Economic Opportunities for Indigenous Communities in British Columbia

Guest blog by Wendy Koh, LEG’23

Throughout this course, I have gained valuable insights into the complexities of economic growth.

Some key ideas and learnings that I will take away:

Apply for our Implementing Public Policy Program!

Are you a public policymaker frustrated with the limited impact of your government’s policies? Do you see many policy ideas starting out with promise but ending up incomplete or ineffectively implemented? Are you trying to improve implementation? If so, you are not alone.

Join with peers from around the globe for a dynamic, highly engaging blended learning format of Implementing Public Policy (IPP) offering a combination of both online and in-person learning, as well as applied action learning —where participants will have time to work on their implementation challenge, apply their learning to their own context, reflect on their experiences, share and learn, and become part of a global community of practice.

The program will be delivered over a period of six months from May 13th to November 12th, 2024, and will include four components:

1. Online modules: where you will consider public policy success as well as failure, and reflect on your implementation challenge.
2. On-campus: where you will be immersed in an intense, interactive environment with Harvard faculty and practitioners to discuss your respective challenges, and explore different implementation methods that could help achieve your policy goals. 
3. Action learning: where you return to your organization and continue working on your implementation challenge using the tools and tactics you learned with support from the faculty.
4. Community of Practice: where you will join Harvard Kennedy School’s Implementing Public Policy Community of Practice, a network of alumni committed to improving policy implementation around the world.

Empowering Singapore’s Young Innovators: Navigating Challenges in Resource Mobilization using PDIA

Guest blog by Tingyu Wu, IPP’23

Embarking on this PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) program has been quite a ride, and it’s changed my life in unexpected ways. Let me give you some context—I’m not your typical politician or government official. By day, I’m a co-founder of a marketing consulting company, keeping busy with the usual corporate hustle. But beneath the surface, I’m deeply passionate about technology hardware products and social entrepreneurship. 

Diversification of the Export Economy in Bangladesh

Guest blog by Fabian Klinge, LEG’23

The past ten weeks have been a fantastic learning journey for me. The course has managed to strike an ideal balance between policy and implementation – between cutting-edge theoretical approaches to analyzing growth challenges on the one hand, and practice-based strategies for bringing about change in real-world (development) settings on the other. 

Improving Students’ Wellbeing and Learning through a Social Emotional Learning Policy in Lebanon 

Guest blog by Nahla Harb, IPP’23

The IPP course was very enriching and a life changing experience for me. The key learnings encompassed a wide range of tips of knowing what and knowing how, starting from PDIA, a creative approach in policy making to the communication and the leadership styles. 

Addressing the Labor Shortage in the State of Wyoming 

Guest blog by John Jenks, IPP’23

The policy implementation challenge that I worked on during the Implementation Public Policy (IPP) course was the shortage of workforce in the State of Wyoming that discourages new firms from entering the state, inhibits existing firms from growing or expanding, and/or contributes to existing firms closing shop and moving out of the state. Wyoming is the least populated state in the country with approximately 580,000 residents and is the second most sparsely populated state behind Alaska. In addition to remoteness, the economy of Wyoming has historically been reliant on the extraction industry—namely of fossil fuel like oil, gas, and coal. As a result of this reliance and the reliance of this industry on state revenues, the state’s economy has been historically subjected to booms and busts. To add to this, there has been little concerted effort to diversify the economy and workforce of the state. Additionally, there is a pervasive undercurrent throughout the state of a fear of growing or growing too fast. Much of this fear has come from seeing what has happened in Utah with the Wasatch Front and Colorado with the Front Range. As a result of these factors, Wyoming faces headwinds in terms of growing and diversifying the state’s economy to make the economy more resilient for current Wyomingites and future generations.  

Reducing Socio-spatial Segregation among Youth and Children in Helsinki

Guest blog by Antti Leino, IPP’23

When presented with the opportunity to take the Harvard IPP program in the spring of 2023, I was a bit hesitant at first as my workload was substantial. But I also saw it as a chance to evaluate and view my day-to-day job from a wider angle, maybe even learn something and improve my productivity.

The problem I had with the IPP program is that my role at the city executive office is not concentrated on a single issue, problem or even sector, but instead the oversight of the operations of the whole city. I work as a political advisor to the Mayor of Helsinki and have held the position since the beginning of this municipal election term from the beginning of August 2021. My role also consists of the role of acting as a chief of staff to the mayors’ cabinet consisting of 10 people. It can be argued, my position is a role where I can potentially make a change of (at least some) things. Similar to Jay-Z, I would say that I have 99 problems and not enough time for one.

Strategic Leadership for Revenue Collection in Liberia

Guest blog by Alvina Sharpe, IPP’23

Some key learnings from this course are about being or managing oneself to be a strategic lead. A leader who understands the direction of his or the team goal(s) and is in the position to clearly articulate the goal to the least person in the organization for understanding. It is also important to note that for the ideas or goal to be bought by the management team of the organization or authorizers, the goal(s) must be in alignment with the strategic direction of the organization. A strategic leader must be aware there are external factors that could alter the achievement of the team goal and as such he/she must be aware of the environment in which the organization is operating. 

Policy Design and Implementation in Rwanda: Against All the Odds 

Guest blog by Ronald Mutabazi, IPP’23

Friday, 27^th May, 2022 looked like another ordinary working day. I was to attend a meeting on projects implementation in the Ministry of Finance. We discussed a long list of them, with boring stories of why their implementation was rated “on-track”, “on-watch”, “off-track”, blah, blah, blah… I had seen most of these projects in various reports for the last decade I’ve been working in the Prime Minister’s Office. Back in my office, I found myself in a deep reflective mood the whole afternoon, frustrated and wondering why implementation is such a big challenge across government Ministries, not only with projects but most public policies as well.  

Failure of Effective Curriculum Implementation in Lebanon

Guest blog by Hyam Ishac, IPP’23

I have been assigned as the president of the center of educational research and development (CRDP) for more than 1 year. From that time until now, I am leading the process of curriculum development in Lebanon. During this time, CRDP, with different stakeholders were working on developing the national SEL policy. Lebanon, like other countries, faces difficulties in public policy implementation, so the different stakeholders decided to engage all the teams including CRDP in the IPP course at Harvard University in order to ensure the effective implementation of this policy. While I was attending the course in Harvard last June and trying to define our story and our problem and trying to deconstruct it to different sub-problems that may form the origin(s) of this problem, I thought that it is better to address the implementation of the ‘New Lebanon Curriculum’, where SEL is integrated in it. Since then, the journey of ‘Inquiry’ about the effective curriculum implementation has been launched. I started the process of asking questions, connecting with different stakeholders and tried to find convenient entry levels to start with. We in CRDP believe that we have to solve our problems not by getting external international expertise and help, but by going through step-by-step analysis of our context to find the valid solution for our problems.