Research Agenda and History

Founded in 2009, The Institute is an international collaborative project to foster research and policy dialog about the structure and potential for global governance and international law affecting pressing issues of global regulation and policy. We are particularly focused on the relationship between the transnational regulatory environment and the potential for sound economic development. The Institute aims to foster innovative approaches to global policy and political economy, and new thinking about international legal and institutional arrangements, with particular emphasis on ideas and issues of importance to the global South. Much about how we are governed at the global level remains a mystery. Scholars at the Institute are working to understand and map the levers of political, economic and legal authority in the world today.

At IGLP, we are convinced that governance is not only rules, institutions and procedures. It is also ideas – ideas that matter. If for a generation everyone thinks an “economy” is an input‐output mechanism to be managed, and then suddenly everyone thinks an economy is a market for allocating resources to their most efficient use in the shadow of a price system, a great deal has changed. That is also governance. The transformation of ideas about what an “economy” is, whether it is national or global, autonomous or institutionally embedded, can be as important as transforming the institutions that sustain the operations of that economy.

Click HERE to learn about Research Projects currently underway at the Institute. 

All of our academic programming is designed to support our research agenda, starting with our signature June IGLP Workshop for young scholars, which focuses on opportunities to build collaborative teams to deepen their thinking through multi‐year participation in our various streams, pro‐seminars and advanced workshops. At the same time, we are continuing our history of sponsoring important transnational dialog. In August 2011, for example, we co-sponsored a major public discussion of the place of a rising Asia in the political economy of the world, to be held in Bangkok Thailand. The event brought current and former political leaders from Europe, Latin America, Africa, the United States and Asia into dialog with academics and researchers from our global network. In this spirit, we have brought leading figures from the foreign affairs establishment in Moscow to Harvard for an intensive discussion of “Putin’s Russia in International Affairs,” and have hosted scholars from across the Americas interested in rethinking Latin America’s position in global legal and political culture. In collaboration with the German Foreign Ministry, we sponsored a series of critical reflections on global governance in workshops held in Germany, at Harvard and in Mexico. We worked closely with ASEAN to support their candidate for appointment as Secretary General of the United Nations. We are now helping to support efforts by an important regional government in the Middle East to improve its ability to tackle governance issues in ways distinct from the demands and one‐size‐fits‐all programs of the international financial institutions and foreign aid agencies.

We have also regularly convened international research teams for an on‐site investigation of policy directions and experience, through site visits and discussions with policy makers, often followed by an academic conference reflecting a first cut on the findings of the research inquiry. Over the coming months, we are planning research workshops in Thailand and in the Middle East. In 2008, we convened law and development specialists from more than ten countries in Bogota, Colombia for a series of workshops and research trips, co‐sponsored with the University of Los Andes (Bogota). We explored national development plans and lending strategies at the Central Bank – as well as the Constitutional Court ‐‐ and investigated, for comparative purposes, the coffee growing and flower growing industries.  Thereafter, David Kennedy chaired a conference on New Perspectives in Law and Development at the University of Los Andes. The research team came from across Latin America, South Africa, Europe, Egypt, Syria and the United States. We sponsored a similar research initiative in 2007 in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The research mission focused on innovative initiatives implemented in Brazil by public and private institutions from “participatory budget” projects, the “bolsa escola”, negotiated land‐reform, the HIV/AIDS program, the Novo Mercado at the São Paulo Stock Exchange, the favela disarmament campaign, as well as the development contributions made by industrial leaders such as Embraer Airlines and Petrobras. In 2006, we sponsored a workshop and conference on the use of foreign law in legislation with the Library of the National Congress in Santiago, Chile. Participants included development and comparative law specialists from almost a dozen countries in North and South America, Europe and the Middle East. We have also cosponsored a workshop on “globalization and development” in Moscow, Russia which brought experts from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Austria, and the United States to meet with senior colleagues in Moscow for discussion.