Sustainability Science Program
Home |
Overview |
People |
Activities |
Events |
Documents
Links |
Sponsors |
Grants & Fellowships |
Stay Informed
Search |
Contact Us
Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship Recipients
The Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship, made by the Science Technology and Public
Policy Program and the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government, supports Kennedy School of Government PhD
candidates conducting early exploratory research on energy or environmental
issues. The fellowship is designed to enable doctoral students to expose
themselves to a wide range of researchers and research approaches early in their
training before they make their ultimate choice of a dissertation topic. The
$7,000 award can be used for a variety of activities such as conducting field
work, providing support for an internship, or learning a foreign language in a
host country. The award is a tribute to the late Dr. Vicki Norberg-Bohm whose
work focused on understanding the process of technological change and the role
of public policy for stimulating innovation and diffusion of
environment-enhancing technologies. For more information on the fellowship,
click here. Information on fellowship recipients and their research follows
below.
2008 Recipients
Eliana Carranza: Soil Composition, Market Opportunities and Missing Women in India
Avinash Kishore: Energy-Irrigation Nexus in India
Laurence Tai: Bureaucratic Determinants of Environmental Policy Outcomes in Industrialized Democracies
2007 Recipients
Sebastian Bauhoff: Environmental regulation as health policy
Robyn Meeks: Investigations into integrated water resource management and
development
Suerie Moon: Access to knowledge, medicines and development
2006 Recipients
Kelsey Jack: Investigating payments for ecosystem services as an example
of an incentive-based environmental policy approach
Kira Matus: Exploring green chemistry as a leapfrogging innovation for
sustainable development
===============
2008 Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship Recipients
Eliana Carranza: Soil Composition, Market Opportunities and Missing Women in India
Eliana Carranza will study how geographic and environmental factors affect economic opportunities for women and influence families' preferences for sons over daughters. The study brings together elements of soil science, crop science and anthropology literature and contributes to the unresolved debate in the economic literature regarding the importance of geography as determinant of development. In order to explain regional variations in the severity of the missing women problem in India, it tests the central hypothesis that higher soil clay content is related to a more balanced gender ratio. However, the argument is not one of purely environmental determinism. It simply intends to highlight that the physical environment plays a very important role given the limited labor market opportunities for women. The results will have implications for land use planning, crop intensification and soil preservation as well as the advancement of women in the labor market and education system.
Eliana Carranza is a PhD candidate in the Program in Political Economy and Government, which is jointly supported by the Kennedy School of Government, the Economics Department, and the Government Department. She holds an MPA in International Development from Harvard University and a Licentiate degree in Economy from the Universidad del Pacífico in Peru, where she was a professor in the Department of Economics. She is an author of studies on social protection systems in Peru. Her research interests include political economy of development, particularly the links among inequality, social expenditure, investment in human capital, and social mobility. She is a recipient of the Norberg-Bohm Fellowship (2008) and the Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science (2008). She, with Eduardo Moron, contributed a chapter analyzing pension reform in Peru in Lessons from Pension Reform in the Americas, (Sinha and Kay, eds, Oxford, 2007). Her faculty hosts at Harvard are Sendhil Mullainathan and Rohini Pande.
Avinash Kishore: Energy-Irrigation Nexus in India
Avinash Kishore will study the energy-irrigation nexus in India. Since 1970s, runaway growth in groundwater irrigation, powered mainly by highly subsidized electricity and diesel, has created an agrarian boom with massive productivity and livelihood benefits in India. However, these benefits have come at huge environmental and financial costs. Consequences of continuing with 'business as usual' will be disastrous for farmers, environment, power sector and overall economy. Yet, few state governments have attempted to raise and rationalize power tariffs, fearing reprisal from 30 million groundwater irrigators. In recent years, two states-West Bengal and Gujarat-are taking bold steps to tackle the problem using two different technical strategies. The Government of West Bengal has committed to universal metering of all electricity connections with an option of time-of-day metering for farmers while the Government of Gujarat has made massive investments in creating parallel electricity distribution lines for farms to strictly enforce power supply rationing. This research will study these two interventions to understand how farmers' use of energy and water responds to change in tariff structures and supply conditions. Both states have vibrant water markets where each pump owner sells water to a number of small and marginal farmers. The second objective is to study the effect of these changes on the market structure and consequent welfare outcomes.
Avinash Kishore is a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on using economic instruments to solve environmental problems in developing countries. He is the recipient of the Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship (2008) and a Sustainability Science Fellowship (2008). Kishore received an MPA and Certificate in Science, Technology and Environment Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University in 2007. Before coming to the US, he worked for four years on water policy in South Asia with International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a CGIAR organization. At IWMI, he published papers on agrarian development, rural electrification and management transfer of public irrigation systems. He holds a Post-graduate Diploma in Rural Management (equivalent to MBA) from the Institute of Rural Management Anand in India.
Laurence Tai: Bureaucratic Determinants of Environmental Policy Outcomes in Industrialized Democracies
Laurence Tai will focus on environmental regulation, the product of a complex political process with many stakeholders. Often this process has produced command-and-control regulation that provides environmental benefits but does so at a significantly higher economic cost than necessary. As the difficulty of improving environmental quality increases, so does the need for cost-effective legal rules. Market-based instruments are more cost-effective than existing command-and-control regulation; however, they have not become as common as they could be. The policymaking process is shaped not only by stakeholders' preferences but also by the institutional framework in which it operates. Bureaucracies in national governments are an integral part of this framework, so policy outcomes are influenced by their organizational structures and rules. Because changing these structures and rules may produce more cost-effective regulation, it is worth ascertaining the bureaucratic determinants of environmental policy outcomes. Tai will research these determinants in four industrialized democracies, which strive to address similar environmental challenges with a variety of bureaucratic structures: Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US. The fellowship will support data collection and interviews in these countries, as well as language training in Japan. Three features to be analyzed are bureaucrats' interactions with regulated industries, internal agency structure, and turnover among civil servants and political executives.
Laurence Tai is a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is jointly pursuing a JD at Harvard Law School. Since coming to the HKS, he has conducted research on expropriations and renegotiations following natural resource contracts between developing countries and multinational corporations. In addition to environmental and energy policy, his research interests include formal political theory and organizational economics. He received a BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College in 2006.
2007 Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship Recipients
Sebastian Bauhoff: Environmental regulation as health policy
Sebastian Bauhoff will explore the intersection of environmental and health
policies by examining air pollution regulations in different settings. Many
countries are struggling to simultaneously meet the needs of environmental
protection and population health. Sebastian plans to explore several questions
on the intersection of these policy areas: How do policy makers perceive the
link between environmental and industrial policies and health policy? Are there
possible win-win strategies that contain emissions and improve health? Why is
this link not featuring more prominently in policy and research discussions?
Sebastian will examine air pollution policies and their implementation in the
US, Europe and China. Sebastian plans to use the fellowship to discuss with
policy makers and local experts in California, London and Beijing.
Sebastian Bauhoff is a doctoral student in the Health Policy Program, an
interdisciplinary program at Harvard. His research interests include statistical
methods, development economics and the intersection of health economics with
environmental and finance policy. Sebastian spent two years in China researching
rural development policies, with a focus on land and health care reforms. He
received a Master of Public Administration in International Development from the
Kennedy School of Government in 2005 and wrote his thesis on scaling up
successful research projects in developing countries, using a school-based
deworming program in Kenya as example. Sebastian received a B.Sc. in Economics
and Economic History from the London School of Economics.
Robyn Meeks: Investigations into integrated water resource management
and development: Linkages between local, national and international levels
Robyn Meeks will explore the linkages between water resource management at
the local, national and international levels in developing countries. Her
research will involve examinations of both macro level approaches to water
resource management, such as integrated water resources management (IWRM),
and micro level approaches promoted through decentralization processes in
the form of community managed water supply systems. Robyn will perform these
investigations by meeting with practitioners, academics, and communities for
whom water resource management is a critical issue. This fellowship will
support a trip to Stockholm, Sweden and field work.
Robyn Meeks is a PhD student in the Public Policy Program at Harvard
University’s Kennedy School of Government. She is interested in water
resource management and development, particularly IWRM, transboundary
issues, and water supply and sanitation. Robyn taught environmental studies
as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan and researched tariff collection
for rural water supply systems in the Kyrgyz Republic as a recipient of a
Fulbright fellowship. In addition, Robyn has consulted for the Water
Governance Programme within the Energy and Environment Group of the United
Nations Development Programme. Robyn received a B.A. in political science
from Brown University and a Master’s in Environmental Management,
concentrating in water, science and policy, from Yale University, where she
was awarded the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship for study of
the Russian language. While at Yale, Robyn interned at Resources for the
Future, served as the editor of UNDP’s newsletter on public-private
partnerships in the urban environment (PPPUE), and conducted research for
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat in
preparation for the 2005 Conference of the Parties.
Suerie Moon: Access to knowledge, medicines and development
From the globalization of patents to the race for exclusive rights to the
human genome, there have been increasing efforts by private actors to
restrict access to knowledge, a trend that will have important consequences
for equity and sustainable development. At the same time, scholars,
entrepreneurs and civil society organizations (CSOs) have been successfully
advocating for greater openness and knowledge-sharing. Beginning in the late
1990s, this issue hit center stage as the worsening AIDS pandemic galvanized
grassroots groups worldwide to protest against patent monopolies that kept
the prices of effective medicines too high for the developing world. Since
then, the debate has evolved considerably; today CSOs – including patient
groups – are involved in the writing and revision of national patent laws,
in shaping WTO rules, and creating new international norms. Nowhere is this
debate more vocal and salient than India. CSOs have become involved in
determining the contours of India’s new patent regime through several key
court cases that have already had an important impact on the availability of
key AIDS and cancer drugs. This case raises broader questions, such as: How
does the involvement of CSOs impact access to knowledge and the ways in
which it is generated? Does CSO involvement signal a trend toward the
democratization of (specifically public health related) research? If so,
what are the implications for society? Furthermore, how do CSOs, and
grassroots patient groups in particular, influence areas such as
patentability criteria that are traditionally reserved for technical
experts? Suerie plans to use the fellowship to support travel to India and
Geneva to interview key actors from civil society, as well as government,
international organizations and the private sector, with the aim of further
honing these research questions and starting dissertation work.
Suerie Moon is a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow in the Sustainability Science
Program at Harvard’s Center for International Development and a doctoral
candidate in the Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government. Her research interests include the ways in which civil society
organizations (CSO) shape policymaking at the global level, and the
accountability relationships that develop between and among CSOs and global
public institutions. She also works on analyzing the relationship between
access to medicines, innovation and intellectual property rights policies,
and the implications for equity in public health in the developing world.
Moon is currently a contributor to the "Institutional Innovations in Global
Health Project" at CID, funded by the KSG Dean’s Acting in Time initiative.
The project takes as a case study the historical and contemporary
international responses to malaria, in order to draw broader conclusions
about effective global health institutions with applicability to other
health areas. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was a campaigner, researcher,
and writer for the Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
international Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, where she focused
on intellectual property rights, equity prices for medicines, and research
and development into ‘neglected diseases.’ She received a Masters in Public
Affairs with Distinction from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University, and graduated cum laude with
a BA in history from Yale University.
2006 Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship Recipients
Kelsey Jack: Investigating payments for ecosystem services as an
example of an incentive-based environmental policy approach
Kelsey Jack will increase her understanding of the implementation and study
of payments for ecosystem services (PES) interventions in developing
countries. Payments for ecosystem services seek to correct the market
failure surrounding many environmental goods and services through transfers
from beneficiaries to providers in exchange for increasing service provision
to socially optimal levels. Exploring innovative PES interventions in
Indonesia and Bolivia, together with interviews and interactions with PES
researchers and practitioners, will increase her perspective on the
questions and challenges facing both of these groups. By the end of the
fellowship, she hopes to have defined the most urgent questions and
challenges surrounding PES implementation, assessed the value of a
comparative research approach, and developed an awareness of both available
data and the most pressing data gaps. Support will be used to fund fieldwork
in Indonesia and Bolivia.
Brooke "Kelsey" Jack is a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She is interested in individual
level decision-making related to natural resources in developing countries,
with a focus on the role of institutions in shaping these decisions. Kelsey
spent two years with IUCN - The World Conservation Union in Lao PDR, where
she worked on issues of conservation and rural livelihoods. She has also
done research for the World Resources Institute, for the Dean of New York
University Law School, and for the Princeton Environmental Institute. She is
a recipient of the Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship and a Center for
International Development Doctoral Research Grant. Kelsey received her
undergraduate degree in public and international affairs from Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School.
Kira Matus: Exploring green chemistry as a leapfrogging innovation for
sustainable development
Kira Matus will explore the potential for green chemistry in the developing
world. Much of the new investment in large-scale chemical infrastructure is
occurring in the developing world, especially in India, China and Eastern
Europe. Kira’s work will explore the following questions: For what reasons,
and under what circumstances, can the practices and technologies of these
nations “leapfrog” ahead of developed nations? What kinds of innovations,
and in which sectors, is innovation most promising? What public policies,
regulatory structures, and public-private partnerships could promote
innovation in the chemical sector? Kira will take the analytical framework
that she has been developing based on US examples, and discuss it with
experts in the countries where new infrastructure is being planned. She
plans to spend time in China and India discussing technological innovation
for development with local experts.
Kira Matus is a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. Her research focuses on the application of
scientific and technical knowledge to the problem of sustainable development
in emerging and high-growth urban areas. She received an SM in Technology
and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. While at
MIT, she was a research assistant in the Joint Program for the Science and
Policy of Global Change. As a part of that group, she worked to quantify the
economic impacts of the health effects of urban air pollution on the
economies of the United States and China. She was a participant in the
Alliance for Global Sustainability’s IPOS graduate student symposium in 2004
in Thailand. She co-led a group of high school students on ICEP - a service
and exchange trip to Sweden and Russia in 2005. Matus is a 2003 magna cum
laude graduate of Brown University where she earned an ScB with honors in
chemistry.
Direct site comments or questions to
CID's Webmaster.
Copyright ©2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Last revised 20 June 2007