Governance

Senior Fellow of the Future of Diplomacy Project, David Ignatius examines the Navy’s energy diet that began seven years ago with an edict from newly appointed Secretary Ray Mabus, who issued five goals for radically changing how the Navy bought and consumed fuel.

SOMETIMES SMALL stories capture large truths. So it is with the fiasco that is the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, connecting Boston and Harvard Square. Rehabilitation of the 232-foot bridge began in 2012, at an estimated cost of about $20 million; four years later, there is no end date in sight and the cost of the project is mushrooming, to $26.5 million at last count.

This glacial pace of implementation does not reflect the intrinsic technical difficulty of the task. For comparison, the Anderson Bridge itself was originally completed in just 11 months in 1912. General George Patton constructed nearly 40 times as much bridging in six months as American soldiers crossed the Rhine to win World War II. And even modern-day examples abound; for instance, in 2011, 14 bridges in Medford were fixed in just 10 weekends. In contrast, the lapses exposed by the Anderson Bridge project hold key lessons for America’s broader inability to solve its infrastructure problems.

The Broadmoor Project: New Orleans Recovery was an effort initiated in 2006 to work with residents of New Orleans' hard-hit Broadmoor neighborhood in designing and implementing a strategy for post-Katrina neighborhood recovery. Conceptualized and led by then Center senior fellow Doug Ahlers, and hosted by the Belfer Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program, the project enabled Harvard Kennedy School and other Harvard students to put their governance skills into action to help rebuild one of America's great cities. It also provided an opportunity for New Orleans' neighborhood leaders to build on their leadership skills through intensive Kennedy School courses.

With its success, the Broadmoor Project officially ended in 2011. It has lived on, however, as a best practices model for disaster recovery throughout the world

"Values Conscious design may not be able to prevent the kind of deliberate fraud perpetrated by Volkswagen, but it could well have revealed Volkswagen's design choices as dubious, to say the least."

On this week's episode of "Security Mom," Juliette Kayyem sits down with Thad Allen, then the Chief of Staff for the U.S. Coast Guard, to hear about his experience in New Orleans, 10 years after the tragic incidents of Hurricane Katrina. Allen had been sent to New Orleans to try to fix the botched recovery efforts of the national government.

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

David Keith is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, housed at the Belfer Center. He has worked at the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy for 20 years and has received numerous honors for his work, including the MIT prize for excellence in experimental physics and TIME magazine’s selection as one of its Heroes of the Environment.

Africa's economic transformation through innovation is within reach. But this cannot be effectively pursued while continuing to be hobbled by the untenable view that industrial diversification needs to start with adding value to the continent's materials.

During a candid conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School, prominent women leaders in the science and media industries recently talked about their efforts to remedy this. They ignited a fervent discussion and identified achievable goals that both professional women and their male and female bosses can work toward. The event, “Sexism, Science, and Science Writing: Promoting Women Leaders in the Lab and the Newsroom,” drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 women and men of all ages—from a female high school student to senior astrophysicists and science writers.

The decision of the University of Massachusetts Amherst to categorically ban Iranians was not only gross discrimination, but also a violation of academic freedom. A similar policy was adopted in the Netherlands a few years ago and later rebuked by the Dutch Supreme Court. Universities must remain open to people from all races, religions, and nationalities.