications node for demographic research in Northern California while maintaining strong national and international ties. Its mission is to facilitate and conduct research in demography and to support teaching and research responsibilities of academic programs. The long-term goal of the program is the establishment of a major center in mathematical and technical demography directly relevant to substantive and theoretical areas in anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and international relations. The program, chaired by Professor Ronald Lee (Economics and Demography), is closely affiliated with the Department of Demography, and sponsors the Demography Brown Bag Colloquium and the BACPOP colloquium.

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