2016 is shaping up to be a potentially critical year for Afghanistan. ISIS is rising there, the Taliban is gaining ground, the stability of the Afghan government is deteriorating by the day, and national elections are coming in October. The US, China, Pakistan, and the Afghan government are currently holding talks aimed at bringing the Taliban to the table to try negotiate an end to the war.

Of those countries, it's Pakistan that is the most significant. Pakistan has probably the most influence of anyone over whether those talks will succeed in getting the Taliban to agree to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with the Afghan government. But there's a lot more going on with the peace talks that are perhaps the country's best or only remaining hope.

To understand how this works and why it matters, I spoke to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Afghanistan. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Jennifer Williams: Could you start by just explaining how Pakistan has been involved in the conflict between the Taliban and Afghanistan historically?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: That goes back to the creation of independent Pakistan, with issues having to do with the Pashtun minority in Pakistan, which is also the majority population of Afghanistan, and irredentist claims by Afghan Pashtun politicians, as well as the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, who at different times supported either Pakistan or Afghanistan and played the two against each other.

Then you have the Taliban emerging in the 1990s, and Pakistan fully supports the Taliban: They help equip it, they provide intelligence, advisers, and during the Taliban era when they ruled country, Pakistan is one of only three countries that recognize the Taliban regime.

They continued supporting the Taliban throughout the past decade, and US-Pakistan relations became very fraught and complicated. It's never been easy. Pakistanis sometimes use the expression that the United States treats Pakistan like a condom: uses it when they need it then discards it when they are finished with it. It's a fairly common saying in Pakistan, especially in the military. So there is a sense of betrayal on the part of the United States, untrustworthiness, that it's an exploitative relationship on the part of the US toward Pakistan.

I should also say that Pakistan has long supported many Islamic extremist groups as part of its asymmetric policy toward India, and some of these groups have now mutated, or they slipped Pakistan's full control.

Even with respect to the Afghan Taliban, there is a lot of support from the Pakistani state intelligence services and military to the Afghan Taliban. At the same time, Pakistan has been under enormous US and international pressure to act against them, and so they will take the occasional action against the Afghan Taliban as well. But those actions are mostly seen as halfhearted, incomplete window dressing.

JW: So what role is Pakistan playing today? I know that they just had the four-party talks and that Pakistan has been insisting that these talks take place in Pakistan. Are they trying to speak for the Taliban?

VFB: I'm not sure that it's a fair characterization that they are speaking for the Taliban. Certainly the Afghan government, including in the latest talks, often insinuates or alleges that Pakistan speaks for the Taliban. But they clearly do not.

The relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan is hardly smooth and perfect. Many members of the Afghan Taliban deeply resent the level of Pakistani interference, even as the group has been supported by Pakistan. There is a lot of Afghan Pashtun nationalism also among the Taliban that deeply resents the influence and attempts at control by the Pakistani state.

Part of the key issue in the relationship is that although Pakistan supports the Afghan Taliban, and although it has historically supported other extremist groups, it does not have perfect control. And arguably, its control is diminishing. And so they posture, they do their double game. They want to appear strong, and so they posture that they have much greater control than they have, but at the same time they deny that they have any nefarious role.

In reality, they are playing both sides against the middle, and they often have much less capacity to control and rein in the extremist groups, including the Afghan Taliban, than many assume. The widespread criticism of Pakistan is one of its duplicity and its nefarious activity and its lack of willingness to act against the Afghan Taliban. Those are true, but they are also coupled with limits to their capacity. They are riding a tiger that they cannot control fully.

So they have been hosting these four-way talks that involve them, the US government, the Afghan government, and the Chinese government. The Afghan government is desperate to achieve some sort of negotiated deal with the Taliban. It feels under tremendous pressure, the military is taking a pounding from the Taliban, and the government lacks legitimacy.

The US has similar views on the notion that the way out of the predicament in Afghanistan is a negotiated deal. The Chinese also like the idea. They have their own influence in Pakistan. China would very much like to say that they finally achieved what the US failed to do over the past decade, that they will bring peace to Afghanistan, and that they will do it by enabling the negotiations.

Pakistan is responsive to China. Their relationship with China is much stronger than their relationship with the United States. They often tell the US that China is their old friend, that China is the country that hasn't betrayed them, unlike the United States. China has promised massive economic development in Pakistan at $40 billion. The Pakistanis often say to the US that the Pakistan-China relationship is "greater than the Himalayas and deeper than the ocean." Very flowery.

JW: What's the relationship like between the Afghan government and Pakistan today?

VFB: The crucial man there really is the Pakistani chief of the army staff Raheel Sharif; no relation to [Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif. I think that there is sort of goodwill and motivation right now, even on the army staff — but that is juxtaposed with, again, the limits of control even the chief has. With almost clockwork regularity you have a round of negotiations in Pakistan or you have a meeting between Raheel Sharif and [Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani, and the next day a bomb goes off in Kabul and people die, or the Indian consulate is attacked.

All those ploys are meant to destroy any beginning of a more positive relationship and have been very effective in subverting the process. The same goes on between Pakistan and India. Meanwhile, Ghani is taking an enormously risky strategy with respect to the negotiations. It's vastly unpopular in Afghanistan, and many, many Afghans hate Pakistan and blame it for all of their troubles.

They use Pakistan as the explanation of everything that ever goes wrong in Afghanistan. And the Pakistanis are responsible for a lot, but there's much, much blame and responsibility that lies on Afghan politicians and Afghan people.

So Ghani's outreach and engagement with Pakistan is extremely unpopular. He's spending an extreme amount of political capital, and does not have support from his partner in the government, Abdullah Abdullah, and the northern Tajik factions that hate Pakistan with great vitriol. So the more Pakistan is unable to deliver things like the Haqqani network, reducing or stopping its attacks in Kabul, the more politically impossible for Ghani the process will be.

JW: So what does that mean in terms of the stability of Afghanistan's unity government?

VFB: The unity government is extremely strained. "Unity" it isn't. The Pakistani negotiation angle is just too big for the strain. It might be strategically important. It might be a very significant element in getting any negotiation going, but it's also extremely politically costly, and the longer it doesn't produce anything, the more politically costly and unsustainable it will be.

In October, there are supposed to be parliamentary elections and district elections in Afghanistan, and, more important, this loya jirga [a national assembly of Afghan elders]. And unless there is some sort of major breakthrough by the summer, a lot of the negotiations and political process with both the Taliban and Pakistan will be put on ice, because it will just be politically impossible in the context of the loya jirga and the elections.

So they really have until the summer to make some sort of breakthrough, and then you will have months of morass and extreme political instability in Afghanistan, but it will also not be conducive in any way to improving either the relationship with Pakistan or the negotiations.

JW: How does Pakistan fit into the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan? What's the relationship there? And how might this affect the peace negotiations?

VFB: The rise of ISIS-Khorasan is one of the most interesting developments. It complicates the negotiations for the Taliban. They oppose the negotiations, and they're a big problem for Mullah Mansour and those who want to negotiate. They enable defections, make them easy, and make them costly.

At the same time, it is interesting because ISIS does not have the same linkages to Pakistan that the Afghan Taliban had, even though ISIS includes many defectors from the Taliban. They quite specifically reject what they call the "yoke" that Pakistan has put on the Afghan Taliban, and they call the Afghan Taliban leadership traitors because of the close relationship with Pakistan.

Moreover, ISIS-Khorasan also has quite a few members of various Pakistani extremist groups like Lashkar-e Taiba and members of TTP [Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan]. So there is also a lot of resentment and hostility toward Pakistan.

I think the rise of ISIS might make Pakistan be cooperative to some extent, but on the other hand, I think it will also reinforce in the mind of many Pakistan security controllers that it's important to cultivate the Afghan Taliban as friends against the bigger danger of ISIS.

JW: Now that ISIS-Khorasan has directly targeted Pakistan, the consulate in Jalalabad, do you think Pakistan will take action?

VFB: I think they'll take action against ISIS and groups like Tehrik-e Taliban. I don't think it will produce more resolve to go after the Afghan Taliban. That's my view. Others are hoping that they will finally accept the realities and really believe that they have to fight all of the insurgents, all of the terrorists, and that they cannot differentiate among them. I am not persuaded that that will, in fact, happen.

JW: So what does this all mean for the prospects for peace? Are you hopeful at all?

VFB: I think the peace negotiations are important, but I am skeptical that anything will happen quickly.

I think that if by summer the Taliban has been willing to join the negotiating table, that will be an important breakthrough, but nothing will be agreed. The summer will be very bloody, and then there will be the political [wrangling] associated with the loya jirga and the elections.

In my view, even if the Taliban comes to the negotiating table, we are looking at years of negotiations, and certainly no breakthrough before 2017 and likely much longer.

And so the question is whether we, the United States, are prepared to stand by with Afghanistan for that long and whether the Afghans will have the resolve. So it's really important that the military and the police fight as hard as they can, because the weaker they fight, the more they defect, the more intimidated they are, the more brain drain that flows from Afghanistan, the stronger the Taliban is viewed and the more intransigent they will be in the negotiations. Now the negotiations will be very much about the military battlefield as much as they will about what's happening at the table for a long time.

This interview was originally published by Vox.

       

This week, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it would postpone oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea and the broader American Arctic indefinitely. The decision came in the wake of disappointing output from its Burger field, the high costs associated with the project (already nearing $7 billion), the “challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska,” and a growing public relations problem with environmental groups opposed to Arctic drilling.

This decision is a momentous one—both for the future of the U.S. energy policy and the ability of the international oil industry to balance global oil supply and demand. The announcement came only days after Hillary Clinton spoke out against the Keystone Pipeline, not only because it would lead to the consumption of more fossil fuels but also because much of the oil might be exported. With broader opposition to lifting the ban on crude oil exports gaining momentum in the White House, it is clear that at least part of the nation’s political leadership is moving in a nationalistic direction. This means that the United States—with its vast resources—is unwilling to help meet the burgeoning energy needs of the world’s population: especially the 1.2 billion people who have no access to commercial energy.

Shell’s decision highlights four significant and diverse areas of concern for the future of energy globally and energy policy here in the United States.

Mapping supply and demand

Shell and much of the rest of the international petroleum industry had viewed the Chukchi Sea as one of the last great oil frontiers. The Chukchi and adjoining Beaufort Seas are vital for meeting the estimated 12 to 15 million barrels per day (mmbd) of additional oil demand projected by almost all oil forecasts (both inside and outside the industry) needed between 2035 and 2040. 

Without the U.S. Arctic, the other areas projected to make major contributions by this time are Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, shale oil around the world (including North America), the Orinoco region of Venezuela, and the pre-salt offshore Brazil. Needless to say, given the political turmoil in Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil—as well as concerns about the long term stability of Saudi Arabia—one has to wonder: Where will the world discover additional, reliable crude oil supplies without a major contribution from the Arctic?

Many in the environmental community argue that we will not need fossil fuels in the future, predicting a turn to renewables, enhanced energy efficiency, large scale battery storage, and electric vehicles. Unfortunately, this has no basis in fact. Clearly renewables will grow exponentially as their prices fall, new technologies will increase energy efficiency, large scale battery storage will commence, and many electric vehicles will hit the road. But there are currently more than 260 million gas and diesel vehicles running on U.S. roads alone, with less than 1 percent of these running on electricity. With transportation fuel demand mushrooming globally, it’s unlikely that oil consumption in the transportation sector will die or even decline significantly. 

Fossil fuels for development

Drilling in the Arctic poses unique environmental risks which must be managed through state-of–the-art technology and accompanied by the most stringent regulatory enforcement. A recent National Petroleum Council examination of all possible challenges involved in Arctic offshore drilling found that drilling can be done safely. Yet despite these findings, most major national environmental groups have opposed any drilling in the Arctic and have even asserted that Shell’s decision is a vindication of their position. But these groups don’t seem concerned or even thoughtful about the long-term implications of the U.S. energy industry’s abandonment of the Arctic.

With the world’s population forecast to rise by 1.6 billion people by 2035, do we really think global oil demand won’t continue to rise? While I recognize that we must do everything to limit the growing use of fossil fuels to attack climate change, do we really have no moral obligation to help countries emerge from poverty, which will almost certainly involve continued use of fossil fuels? 

During his recent visit to America, Pope Francis called for the world to make a renewed commitment to help the “poorest of the poor,” and the United Nations has also put forward new sustainable development goals that include an expansion of energy access to those who are either unserved or underserved. Focusing our policies exclusively on shutting down U.S. fossil fuel development, as some environmental groups advocate, takes away resources that can be used to improve global health, education, clean water, and women’s empowerment—all of which are all directly related to energy access. In looking at girl’s education, for example, increasing energy availability allows water to be pumped up from the river, obviating the need for arduous, tedious work for the women and girls that would otherwise have to carry this water by hand to their communities, limiting time for education. The availability of energy allows vaccines to be safely stored, crops to be refrigerated, and children to have the electricity available to study at night. 

All of these benefits—and many others—cannot happen without improving electricity access, which still involves fossil fuel. The United States can and should play a role in this effort.

Jostling for Arctic access

Shell is not the only company to experience setbacks in the Arctic. Italy’s ENI SpA and Norway’s Statoil ASA just yesterday had another regulatory setback due to delays in obtaining permission from Norway to commence production. In June, a consortium including Exxon and BP PLC suspended its Canadian Arctic exploration, noting insufficient time to begin test drilling before the expiration of its lease in 2020. In addition, Exxon had to curtail its plans to drill in the Russian Arctic after the United States imposed sanctions on Moscow and its energy industry following the annexation of Crimea. 

Russia, though, remains active in the Arctic, and it can be assumed that once sanctions are lifted, many oil companies will try to gain a toehold. China, Korea, India, and Singapore, among other countries, have expressed interest in gaining access to the region’s mineral, energy, and/or marine resources. In several cases, they are building ice-worthy vessels to give them the capability to do so. The Bering Strait is emerging as a significant new maritime route in desperate need of enhanced regulation.

In a report last year, my colleagues and I looked at key recommendations for offshore oil and gas governance as the United States assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council. Beyond highlighting the resource potential of the region, our work looked at increasing needs for safety and security as a result of increasing transportation across the Arctic. Even as the United States stands to be less involved in Arctic energy development, it is our duty as chair of the Arctic Council to lead in region. 

Alaska is a state, not a park

The promise of the Arctic has inspired adventurers, explorers, geographers, scientists, and entrepreneurs for generations and will continue to do so in the future. The United States should be actively involved in helping to ensure that Arctic resources are developed and used prudently—rather than sit on the sidelines with myopic dreams of leaving the region a pristine wilderness. Arctic inhabitants—both natives and others—of course want to keep the Arctic safe, but they do not want to make it a museum. 

Development of the region’s resources accounts for nearly 95 percent of Alaska’s revenues. If we deny its development, are we prepared to make a line item in the federal budget to pay for Alaska to remain a park? 

       

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A total of 80 currency boards have come into existence at some point since the mid-19th century, but to date only about 15 of them still exist, among which is the CFA franc monetary zone. The future sustainability of the CFA franc zone, to which the CEMAC CFA franc belongs, is increasingly questioned in the light of increasing asymmetries in exposure to external shocks, differential speeds of adjustment of the real exchange rate following shocks, differential impacts in economic fundamentals, and low levels of intra-regional trade and financial flows between CEMAC and WAEMU. For the CEMAC bloc of countries in particular, the future sustainability of the fixed exchange regime depends crucially on continued oil exports, which currently represent about 90 percent of export revenues and 40 percent of GDP. Should oil reserves deplete in the near future or oil prices decline significantly, a substantial source of foreign reserves would be lost, thereby exposing the regime to collapse. Even without resource depletion, continued volatility in global financial markets is increasing the risks of collapse of the fixed exchange regime as oil and commodity price swings ignite currency speculation as well as render reserves much more volatile. Against this backdrop, the present study examines the stakes facing the CEMAC CFA franc, discusses the exit options from the currency board and makes recommendations towards a sustainable monetary policy framework for CEMAC countries going forward. The analysis points to the imperative of pursuing a full monetary union with a single CEMAC franc pegged to the U.S. dollar and further suggests that, like the experience of the eurozone, the CEMAC monetary arrangement can be best implemented only by complying with the principle of political union.

 

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2015 is a pivotal year for global development; this fall is a pivotal moment. Meetings this fall will determine the global vision for sustainable development for 2030.

Three papers being released today—“Action implications focusing now on implementation of the post-2015 agenda,” “Systemic sustainability as the strategic imperative for the post-2015 agenda,” and “Political decisions and institutional innovations required for systemic transformations envisioned in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda”—set out some foundational ideas and specific proposals for political decisions and institutional innovations, which focus now on the implementation of the new global vision for 2030. This blog summarizes the key points in the three papers listed below.

Fundamentals for guiding actions, reforms and decisions

1) Managing systemic risks needs to be the foundational idea for implementing the post-2015 agenda.

The key political idea latent but not yet fully visible in the post-2015 agenda is that it is not a developing country poverty agenda for global development in the traditional North-South axis but a universal agenda based on the perception of urgent challenges that constitute systemic threats.

The term “sustainable development” by itself as the headline for the P-2015 agenda creates the danger of inheriting terminology from the past to guide the future.

2) Goal-setting and implementation must be effectively linked.

The international community learned from the previous two sets of goal-setting experiences that linking implementation to goal-setting is critical to goal achievement.  G-20 leader engagement in the post-2015 agenda and linking the success of the G-20 presidencies of Turkey (2015), China (2016), and Germany (2017) would provide global leadership for continuity of global awareness and commitment.

3) Focus on the Sustainable Development Goals must be clear.

Criticism of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as being too defuse and too detailed is ill-founded and reveals a lack of political imagination. It is a simple task to group the 17 goals into a few clusters that clearly communicate their focus on poverty, access, sustainability, partnership, growth, and institutions and their linkages to the social, economic, and environmental systemic threats that are the real and present dangers.

4) There must be a single set of goals for the global system.

The Bretton Woods era is over. It was over before China initiated the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). Never has it been clearer than now that maintaining a single global system of international institutions is essential for geopolitical reasons. For the implementation of the post-2015 agenda, all the major international institutions need to commit to them.

Proposals for political action and institutional innovations

In a joint paper with Zhang Haibing from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS), we make five specific governance proposals for decision-makers: 

1) Integrating the SDGs into national commitments will be critical.

The implementation of the post-2015 agenda requires that nations internalize the SDGs by debating, adapting and adopting them in terms of their own domestic cultural, institutional, and political circumstances. It will be important for the U.N. declarations in September to urge all countries to undertake domestic decision-making processes toward this end.

2) Presidential coordination committees should be established.

To adequately address systemic risks and to implement the P-2015 agenda requires comprehensive, integrated, cross-sectoral, whole-of-government approaches.  South Korea’s experience with presidential committees composed of ministers with diverse portfolios, private sector and civil society leaders provides an example of how governments could break the “silos” and meet the holistic nature of systemic threats.

3) There needs to be a single global system of international institutions.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.” Together with a speech Li gave at the OECD on July 1st after signing an expanded work program agreement with the OECD and becoming a member of the OECD Development Center, clearly signals of China’s intention to cooperate within the current institutional system. The West needs to reciprocate with clear signals of respect for the increasing roles and influence of China and other emerging market economies in global affairs.

4) We must move toward a single global monitoring system for development targets.

The monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the post-2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them. The U.N., the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF have all participated in joint data gathering efforts under the International Development Goals  (IDGs) in the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the 2000s. Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play now, but they need to be brought together under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system.

5) Global leadership roles must be strengthened.

By engaging in the post-2015 agenda, the G-20 leaders’ summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered post-2015 agenda. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues. The G-20 finance ministers can play an appropriate role by serving as the coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the post-2015 agenda. A G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council, composed of the heads of the presidential committees for sustainable development from G20 countries, could become an effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability.

These governance innovations could re-energize the G-20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination, and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the post-2015 agenda.

       

       

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With a number elections now underway in Europe and the United States, populist politicians are gaining support by tapping into frustration with the lingering effects of the global financial crisis and the eurocrisis, mounting fears of terrorism, concerns surrounding record levels of migration, and growing doubt over political elites’ abilities to address these and other crises. The global economic order is already beginning to be impacted by the mounting political pressure against it. Trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership that form the cornerstone of the global economic order have met with significant resistance. Brexit’s reverberations have already been felt in international markets. Fissures within the European Union and American anxiety towards a U.S. global role could have a pronounced impact on the international economic system.

On July 14, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted an event tied to the recent publication of Nonresident Senior Fellow Daniel Drezner’s new paper, “Five Known Unknowns about the Next Generation Global Political Economy.” The event was an opportunity to discuss the future of the global economic order given rising populism and discontent with globalization. Panelists included Nonresident Senior Fellow Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; Caroline Atkinson, head of Google’s global public policy team and former White House deputy national security advisor for international economics; and David Wessel, director of the Brookings Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

Thomas Wright, director of IOS, provided brief opening remarks and moderated the discussion.

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• The future of the global economic order in an era of rising populism

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• The future of the global economic order in an era of rising populism

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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Editor's Note: This blog post is part of The Primaries Project series, where veteran political journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro, along with scholars in Governance Studies, examine the congressional primaries and ask what they reveal about the future of each political party and the future of American politics.

Even though they have come to dominate political campaigns, Super PACs and their shadowy counterparts are barely old enough to qualify for pre-kindergarten. Since these big-bucks independent groups have only been legal since 2010, we are still groping to understand the long-term role that Super PACs are apt to play in congressional politics—especially primaries.

With the demonization of the Koch Brothers by the Democrats and the attacks on liberal givers like Tom Steyer from the right, it is easy to assume that Super PAC donors are ideologues. Scorched-earth contests like the Mississippi Republican Senate primary further fuel this impression. Thad Cochran versus Chris McDaniel could be viewed as a proxy war between the GOP establishment (personified by Karl Rove's Super PAC American Crossroads) and the Tea Party (working through groups like Club for Growth Action).

But there is another very important, but far less publicized, role that Super PACs are playing in this year's congressional primaries. And when the internecine warfare in the Republican Party dies down, this type of Super PAC involvement in party primaries may become the norm.

Two recent GOP House primaries in winnable districts in New York illustrate this alternative model. In both cases, Super PACs took on the role—once left to the political parties—of vetting the candidates. Super PAC donors and their campaign consultants made their own decisions about who is electable and who has the right political pedigree. And in these New York primary contests without any clear ideological markers, heavy spending by Super PACs made all the difference.

Twenty-nine-year-old Elise Stefanik was a major beneficiary of Super PAC spending in her primary in New York's rural 21st District that runs from the Saratoga racetrack to the Canadian border. Stefanik has never run for public office before, but she boasts all of the right credentials to appeal to Washington Republican politicos. Even though she calls herself a "small businesswoman" in her TV ads, Stefanik served on the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush and was in charge of 2012 debate preparation for Paul Ryan.

Small wonder that American Crossroads and Karl Rove invested heavily in Stefanik's primary race, spending  $772,000 in attack ads excoriating her GOP rival, Matt Doheny. This was, by the way, the only House primary in the nation in which American Crossroads has made a significant investment to distinguish between Republicans. And the Super PAC's involvement was certainly not motivated by ideology. As the Watertown Daily Times put it on the eve of the Stefanik-Doheny primary, "It's difficult to point to a single issue on which a big divide exists between the two."

Yes, Doheny—a largely self-funding investment banker who had lost two prior races for the House—was a flawed Republican candidate. And Stefanik was the embodiment of the kind of message discipline beloved by campaign consultants. But it is hard to believe that electability alone prompted attack ads with tag lines like: "Matt Doheny—it would be a big mistake to send him to Congress."

American Crossroads, which spent more than either the Stefanik or Doheny campaigns, prevailed in the June 24th primary. Stefanik romped home with 61 percent of the primary vote.

The same pattern emerged in the Republican primary in New York's 1st District on the tip of Long Island. The major player this time was the US Jobs Council, which is heavily funded by hedge-fund mogul Robert Mercer, whose home is in the district. As Mother Jones reported in an article by Molly Redden, Mercer's Ahab-like obsession has been defeating Democratic incumbent Tim Bishop ever since the congressman voted for the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.

Both candidates in the Republican primary to oppose Bishop had their weaknesses in appealing to a conservative electorate. State Senator Lee Zeldin carried the burden of votes in Albany that could be interpreted as raising taxes. George Demos, a former SEC lawyer, was heavily supported by his wife's in-laws who, in normal times, are liberal California Democrats.

In truth, there were scant philosophical differences between the two conservative Republicans. Newsday columnist Lane Filler wrote, "Both oppose abortion, think taxes are too high, support gun rights, hate Common Core, favor a strong national defense, are against 'amnesty' for immigrants here illegally...I have not turned up any meaningful difference between them on policy."

But that didn't prevent the US Jobs Council from spending more than $200,000 on attack ads that portrayed Demos, who had been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki, as a creature of "Nancy Pelosi's people." A typical ad charged that Demos "is trying to use the Pelosi cash machine to buy a seat in Congress."

Even though Demos donated $2 million to his own campaign, it was not enough to hold off the onslaught of Super PAC attacks. In the end, Zeldin defeated Demos in the primary by a 62-to-38 percent margin.

Politico reporter Ken Vogel in his praiseworthy new book, Big Money, likens Super PAC donors to meddlesome "sports junkies who plunk down hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a professional team." Often the motivation of these mega-givers is the arrogant belief that because they are rich, they know more about politics than the pros. With it comes the certainty that they can pick winners and losers in primaries just like they do with stocks on Wall Street.

And that is why the heavy Super PAC influence in these two little-covered New York House primaries may represent the wave of the future in party politics.

      

       

Executive Summary

At the invitation of President George W. Bush, the G20 leaders met on November 15, 2008, in Washington, DC, in response to the worldwide financial and economic crisis. With this summit meeting the reality of global governance shifted surprisingly quickly. Previously, major global economic, social and environmental issues were debated in the small, increasingly unrepresentative and often times ineffectual circle of G8 leaders. Now, there is a larger, much more legitimate summit group which can speak for over two-thirds of the world’s population and controls 90% of the world’s economy.

The successful first G20 Summit provides a platform on which President-elect Obama can build in forging an inclusive and cooperative approach for resolving the current financial and economic crisis. Rather than get embroiled in a debate about which country is in and which country is out of the summit, the new U.S. administration should take a lead in accepting the new summit framework for now and focus on the substantive issues. Aside from tackling the current crisis, future G20 summits should also drive the reform of the international financial institutions and address other major global concerns—climate change, poverty and health, and energy among others. With its diverse and representative membership of key countries and with a well-managed process of summit preparation and follow-up the new G20 governance structure would allow for a more inclusive deliberation and more effective response to today’s complex global challenges and opportunities.

Policy Brief #168

A Successful G20 Summit—A Giant Step Forward

Once announced, there was speculation that the G20 Summit would be at best a distraction and at worst a costly failure, with a lame duck U.S. president hobbled by a crisis-wracked economy and a president-elect impotently waiting at the sidelines, with European leaders bickering over seemingly arcane matters, and with the leaders of the emerging economies sitting on the fence, unwilling or unprepared to take responsibility for fixing problems not of their making.

As it turned out, the first G20 Summit was by most standards a success. It served as a platform for heads of state to address the current financial turmoil and the threats of the emerging economic crisis facing not only the U.S. and Europeans, but increasingly also the rest of the world. The communiqué unmistakably attributes blame for the crisis where it belongs—to the advanced countries. It lays out a set of principles and priorities for crisis management and an action plan for the next four months and beyond, and it promises to address the longer-term agenda of reform of the global financial system. Very importantly, it also commits the leaders to meet again in April 2009 under the G20 umbrella. This assures that the November G20 Summit was not a one-off event, but signified the beginning of a new way of managing the world economy. The U.S. Treasury, which apparently drove the decision to hold the G20 rather than a G8 summit and which led the brief preparation process, deserves credit for this outcome.

A Long Debate over Global Governance Reform Short-circuited

With this successful summit a number of unresolved issues in global governance were pushed aside virtually overnight:

• The embarrassing efforts of past G8 summits to reach out to the leaders of emerging market economies with ad hoc invitations to join as part-time guests or through the well-meaning expedient of the “Heiligendamm Process”—under which a G8+5 process was to be institutionalized—were overtaken by the fact of the G20 summit.
• A seemingly endless debate among experts about what is the optimal size and composition for an expanded summit—G13, G14, G16, G20, etc. —was pragmatically resolved by accepting the format of the already existing G20 of finance ministers and central bank presidents, which has functioned well since 1999. With this, the Pandora’s Box of country selection remained mercifully closed. This is a major accomplishment, which is vitally important to preserve at this time.
• The idea of a “League of Democracies” as an alternative to the G8 and G20 summits, which had been debated in the U.S. election, was pushed aside by the hard reality of a financial crisis that made it clear that all the key economic players had to sit at the table, irrespective of political regime.
• Finally, the debate about whether the leaders of the industrial world would ever be willing to sit down with their peers from the emerging market economies as equals was short circuited by the picture of the U.S. president at lunch during the G20 Summit, flanked by the presidents of two of the major emerging economies, Brazil and China. This photograph perhaps best defines the new reality of global governance in the 21st Century.

Is the G20 Summit Here to Stay?

The communiqué of the November 15, 2008 Summit locked in the next G20 summit and hence ordained a sequel that appears to have enshrined the G20 as the new format to address the current global financial and economic crisis over the coming months and perhaps years. Much, of course, depends on the views of the new U.S. administration, but the November 2008 Summit has paved the way for President Obama and his team to move swiftly beyond the traditional G8 and to continue the G20 format.

In principle there is nothing wrong with exploring options for further change. However at this juncture, we strongly believe that it is best for the new U.S. administration to focus its attention on making the G20 summit format work, in terms of its ability to address the immediate crisis, and in terms of subsequently dealing with other pressing problems, such as global warming and global poverty. There may be a need to fine-tune size and composition, but more fundamental changes, in our view, can and should wait for later since arguments about composition and size—who is in and who is out—could quickly overwhelm a serious discussion of pressing substantive issues. Instead, the next G20 Summit in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2009 should stay with the standard G20 membership and get on with the important business of solving the world’s huge financial and economic problems.

One change, however, would be desirable: At the Washington Summit in November 2008 two representatives for each country were seated at the table, usually the country’s leader and finance minister. There may have been good reasons for this practice under the current circumstances, since leaders may have felt more comfortable with having the experts at their side during intense discussions of how to respond to the financial and economic crisis. In general, however, a table of 40 chairs undoubtedly is less conducive to an open and informal discussion than a table half that size. From our experience, a table of 20 can support a solid debate as long as the format is one of open give and take, rather than a delivery of scripted speeches. This is not the case for a table with 40 participants. The G8 format of leaders only at the table, with prior preparation by ministers who do not then participate in the leaders level summits, should definitely be preserved. To do otherwise would dilute the opportunity for informal discussion among leaders, which is the vital core of summit dynamics.

What Will Happen to the G8 Summit and to the G7 and G20 Meetings of Finance Ministers?

As the world’s financial storm gathered speed and intensity in recent months, the inadequacy of the traditional forums of industrial countries—the G8 group of leaders and the G7 group of finance ministers—became obvious. Does this mean that the G8 and G7 are a matter of the past? Most likely not. We would expect these forums to continue to meet for some time to come, playing a role as caucus for industrial countries. In any event, the G20 finance ministers will take on an enhanced role, since it will be the forum at which minister-level experts will lay the ground on key issues of global financial and economic management to ensure that they are effectively addressed at summit level by their leaders. The G20 Summit of November 15 was prepared by a meeting of G20 finance ministers in this fashion.

It may well be that the dynamics of interactions within the G20 will cause coalitions to be formed, shifting over time as issues and interests change. This could at times and on some issues involve a coalition of traditional G7 members. However, with increasing frequency, we would expect that some industrial countries would temporarily team-up with emerging market country members, for example on agricultural trade policies, where a coalition of Argentina, Australia, Brazil and Canada might align itself to challenge the agricultural protection policies of Europe, Japan and the United States. Or in the area of energy, a coalition among producer states, such as Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia might debate the merits of a stable energy supply and demand regime with an alliance among energy users, such as China, Europe, Japan, South Africa and the United States. It is this potential for multiple, overlapping and shifting alliances, which creates the opportunities for building trust, forcing trade-offs and forging cross-issue compromises that makes the G20 summit such an exciting opportunity.

What Should Be the Agenda of Future G20 Summits?

The communiqué of the November 2008 G20 Summit identified three main agenda items for the April 2009 follow-up summit: (1) A list of key issues for the containment of the current global financial and economic crisis; (2) a set of issues for the prevention of future global financial crises, including the reform of the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank; and (3) a push toward the successful conclusion of the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations.

The first item is obviously a critical one if the G20 is to demonstrate its ability to help address the current crisis in a meaningful way. The second item is also important and timely. The experience with reform of the global financial institutions in the last few years has demonstrated that serious governance changes in these institutions will have to be driven by a summit-level group that is as inclusive as the G20. We would hope that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as chair—with his exceptional economic expertise and experience in the international institutions, especially the IMF—will be able to forge a consensus at the April 2 summit in regard to reform of the international financial institutions. The third agenda item is also important, since the Doha Round is at a critical stage and its successful conclusion would send a powerful signal that the world community recognizes the importance of open trade relations in a time of crisis, when the natural tendency may be to revert to a protectionist stance.

However, we believe three additional topics should be added to the agenda for the April 2009 G20 Summit:

• First, there should be an explicit commitment to make the G20 forum a long-term feature of global governance, even as the group may wish to note that its size and composition is not written in stone, but subject to change as circumstances change.
• Second, the communiqué of the November summit stated that the G20 countries are “committed to addressing other critical challenges such as energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, and the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease”. This needs to be acted upon. These issues cannot be left off the table, even as the global financial and economic crisis rages. If anything, the crisis reinforces some of the key challenges which arise in these other areas and offers opportunities for a timely response. The U.K.-hosted summit should launch a G20 initiative to develop framework ideas for the post-Kyoto climate change agreement at Copenhagen.
• Third, assuming the April 2009 summit commits itself—as it should—to a continuation of the G20 summit format into the future, it must begin to address the question of how the summit process should be managed. We explore some of the possible options next.

How Should the G20 Summit Process Be Managed?

So far the G7, G8 and G20 forums have been supported by a loose organizational infrastructure. For each group the country holding the rotating year-long presidency of the forum takes over the secretariat function while a team of senior officials (the so-called “sherpas”) from each country meets during the course of the year to prepare the agenda and the communiqué for leaders and ministers. This organization has the advantage of avoiding a costly and rigid bureaucracy. It also fosters a growing level of trust and mutual understanding among the sherpas.

The problem with this approach has been two-fold: First, it led to discontinuities in focus and organization and in the monitoring of implementation. For the G20 of finance ministers, this problem was addressed in part by the introduction of a “troika” system, under with the immediate past and future G20 presidencies would work systematically with the current G20 presidency to shape the agenda and manage the preparation process. Second, particularly for the countries in the G20 with lesser administrative capacity, the responsibility for running the secretariat for a year during their country’s presidency imposed a heavy burden.

For the G20 summit, these problems will be amplified, not least because these summits will require first-rate preparation for very visible and high-level events. In addition, as the agenda of the G20 summit broadens over time, the burden of preparing a consistent multi-year agenda based on strong technical work will be such that it cannot be effectively handled when passed on year to year from one secretariat in one country to another secretariat in another country, especially when multiple ministries have to be engaged in each country. It is for this reason that the time may have come to explore setting up a very small permanent secretariat in support of the G20 summit.

The secretariat should only provide technical and logistical support for the political leadership of the troika of presidencies and for the sherpa process, but should not run the summit. That is the job of the host member governments. They must continue to run the summits, lead the preparations and drive the follow-up. The troika process will help strengthen the capacity of national governments to shoulder these burdens. Summits are the creatures of national government authorities where they have primacy, and this must remain so, even as the new summits become larger, more complex and more important.

Implications for the Obama Administration

The November 2008 G20 Summit opened a welcome and long-overdue opportunity for a dramatic and lasting change in global governance. It will be critical that the leaders of the G20 countries make the most of this opportunity at the next G20 Summit on April 2. The presence of U.S. President Obama will be a powerful signal that the United States is ready to push and where necessary lead the movement for global change. President-elect Obama’s vision of inclusion and openness and his approach to governing, which favors innovative and far-reaching pragmatic responses to key national and global challenges, make him a great candidate for this role.

We would hope that President Obama would make clear early on that:

• He supports the G20 summit as the appropriate apex institution of global governance for now;
• He may wish to discuss how to fine-tune the summit’s composition for enhanced credibility and effectiveness but without fundamentally questioning the G20 framework;
• He supports cooperative solutions to the current financial crisis along with a serious restructuring of the global financial institutions;
• He will look to the G20 summit as the right forum to address other pressing global issues, such as climate change, energy, poverty and health; and
• He is ready to explore an innovative approach to effectively manage the G20 summit process.

These steps would help ensure that the great promise of the November 2008 G20 Summit is translated into a deep and essential change in global governance. This change will allow the world to move from a governance system that continues to be dominated by the transatlantic powers of the 20th century to one which reflects the fundamentally different global economic and political realities of the 21st century. It would usher in a framework of deliberation, consultation and decision making that would make it possible to address the great global challenges and opportunities that we face today in a more effective and legitimate manner.

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Policy Brief #175

As the nation strives to recover from the “Great Recession,” job creation remains one of the biggest challenges to renewed prosperity. Small businesses have been among the most powerful generators of new jobs historically, suggesting the value of a stronger focus on supporting small businesses—especially high-growth firms—and encouraging entrepreneurship. Choosing the right policies will require public and private decision-makers to establish clear goals, such as increasing employment, raising the overall return on investment, and generating innovations with broader benefits for society. Good mechanisms will also be needed for gauging their progress and ultimate success. This brief examines policy recommendations to strengthen the small business sector and provide a platform for effective programs. These recommendations draw heavily from ideas discussed at a conference held at the Brookings Institution with academic experts, successful private-sector entrepreneurs, and government policymakers, including leaders from the Small Business Administration. The gathering was intended to spur the development of creative solutions in the private and public sectors to foster lasting economic growth.

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	What incentives and assistance could be made available to “gazelles” and to small business more generally? What policies are likely to work most effectively? In the near term, government policies aimed at bolstering the recovery and further strengthening the financial system will help small businesses that have been hard hit by the economic downturn. Spurred by the interchange of ideas at a Brookings forum on small businesses, we have identified the following more targeted ideas for fostering the health and growth of small businesses (and, in many cases, larger businesses) over the longer run: Improve access to public and private capital. Reexamine corporate tax policy with an eye toward whether provisions of our tax code are discouraging small business development. Promote education to help businesses struggling with shortages of workers with particular skills, and promote research to spur innovation. Rethink immigration policy, as current policy may be contributing to shortages of key workers and deterring entrepreneurs who wish to start promising businesses in our country. Explore ways to foster “innovation-friendly” environments, such as regional cluster initiatives. Strengthen government counseling programs.

The term “small business” applies to many different types of firms. To begin, the small business community encompasses an enormous range of “Main Street” stores and services we use every day, such as restaurants, dry cleaners, card shops and lawn care providers. When such a business fails, it is often replaced by a similar firm. The small business community also includes somewhat bigger firms—in industries such as manufacturing, consulting, advertising and auto sales—that may have more staying power than Main Street businesses, but still tend to stay relatively small, with under 250 employees. While these two kinds of small businesses contribute relatively little to overall employment growth, they are a steady source of mainstream employment. If economic conditions do not support the formation of new businesses to replace the ones that fail, there would be a significant net destruction of jobs and harm to local communities.

Yet another type of small business has an explicit ambition for rapid growth. These high-growth companies are sometimes known as “gazelles.” According to the Small Business Administration, small businesses account for two-thirds of new jobs, and the gazelles account for much of this job creation. The most striking examples—such as Google and eBay—have tended to be in high-tech industries and were gazelles for a significant time before they graduated to be very large businesses. However, gazelles exist in all industry types and in all regions of the country, and the large majority are not grazing in the nation’s technology-dominated Silicon Valleys. According to one expert, the three largest industry categories for high-growth companies are restaurant chains, administrative services and health care companies. One non-high-tech example is Potbelly Sandwiches, a restaurant chain that began in Chicago. Another is the San Francisco-based Gymboree Corporation, a provider of child development programs and children’s clothing.

 

Fostering the Development of High-Growth Companies

High-growth small businesses represent only about 5 percent of total startups, making it important to determine how to spot and foster them. A key common characteristic is that growth is critically dependent on the entrepreneurs who start these companies; they are people on a mission, charismatic leaders who can inspire creativity and commitment from their staffs.

The age of these firms is highly correlated with when their growth is highest. Generally, the most dramatic growth occurs after at least four years of existence—and coincidentally lasts about four years—before it slows again to a more typical pace for small businesses. Of course, some firms such as Google defy this pattern and continue to experience high growth for many years.

Although dynamic small businesses can be found nearly everywhere and in many industries, some regions spawn more of them than others. These regions may have especially supportive features, such as a critical mass of potential workers with relevant skills, a social climate and network that encourage idea generation, locally available venture capital, or some combination of these factors.

Unfortunately, attempts to anticipate which companies or even industries are likely to produce gazelles are prone to error. Thus, excessive emphasis on national industrial policies that favor specific industries are likely misplaced. Without knowing how to target assistance precisely, broad strategies, such as assistance with funding, knowledge, contacts and other essential resources, may be the best approach to fostering high-growth businesses. Such support has the added value of also aiding Main Street businesses.

Many of the most promising policies focus on removing obstacles that hinder entrepreneurs with solid business plans from launching and expanding their businesses.

Funding

As a result of the burst of the dot.com bubble in early 2000 and the recent financial crisis, small businesses have found the availability of venture capital funds drastically diminished. The crisis has also made it more difficult to obtain funding from banks and other conventional means. These trends particularly affect the “missing middle” of small businesses—roughly, those with between 10 and 100 employees.

The venture capital market. Historically, venture capital has financed only a relatively small portion of small businesses, but those financed have tended to be the ones with the greatest growth potential. In recent years, firms that eventually grew to where they could issue initial public stock offerings generally relied more heavily on venture capital financing than the average small business.

The dollar value of venture capital deals funded today is only about one-fifth the size it reached at its peak. While the peak amount may have been too large, today’s value is probably too small. With their capital heavily invested in a small range of industries and locales, it seems likely that venture capital firms have missed a high proportion of potential investment opportunities. Further, “once burned, twice shy” funders have increasingly focused on larger, later-stage ventures. Consequently, mezzanine financing, which new companies need to survive and thrive in the critical early stages, is scarce.

The funding problems partly stem from venture capital firms today having less money to invest. Some investors who formerly contributed to such firms have become more risk-averse, and worse performance figures have discouraged new investors. Lack of venture capital affects some industries more than others, and even some green energy companies—viewed by some as one of the nation’s more promising industry sectors—have moved to China, where financial support is more readily available.

Bank lending. In contrast to large businesses, which can turn to capital markets for funding, many small businesses are dependent on banks for financing. Although the worst of the 2008–09 credit crunch is behind us, many small businesses still find it difficult to obtain bank loans. Community banks, a key source of small business financing, have been hard hit by losses in commercial real estate, which have limited their lending capacity. Further, many small business owners who historically would have used real estate assets as collateral for expansion loans can no longer do so because of declines in real estate prices. In addition, small businesses that have, in the past, used credit cards to purchase equipment and supplies have been hindered by reductions in credit limits.

Overall economic conditions

The high degree of uncertainty currently surrounding the economic and financing climate may have prompted many entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs to hold off on growth plans. Despite their reputation as high-flying risk-takers, good entrepreneurs take only calculated risks, where the benefits outweigh the dangers. Uncertainties about the future trajectory of the economy merely increase risk without raising potential rewards.

Government policies

Government policies affect the climate for small businesses in many ways. For example, small businesses face substantial hurdles when entering the complicated world of federal grants and contracts. At the state level, severe budget shortfalls mean that even well-designed initiatives to boost small businesses may founder.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) assists the full continuum of small businesses through a variety of means. These include: an $80 billion loan guarantee portfolio; specialized counseling and training centers; specialized business development programs targeting the socially and economically disadvantaged; oversight to ensure that at least 23 percent of federal government contracts go to small businesses (with certain preferences for minority and women-owned businesses); and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Investment Companies programs.

The Obama administration is attempting to broaden support for small businesses by bringing the SBA into multi-agency initiatives that tackle common problems. For example, the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Labor, along with the National Science Foundation and the SBA, are supporting a five-year, nearly $130 million Energy Regional Innovation Cluster.

Strength of “social capital”

Through the 1990s, the United States was a worldwide leader in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship and reaped the reward of employment growth. Current international comparisons suggest that we are now closer to tenth place among some 70 nations in our ability to support innovation. Much of what has kept our nation from remaining in the top spot appears to relate to insufficient cultural support for entrepreneurship.

Strong social networks in specific geographic regions appear to substantially bolster the growth of innovative businesses. These networks are built around entrepreneurial dealmakers who serve as the nodes of the network, forming connections among researchers, entrepreneurs and investors. Unfortunately, many regions and industries lack strong networks.

Access to decision-making information. Entrepreneurs need an array of information and advice about how to tackle the problems that arise at different stages in business development. The SBA reports that companies that have taken advantage of their long-term counseling programs, for example, have higher growth than companies that have not.

Opportunity for all. Social networks are self-selecting, and some people have to work extra hard to gain entry to a region’s network of entrepreneurs. While various organizations exist to help women and people of color access entrepreneurial skills and information, these efforts may not suffice. Under-representation of any group presumably would filter out a number of potential high-growth companies.

Workforce issues

A long-time strength of the American workforce, worker mobility has declined. This trend has been attributed in part to an aging population and in part to the current difficulty people have in selling their homes. Businesses report difficulty finding employees with the right training, especially at the technician level, where straightforward vocational training could help.

Global competition

Increasing global competition for good projects, entrepreneurs and capital is a positive trend from an international perspective, but runs counter to the national goal of promoting rapid growth in U.S. industry and employment. Today, many entrepreneurs can choose among starting a business here, in their home country, or even in a third, more hospitable nation. At the same time, current U.S. immigration policy hinders entrepreneurs from coming here to launch their companies. A recent report from The Brookings- Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable concluded that “educated workers with the knowledge and skills to innovate are critical” to the United States and recommended increasing the annual number of skilled visas.

 

Policy Goals for Small Business

Measuring Results

More work is needed to identify key policy goals and priorities related to small business success. Critically, what would constitute “improvement” in public policy regarding small business employment, and how would we measure it? Clearly, increasing the total number of jobs created each year (by both small and large businesses, net of job destruction) would be a positive outcome, all else being equal. Another potential goal would be improving the “quality” of the jobs created, as measured by average compensation or by job creation in new industries or geographic areas where unemployment is high. Creating “good jobs” that bring generous compensation would seem to be always desirable, but this outcome could conflict with other social goals, for example, if the jobs created required skills out of the reach of groups that are traditionally difficult to employ.

Slowing job destruction could be as important as increasing the creation of new jobs, but discouraging layoffs without increasing performance would do more harm than good. The trick is to raise the quality of marginal firms so that their improved performance allows them to retain employees they would otherwise have to let go.

A final key factor in setting policy goals that would support small businesses is measuring the cost to taxpayers of the initiatives that flow from the goals. This includes the subsidy cost contained in the federal budget, as well as costs and tradeoffs in society at large.

Changing Key Policies

Small businesses face both short-run and long-run challenges. With regard to the former, many small businesses have been hard hit by the recession and appear to be lagging behind larger businesses in their recovery. The cyclical struggles of this sector in part reflect the dependence of many small firms on the still-strained banking system for their financing; they also reflect the high toll that our extremely soft labor markets have taken on demand for Main Street goods and services. Thus, government policies aimed at broadly bolstering the recovery and further strengthening the financial system will yield important benefits to small businesses.

The government, in conjunction with the private sector, can also take steps that will foster an economic environment that is supportive of entrepreneurship and economic growth over the long run. Specific policy steps that might help small businesses (and, in many cases, large businesses) include:

Improve access to public and private capital. Implementing serious financial reform will reduce the likelihood that we will see a repeat of the recent credit cycle that has been so problematic for the small business sector. When credit market disruptions do occur, policymakers should be attentive to whether temporary expansions of the SBA loan guarantee program are needed to sustain lending to creditworthy borrowers. The SBA should also consider expanding the points of access to its loan programs through an expansion of its lending partners. Finally, the SBA (or a similar entity) might encourage venture capital funds to broaden their investments beyond familiar areas by systematically bringing these investors together with entrepreneurs from neglected geographic regions and business sectors.

Reexamine corporate tax policy. More thinking is needed about whether provisions in our tax code discourage small business development in a way that is harmful to the broader economy and that places the United States at a relative disadvantage internationally. For example, Congress might consider whether it would be beneficial, on net, to lower employment taxes as a way of spurring hiring at businesses with high-growth potential. In addition, some analysts believe there would be gains from increasing tax credits for research and development and further lowering taxes on capital equipment. A design priority in all cases should be simplicity, as complicated rules can limit take-up among smaller firms that do not have extensive accounting or legal expertise.

Promote education and research. Entrepreneurs report difficulty in finding workers with the skills they need for manufacturing, technology and other jobs that do not require four-year college degrees. Access to such educational opportunities, including tailored vocational training, should be affordable and ubiquitous.

At the university level, improvements are needed in the way academic research is brought to the commercial market. Continued public and private support for basic research might be wise, particularly if we are in a trough between waves of innovation, as some analysts believe. The large investments by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other ambitious public and private programs laid the groundwork for many of the high-growth businesses of today. It may be worth exploring whether support for research in “softer” areas than the sciences might do an equal or better job of inspiring innovations.

Rethink immigration policy. A reconsideration of limits on H1-B visas might help entrepreneurs struggling with shortages of workers with particular skills. In addition, current immigration policy discourages immigrants who want to establish entrepreneurial businesses in America. Any efforts to expand immigration are frequently perceived as “taking jobs away from Americans,” but studies have shown that new businesses create jobs for Americans.

Explore ways to foster “innovation-friendly” environments. Some regions of the United States clearly do a better job of encouraging innovation. Silicon Valley is the classic example, but there may be as many as 40 such clusters scattered around the country. While clusters often arise organically, typically near major universities, some states have made an explicit commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship. Examples include the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and California’s Biological Technologies Initiative, involving community colleges statewide. Federal, state and local policymakers should keep a keen eye on ways of adapting best practices from these initiatives as information becomes available about which elements are most effective.

Strengthen government counseling programs. The SBA might do more to expand and tailor its already successful growth counseling programs to better meet the needs of both Main Street and potential high-growth businesses, as well as firms at different developmental stages. Any effort to expand small businesses’ opportunities for federal grants and contracts should be accompanied by significant streamlining of the application process.

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Event Information

Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth performance over the last decade has been astounding, though they mask underlying job creation challenges facing policymakers. The unemployment rate for sub-Saharan Africa remained fairly stable over the period. In 2015, it stood at a slightly high 7.4 percent, compared with over 9 percent in the European Union and 5.3 percent in the United States. However, the figures on vulnerable employment and the working poor[1] in Africa tell a different story—averaging 69.9 percent and 64.0 percent in 2015, respectively. Indeed, of those who are employed, four in five workers are not in the wage economy, but in the informal sector, with no access to workers’ benefits, social protection, and job reliability. In addition, many workers—both formal and informal—are underemployed or overqualified.

The conventional knowledge of structural transformation—labor migration from agriculture to high-productivity, labor-intensive industry—has been turned on its head in Africa. Instead, Africans are moving to jobs in the services sector, which some experts argue is a less productive path. Then again, unique opportunities in African digital jobs are opening up doors the world has never seen before.

The need for decent job creation in Africa also provides both threats and opportunities to the United States. For example, a lack of viable jobs could make the turn to crime, violence, and even extremism—with the promise of steady income from these activities—more appealing to economically marginalized individuals, especially among the youth. Furthermore, job creation boosts the growth of the middle class, expanding the base of consumers for American products, at the same time creating new, stronger trade partners able to supply goods to American consumers. Already, the United States and other countries are creating a myriad of programs to boost entrepreneurship on the continent.

On Monday, June 27, the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative and the Congressional African Staff Association hosted an event to discuss why Africa is struggling to create the quantity and quality of jobs it needs and what policies—both African and U.S.—can turn that trend around. Ernest Danjuma Enebi, founder and managing partner of The Denda Group, moderated the discussion. Panelists included Dr. Eyerusalem Siba, research fellow at the Africa Growth Initiative; Hassanatu Blake, co-founding director and president of the non-profit Focal Point Global; and Nicolas Cook, a specialist in African Affairs in the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service.

The discussion touched on multiple key points, including what Africa’s unique structural transformation path means for the region’s employment landscape; how development partner efforts affect job growth on the continent; how Africa can avoid a potential “demographic timebomb” of youth unemployment and instead benefit from a “demographic dividend”; and how the United States is addressing the challenges these trends pose for both the continent and the U.S.

Enebi began the dialogue with a Q&A with Siba on an overview of African economic trends, youth unemployment, and formal sector jobs on the continent.

Blake argued that the high youth unemployment is due in part to the region’s struggling educational systems where Poor quality education leads to poor grades on periodic tests and thus students are being pushed out of school, she said. Once out of the formal schooling system, they enter the workforce underprepared without the skills they need to succeed in the job market.

Blake continued to argue this point through a description of Harambee, a private South African organization that works towards improving prospects of youth employment. The program has placed over 20,000 youth into jobs over the past 5 years by testing job applicants on literacy and mathematical ability and matching them with employers. Harambee addresses a broader skills mismatch that Blake argued is holding back job creation. More broadly, Blake argued, public-private partnerships must be created to help youth find jobs and employers find employees.

A major theme of the discussion was that a shift away from aid and towards the support of labor-intensive industries and enabling environments for business can spur job creation.

Of course, causes of unemployment are largely driven by the demand-side factors, acknowledged the panelists. A major theme of the discussion was that a shift away from aid and towards the support of labor-intensive industries and enabling environments for business can spur job creation. Indeed, Cook discussed the importance of the mantra “trade not aid” in addressing these issues, as there are many large American firms with an economic interest in expanding to Africa; however this interest is miniscule compared to Africa’s trade with the rest of the world. Increasing global investments in Africa is, thus, a key part of any job creation, he emphasized.

Cook also touched on global relationships with Africa. He noted that only 1 percent of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) goes to Africa, and only one percent of American trade is with Africa. Now, several economic development programs, like the U.S. Electrify Africa Act of 2015 and the USAID Power Africa Initiative, exist but are in need of continued funding. To boost trade, the United States has launched the Trade Africa program and has established trade hubs in western, eastern, and southern Africa.

Investments in infrastructure, greater participation in the export market, interventions on improving managerial and marketing skills and the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to access global markets can help clear the way for greater job creation.

Siba agreed with the idea of a focus on trade and FDI as major factors in job creation. In fact, she shifted the discussion toward a focus on investments in supporting industry because, as she emphasized, the biggest predictor of business performance including job creation is export market participation. Investments in infrastructure, greater participation in the export market, interventions on improving managerial and marketing skills and the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to access global markets can help clear the way for greater job creation, she said.

There are clearly many opportunities for foreign investors to support African industry, but challenges to development remain due to poor infrastructure and a lackluster environment for business.

Blake agreed that ICTs and infrastructure hold great potential for spurring job growth, but pointed out that ICT and infrastructure investment “look different” in different parts of the continent. In some countries in central Africa that she worked with and Cameroon, she suggested, ICTs are not always the best vehicle to drive job growth due to the prohibitive cost of ICT devices and emphasized that keeping local conditions in mind when exploring potential job-creating programs and investments is essential for success.

Cook then pivoted to a discussion on the importance of small enterprises and technology in boosting job growth. He pointed out the importance of WhatsApp as a new means of communication that has helped spur job growth and productivity, and the mobile money transfer platform m-Pesa as a key component of the increase in micro-lending in Kenya. Offered by Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile network, M-Pesa allows mobile phone users to transfer money, pay bills, and deposit money. The World Bank highlighted the service in 2009, concluding that “The affordability of the service has been key in opening the door to formal financial services for Kenya’s poor.” The service has also allowed financing of micro-enterprise to take off, but Cook acknowledged that ascertaining the precise impact of these technologies on job growth is very difficult due to the scarcity of data.

The small credit card market and rarely used banking services exclude a wide percentage of the population from the financial system. The widespread presence of mobile phones has now opened up this system.

Fifty to 80 percent of new jobs in Africa are created by small businesses that are not likely to survive more than five years.

Siba elaborated on Cook’s description of the vital role of small businesses in creating jobs on the continent. She argued that any job creation programs in Africa should focus on solving the challenges of small businesses in job creation because they dominate the market structure. Unfortunately, at the moment, small businesses there are not robust. Fifty to 80 percent of new jobs in Africa are created by small businesses that are not likely to survive more than five years. Since small and medium enterprises comprise over 90 percent of all firms in sub-Saharan Africa, this volatility affects the whole economy. As a result, any potential solutions must take this market structure into account. In addition, as Siba suggested, increased focus must be paid to the integration of African businesses into regional markets and domestic and global value chains so that small and medium enterprises have more opportunities to grow.

The discussion concluded with a focus on opportunities for growth: Governments should focus on processing raw commodities for local uses, like timber, coffee, and cocoa; small- and medium-sized enterprises should be scaled up with stronger access to financing and skill development; governments should pursue partnerships with private companies to address the skills mismatch; and education funding should be deliberately targeted to address missing skills, correctly processed, and carefully monitored. Continued job creation in Africa depends on it.

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Demand for more walkable, mixed use neighborhoods is growing across the United States. However, the challenges associated with fi nancing these developments are allowing much of this demand to go unmet. This paper discusses how more, and more upfront, patient equity in walkable projects—from various sources and providers—would facilitate their development, and yield high returns over the long term. The paper also examines how patient equity contributed to the success of several such developments built over the past 15 years, illustrating untapped potential. Finally, it notes the role the public sector can play in providing patient equity investments.

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Also in this podcast: Russ Whitehurst discusses the cost of universal education for preschool, and David Wessel comments on the current state of the economy

"To use some of the time honored clichés, 'The enemy may get a vote too.' Or the Bolshevik line, 'You may not have an interest in war, but war may have an interest in you' I paraphrase that to say we may not, at the moment, have an interest in counterinsurgency and stabilization missions, but they may have an interest in us… we can't be like the ostrich putting our head in the sand just because we're tired of these kinds of wars. They might come back, whether we like it or not." says Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon about his new book, "The Future of Land Warfare."

After learning about the various scenarios that might necessitate land warfare, we'll hear Russ Whitehurst, senior fellow in Economic Studies and Editor of the Evidence Speaks project, discuss the cost of universal Pre-K. "The question is: what should the nation or states do to increase participation rates to a universal level?" Whitehurst asks in this project. "And what I've found by looking at the evidence is that actually people haven't provided very good evidence on how many children are presently served."

Also, stay tuned to hear expert David Wessel update us on one of the nation's most alarming economic problems – wage stagnation.

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Show Notes:

• Read more about O'Hanlon's book, "The Future of Land Warfare"
• The future of the U.S. army
• Toward a "Reaganov" Russia: Russian Security Policy after Putin
• Obama the Carpenter: The President's National Security Legacy
• What role will evidence play in the 2016 election?
• Do we already have universal preschool?
• Why public school vouchers could have bi-partisan appeal
• Hutchins Roundup: wealth inequality, student borrowing, and more

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Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

       

Good morning and welcome to the "future." At approximately 4:29 p.m. Hill Valley time on Oct. 21, Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrive at the present day. For many millennials especially, the 1985 film series Back to the Future represented the far-flung fantastical future that many dreamed would come. But how does the Reagan-era vision of a future where we don't need roads compare to our daily lives today?

Sadly, you probably came to work today on the same street you may have trodden as a child back in 1985 without a hover board. But our future is still pretty fantastic, and many of the outlandish futuristic devices you saw in the 1989 film Back to the Future II are closer than you think—or already here. Here are three predictions that the film made that today might actually turn the head of an ‘80s time traveler

Drone proliferation

When Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrived in 2015, the sky was filled with more flying cars than the drones that sometimes dot our skies, but the film did point to some potential uses for unmanned remote flying devices. In the future, the film envisioned drones for walking the dog and even remote photography drones reporting on the day's news. While drones today don't exactly fill these roles, that future is perhaps closer than you think.

"Private actors will soon operate drones in equal if not greater numbers than the government," Brookings Fellow Wells Bennett wrote in a report on civilian use of drones last year. Amazon has tested drones to aid in home and business delivery. CNN has been given clearance by the government to explore the use of drones for reporting. Even law enforcement and public safety officials have used drones to aid in policing and fighting fires.

The widespread use of drones in daily life is probably still part of our future rather than our present in 2015, but regulations for this future are being written today. Federal regulators just this week announced that recreational drones will need to be registered. Last year as part of our project on civilian robotics, Gregory McNeal offered his own suggestions for federal and state regulators on how best to tackle civilian drone regulations.

Cybernetic humans and wearable technology

In the 1989 film, Marty faces off against his son's cybernetic bully, Griff Tannen. The bullies of the present don't exactly resemble Griff or Locutus of Borg, but cybernetics is closer than you think—even resting in your palm right now.

Taking a walk through Hill Valley in the real 2015, a time traveler might see several pedestrians immersed in their smartphones or glancing at notifications on their wearable devices. In our homes, virtual reality is becoming more prominent as well. Systems like Oculus and Google Cardboard resemble very closely the remote television visors worn by Marty's kids in the future.

"The proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude that [cell phones] were an important feature of human anatomy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2014 opinion referencing the cybernetic future we are living today. Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong acknowledge in their report on the emerging cyborg future that the connection we have with technology is becoming more personal. While surveillance laws of the past might make distinctions between human tissue and the devices we use in our daily lives, Wittes and Chong argue that perhaps the separation between the human being and technology in some cases is no longer there—and the law should adapt to acknowledge this.

Flying cars and the transportation of the future

The most-often panned prediction of the film is admittedly the most disappointing—there are no flying cars in our future. This has been a fantasy for even Baby Boomers who were thrilled by the Jetsons' view of the 21st Century. Flying cars do exist in a limited form, but they are more accurately described as ultra-portable planes that require a pilot’s license to fly. However, the future of transportation is even better than Marty or Doc Brown ever realized; they just needed to travel a few more years in the future to see it happen.

Driverless cars have the potential to be the biggest seismic shift in transportation that many of us will experience in our lifetime. Numerous automotive makers and even Google are preparing for the autonomous future. Imagine your vehicle circling the parking lot to pick you up after a film; traversing rush hour traffic to deliver your daughter to softball practice; even serving as designated driver on Friday night after drinks at the bar.

The future seems like a fantasy, but liability concerns about whom to sue when an automated vehicle gets in a fender bender—or worse—clouds this would-be future.

"While liability will always be important with respect to motor vehicle operation, automation will dramatically increase safety on the highways by reducing both the number and severity of accidents," writes John Villasenor in his report on how to tackle liability in the driverless era. Despite many reservations about driverless cars, Villasenor argues that current liability law frameworks would be well equipped to address concerns.

Of course, whether the DeLorean Motor Company will come out of mothballs and produce a driverless DeLorean remains to be seen.

Discuss the future's impact on the modern workforce

At least according to Robert Zemeckis, we've arrived in the future. Not that you’re here, join us at 2 p.m. Oct. 26 when we'll discuss one of the important consequences of all of this technological automation: its impact on the workforce and the availability of social benefits.

       

       

       

       

       

2015 is a pivotal year for global development; this fall is a pivotal moment. Meetings this fall will determine the global vision for sustainable development for 2030.

Three papers being released today—“Action implications focusing now on implementation of the post-2015 agenda,” “Systemic sustainability as the strategic imperative for the post-2015 agenda,” and “Political decisions and institutional innovations required for systemic transformations envisioned in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda”—set out some foundational ideas and specific proposals for political decisions and institutional innovations, which focus now on the implementation of the new global vision for 2030. This blog summarizes the key points in the three papers listed below.

Fundamentals for guiding actions, reforms and decisions

1) Managing systemic risks needs to be the foundational idea for implementing the post-2015 agenda.

The key political idea latent but not yet fully visible in the post-2015 agenda is that it is not a developing country poverty agenda for global development in the traditional North-South axis but a universal agenda based on the perception of urgent challenges that constitute systemic threats.

The term “sustainable development” by itself as the headline for the P-2015 agenda creates the danger of inheriting terminology from the past to guide the future.

2) Goal-setting and implementation must be effectively linked.

The international community learned from the previous two sets of goal-setting experiences that linking implementation to goal-setting is critical to goal achievement.  G-20 leader engagement in the post-2015 agenda and linking the success of the G-20 presidencies of Turkey (2015), China (2016), and Germany (2017) would provide global leadership for continuity of global awareness and commitment.

3) Focus on the Sustainable Development Goals must be clear.

Criticism of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as being too defuse and too detailed is ill-founded and reveals a lack of political imagination. It is a simple task to group the 17 goals into a few clusters that clearly communicate their focus on poverty, access, sustainability, partnership, growth, and institutions and their linkages to the social, economic, and environmental systemic threats that are the real and present dangers.

4) There must be a single set of goals for the global system.

The Bretton Woods era is over. It was over before China initiated the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). Never has it been clearer than now that maintaining a single global system of international institutions is essential for geopolitical reasons. For the implementation of the post-2015 agenda, all the major international institutions need to commit to them.

Proposals for political action and institutional innovations

In a joint paper with Zhang Haibing from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS), we make five specific governance proposals for decision-makers: 

1) Integrating the SDGs into national commitments will be critical.

The implementation of the post-2015 agenda requires that nations internalize the SDGs by debating, adapting and adopting them in terms of their own domestic cultural, institutional, and political circumstances. It will be important for the U.N. declarations in September to urge all countries to undertake domestic decision-making processes toward this end.

2) Presidential coordination committees should be established.

To adequately address systemic risks and to implement the P-2015 agenda requires comprehensive, integrated, cross-sectoral, whole-of-government approaches.  South Korea’s experience with presidential committees composed of ministers with diverse portfolios, private sector and civil society leaders provides an example of how governments could break the “silos” and meet the holistic nature of systemic threats.

3) There needs to be a single global system of international institutions.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.” Together with a speech Li gave at the OECD on July 1st after signing an expanded work program agreement with the OECD and becoming a member of the OECD Development Center, clearly signals of China’s intention to cooperate within the current institutional system. The West needs to reciprocate with clear signals of respect for the increasing roles and influence of China and other emerging market economies in global affairs.

4) We must move toward a single global monitoring system for development targets.

The monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the post-2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them. The U.N., the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF have all participated in joint data gathering efforts under the International Development Goals  (IDGs) in the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the 2000s. Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play now, but they need to be brought together under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system.

5) Global leadership roles must be strengthened.

By engaging in the post-2015 agenda, the G-20 leaders’ summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered post-2015 agenda. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues. The G-20 finance ministers can play an appropriate role by serving as the coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the post-2015 agenda. A G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council, composed of the heads of the presidential committees for sustainable development from G20 countries, could become an effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability.

These governance innovations could re-energize the G-20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination, and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the post-2015 agenda.

       

       

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Japan may face political uncertainty in the weeks ahead with an election slated for the Diet’s Upper House this summer. Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that Prime Minister Abe would dissolve the Lower House in order to have a double election this summer. However, lackluster economic performance, the pending decision on a consumption tax increase, and the task of reconstruction after the Kumamoto earthquakes may encourage the Prime Minister to reevaluate his options. How will the ruling coalition redefine its electoral strategy as voters expect further progress on the economic agenda? Can the newly-formed Democratic Party use this first electoral test to demonstrate greater potential?

On May 3, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies hosted a panel of distinguished Japanese politicians for a discussion on the future of Japanese politics. Yoshimasa Hayashi, Yasutoshi Nishimura, and Itsunori Onodera of the Liberal Democratic Party and Goshi Hosono of the Democratic Party shared their thoughts on their respective parties’ preparations for the upcoming election and the impact the election may have on the balance of power in the Diet, as well as issues such as the ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the implementation of signature reform policies, and the potential resurgence of the opposition Democratic Party.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #JapanPolitics

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• The future of Japanese politics (Japanese)

       

       

“For a not-for-profit it’s the equivalent of venture capital,” said Sir Ronald Cohen, chairman of the Global Social Impact Investing Steering Group, about impact bonds in his keynote address at a recent event at the Brookings Institution. Impact bonds combine results-based financing and impact investing, where investors provide upfront capital for a social service and government agencies, or donors, agree to pay investors back based on the outcomes of the service. At their best, they could allow for innovation, encourage performance management and adaptability, promote learning through evaluation, and create a clear case for investing in what works. However, impact bonds thus far have had immense transaction costs and there are risks that poor execution of the impact bond mechanism could have negative consequences for beneficiaries.

It has been six years since the first impact bond was implemented in March of 2010, and the field is beginning to move from an exploratory stage to looking at systemic change, as Tracy Palandjian, CEO and co-founder of Social Finance U.S. described. The event, “The Global Potential and Limitation of Impact Bonds,” served as a point of reflection for stakeholders at this pivotal stage of the field, bringing together over 500 individuals in the room and on the webcast, including practitioners developing impact bonds around the world. While context matters, there were notable similarities in the motivations and challenges across regions.

Potential value-add

In our presentations of our research and subsequent panels, we focused on the potential value and challenges of combining results-based financing and impact investing through an impact bond. Shri Naveen Jain, mission director of the National Health Mission of Rajasthan, India, who is working to develop an impact bond for maternal and child health services across his entire state, pointed out that the value of a results-based financing contract to him was in the added transparency it provides—the government is able to see what they are paying for, keep service providers accountable, and incentivize providers to achieve better outcomes. Louise Savell, a director at Social Finance U.K., the entity that first put impact bonds on the map, explained that results-based financing contracts are often arranged such that only one portion of the contract is based on results. This, she explained prescribes a model and does not allow for flexibility; furthermore, it forces service providers to bear a significant risk. Impact bonds allow for the entirety of payments to be based on results, which gives the provider full flexibility (at least in theory), but puts the risk of service performance on the investor. The shift of risk to investors could be particularly useful for service delivery in conflict affected areas, where donors are often highly concerned about how money will be used, mentioned Francois de Borchgrave, co-founder and managing director of Kois Invest, who is working on an impact bond with the International Rescue Committee of the Red Cross. The panelists also emphasized that impact bonds are more powerful than results-based financing contracts alone because, if successful, they pay real financial returns to investors. This draws a great deal of attention from policymakers and the public, and the added scrutiny helps in making the investment case for preventive interventions highly explicit. Mayor Ben McAdams of Salt Lake County, Utah said that “data and evidence is bridging a partisan divide” in his state—when the case for investment is clear, policymakers from both sides of the aisle are willing to invest. Impact bonds do not necessarily add value by increasing the total amount of funding available for social services, because investors are repaid if outcomes are achieved. Rather, impact bonds could help increase the outcomes achieved with given funding.

Overall there was agreement that impact bonds have enormous potential to lead to more outcome-focused financing that focuses on preventive interventions and incentivizes collaboration. However two critical considerations for the use of impact bonds arose throughout the day.

Optimal impact bond size

The first consideration discussed was whether or not impact bonds can support innovation or scale. As found in our first report, impact bonds have been relatively small in scale in terms of capital and beneficiaries. The average upfront investment in impact bonds to date is $3.7 million, reaching an average of 1,900 beneficiaries. They also have not, on average, focused on particularly innovative interventions—in fact they have almost all had a relatively strong base of evidence behind them. Views on the panel differed on whether the uses of impact bonds could be expanded—if they could be used for highly innovative pilot programs or proven large scale programs. One perspective was that impact bonds could indeed provide seed capital to test new ideas for service delivery. This would require investors who are willing to test not only the innovation but also this relatively new financing mechanism. Given the high transaction costs that impact bonds entail, however, this may not be the most efficient use of resources. Impact bonds could also reach more beneficiaries per transaction (greater scale) with changes in public procurement and the creation of markets for tradeable impact bond assets. Government can play a role in facilitating larger impact bonds by creating central government outcome payment funds, providing tax breaks for investment in impact bonds, and enabling the development of investment vehicles, all of which are being implemented in the U.K. Impact bonds could also help effective social services reach scale by encouraging government to fund programs at scale after the impact bond is over or by improving data use and performance management in government-funded services broadly.

Outcome evaluation design

A second, and related, discussion happened around evaluation methodology—which may differ depending on whether the impact bond is intended to test an innovative intervention or scale an intervention already backed by significant evidence. The “gold standard” randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the only methodology that eliminates the possibility that impact could be attributed to something other than the intervention, though the majority of impact bonds thus far use evaluation methodologies that are less rigorous. The panelists explained that it is important, however, to consider the status quo—currently, less than 1 percent of U.S. federal spending on social services has been shown to be effective. The same is true in low- and middle-income countries, where there are relatively few impact evaluations given the number of interventions. At the end of the day, the government agency acting as the outcome funder must decide on the importance of attribution to trigger payment through the impact bond in view of the already available evidence of program effectiveness and weigh the criticism that might ensue in the absence of a valid counterfactual.

Challenges

Though impact bonds are a potentially useful tool in the toolbox of many financing mechanisms, there are some significant constraints to their implementation. The biggest barrier to impact bonds and other results-based contracts is the administrative hurdle of contracting for outcomes. Peter Vanderwal, innovative financing lead at the Palladium Group, and Caroline Whistler, co-president and co-founder of Third Sector Capital Partners, both stated that governments often are unable or do not know how to contract for outcomes, and there is a need to invest in their capacity to do so. Appropriation schedules are part of this challenge, governments are often not allowed to appropriate for future years. When an audience member asked how we go about changing the culture in government to one of contracting for outcomes, Mayor McAdams answered that impact bonds may have a contagious effect—contracting for outcomes will be the expectation in the future. Additionally, the transaction costs of establishing the partnership are large relative to other mechanisms, though they may be worthwhile. Jim Sorenson, of the Sorenson Impact Center, pointed out that service provider capacity and data collection systems could be barriers to the development of future impact bonds. There is also still a long way to go in developing outcome measures and in particular in calibrating those outcome measures to low- and middle-income countries.

The role of governments and research groups

The influence that impact bonds have on the provision of quality services globally depends on the quality of implementation. With a rapidly growing market, there will inevitably be “bad” impact bonds in the future. To ensure that impact bonds are used as effectively as possible, governments and the research community have a pivotal role to play in asking the right questions: Will a results-based contract help improve outcomes in this particular case? What should the outcomes be to avoid perverse incentives or potentially negative externalities? And would an impact bond structure add value? 

       

       

       

       

       

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With ongoing crises in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world, U.S. global leadership is arguably as critical now as it has ever been. However, many question how the United States should exercise its leadership, what foreign policy agenda it should pursue, and how it should configure its military and security agencies going forward. In a recent speech at West Point, President Obama laid out his foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency. While the Obama Administration will pursue the president’s agenda as laid out at West Point, others in Washington have different views on how best to manage U.S. foreign policy going forward.

On June 11, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings will host Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for an address on the future of U.S. foreign and security policy. The address will be introduced by Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon, and the discussion following the Senator’s address will be moderated by Senior Fellow Robert Kagan.

After the program, Senator McCain will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #McCain

      

       

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By the end of May, citizens of Europe will have left the polling booths and a new European Parliament will have been directly elected for the eighth time in the institution’s history. Since the last elections were held in 2009 on the heels of the global financial crisis, the eurozone has developed stronger economic stability mechanisms, kept its membership intact, and even added additional members. Yet Europe also faces a resurgence of extreme nationalism, political fragmentation within nation-states, and frustration and protest driven by high rates of unemployment. There are very different visions for the future of Europe.

On June 3, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted a discussion on Europe’s future and what Europe’s election results mean for critical choices like the formation of the new European Commission, fiscal policies, U.S.-EU relations, TTIP negotiations and the future of the EU-United Kingdom relationship. Some of the issues that were addressed are also analyzed in Europe’s Crisis, Europe’s Future, a recently published book (Brookings Press, April 2014) co-edited by Kemal Derviș and Jacques Mistral.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #EuroFuture

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• European Monetary Union Has Political Consequences
• The European Elections and the Future of Europe
• People Are Feeling Apathetic about Europe
• European Elections Proof of Frustrations
• Jobs and Growth at Heart of Europe's Problem
• Britain Wants Eurozone to Succeed
• The European Elections and the Future of Europe

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• The European Elections and the Future of Europe

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For the first time in Turkey’s history, the electorate directly cast their votes for president earlier this week, overwhelmingly electing current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the position with 52 percent of the votes. After 12 years in power, Erdoğan’s victory was widely expected, even though the two main opposition parties chose Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as their common candidate in a rare show of unity, and Selahattin Demirtaş the leader of the main Kurdish political party in Turkey, tried hard to appeal to an electoral base beyond just Kurds. The impact of the election’s results, however, remains to be seen.

How should the election results be interpreted? Will Erdoğan succeed in transforming Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one? Who will he chose as prime minister? What will this outcome mean for Turkey’s economic performance and its foreign policy at a time when the neighborhood is sliding deeper into instability, if not chaos? What will happen to Turkey’s European vocation and its transatlantic relations?

On September 4, the Turkey Project of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider what President Erdoğan’s new mandate means for the nation, its government and institutions and the ruling Justice and Development Party. Kemal Kirisci, TÜSİAD senior fellow and Turkey project director, moderated the conversation. Panelists included Robert Wexler of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, Kadir Üstün of the SETA Foundation, and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Ömer Taşpınar.

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• President Erdoğan: Turkey’s Election and the Future

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Will McCants: As we wind down another year in the so-called Long War and begin another, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in over. The first is Barak Mendelsohn, an associate professor of political science at Haverford College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He is author of the brand new The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences.

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Barak Mendelsohn: Al-Qaida attacked the U.S. homeland on 9/11, unprepared for what would follow. There was a strong disconnect between al-Qaida’s meager capabilities and its strategic objectives of crippling the United States and of bringing about change in the Middle East. To bridge that gap, Osama bin Laden conveniently and unrealistically assumed that the attack on the United States would lead the Muslim masses and all other armed Islamist forces to join his cause. The collapse of the Taliban regime and the decimation of al-Qaida’s ranks quickly proved him wrong.

Yet over fourteen years later al-Qaida is still around. Despite its unrealistic political vision and considerable setbacks—above all the rise of the Islamic State that upstaged al-Qaida and threatened its survival—it has branches in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa.

Down, but not out

Two factors explain al-Qaida’s resilience: changes in the environment due to the Arab revolutions and the group’s ability to take advantage of new opportunities by learning from past mistakes. The Arab awakening initially undercut al-Qaida’s original claims that change in Muslim countries cannot come peacefully or without first weakening the United States. Yet, the violence of regimes against their people in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere created new opportunities for al-Qaida to demonstrate its relevance. Furthermore, involved citizens determined to shape their own future presented al-Qaida with a new opportunity to recruit. 

But favorable conditions would be insufficient to explain al-Qaida’s resilience without changes in the way al-Qaida operates. Learning from its bitter experience in Iraq, al-Qaida opted to act with some moderation. It embedded itself among rebel movements in Syria and Yemen, thus showing it could be a constructive actor, attentive to the needs of the people and willing to cooperate with a wide array of groups. As part of a broader movement, al-Qaida’s affiliates in these countries also gained a measure of protection from external enemies reluctant to alienate the group’s new allies. 

[E]ven after showing some moderation, al-Qaida’s project is still too extreme for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

At present, the greatest threat to al-Qaida is not the United States or the Arab regimes; it’s the group’s former affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State. ISIS is pressuring al-Qaida’s affiliates to defect—while it has failed so far to shift their allegiance, it has deepened cracks within the branches and persuaded small groups of al-Qaida members to change sides. Even if al-Qaida manages to survive the Islamic State’s challenge, in the long term it still faces a fundamental problem that is unlikely to change: even after showing some moderation, al-Qaida’s project is still too extreme for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Up, but not forever

With the United States seeking retrenchment and Middle Eastern regimes weakening, the Islamic State came to prominence under more convenient conditions and pursued a different strategy. Instead of wasting its energy on fighting the United States first, ISIS opted to establish a caliphate on the ruins of disintegrating Middle Eastern states. It has thrived on the chaos of the Arab rebellions. But in contrast to al-Qaida, it went beyond offering protection to oppressed Sunni Muslims by promoting a positive message of hope and pride. It does not merely empower Muslims to fend off attacks on their lives, property, and honor; the Islamic State offers its enthusiastic followers an historic chance to build a utopian order and restore the early Islamic empire or caliphate.

ISIS opted to establish a caliphate on the ruins of disintegrating Middle Eastern states. It has thrived on the chaos of the Arab rebellions.

The Islamic State’s leaders gambled that their impressive warfighting skills, the weakness of their opponents, and the reluctance of the United States to fight another war in the Middle East would allow the group to conquer and then govern territory. The gamble paid off. Not only did ISIS succeed in controlling vast territory, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul; the slow response to its rise allowed the Islamic State’s propaganda machine to construct a narrative of invincibility and inevitability, which has, in turn, increased its appeal to new recruits and facilitated further expansion.

And yet, the Islamic State’s prospects of success are low. Its miscalculations are threatening to undo much of its success. It prematurely and unnecessarily provoked an American intervention that, through a combination of bombings from the air and skilled Kurdish proxies on the ground, is limiting the Islamic State’s ability to expand and even reversing some of the group’s gains. 

ISIS could settle for consolidating its caliphate in the territories it currently controls, but its hubris and messianic zeal do not allow for such limited goals. It is committed to pursuing military expansion alongside its state-building project. This rigid commitment to two incompatible objectives is perhaps the Islamic State’s biggest weakness. 

[T]he slow response to its rise allowed the Islamic State’s propaganda machine to construct a narrative of invincibility and inevitability.

Rather than pursue an economic plan that would guarantee the caliphate’s survival, the Islamic State has linked its economic viability to its military expansion. At present, ISIS relies on taxing its population and oil sales to support its flailing economy. But these financial resources cannot sustain a state, particularly one bent on simultaneously fighting multiple enemies on numerous fronts. Ironically, rather than taming its aspirations, the Islamic State sees conquest as the way to promote its state-building goals. Its plan for growing the economy is based on the extraction of resources through military expansion. While this plan worked well at first—when the Islamic State faced weak enemies—it is not a viable solution any longer, as the self-declared caliphate can no longer expand fast enough to meet its needs. Consequently, this strategy is undermining ISIS rather than strengthening it. 

Unfortunately, even if the Islamic State is bound to fail over the long run, it has had enough time to wreak havoc on other states in the neighborhood. And while its ability to govern is likely to continue diminishing, the terror attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Sinai suggest that the Islamic State will remain capable of causing much pain for a long time.

      

Will McCants: As we begin another year in the so-called Long War, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in. First was Barak Mendelsohn, who contrasts al-Qaida’s resilience and emphasis on Sunni oppression with the Islamic State’s focus on building a utopian order and restoring the caliphate.

Next is Clint Watts, a Fox fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He offers ways to avoid the flawed assumptions that have led to mistaken counterterrorism forecasts in recent years. 

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Clint Watts: Two years ago today, counterterrorism forecasts focused on a “resurgent” al-Qaida. Debates over whether al-Qaida was again winning the war on terror ensued just a week before the Islamic State invaded Mosul. While Washington’s al-Qaida debates steamed away in 2013, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s al-Qaida suffered unprecedented internal setbacks from a disobedient, rogue affiliate formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI). With terror predictions two years ago so far off the mark, should we even attempt to anticipate what the next two years of al-Qaida and ISIS will bring?

Rather than prognosticate about how more than a dozen extremist groups operating on four continents might commit violence in the future, analysts might instead examine flawed assumptions that resulted in the strategic surprise known as the Islamic State. Here are insights from last decade’s jihadi shifts we should consider when making forecasts on al-Qaida and the Islamic State’s future in the coming decade. 

Loyalty is fleeting, self-interest is forever. Analysts that missed the Islamic State’s rise assumed that those who pledged allegiance to al-Qaida would remain loyal indefinitely. But loyalties change despite the oaths that bind them. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State’s leaders used technicalities to slip their commitments to al-Qaida. Boko Haram has rapidly gone from al-Qaida wannabe to Islamic State devotee. 

In short, jihadi pledges of loyalty should not be seen as binding or enduring, but instead temporary. When a group’s fortunes wane or leaders change, allegiance will rapidly shift to whatever strain of jihad proves most advantageous to the group or its leader. Prestige, money, manpower—these drive pledges of allegiance, not ideology. 

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State do not think solely about destroying the United States and its Western allies. Although global jihadi groups always call for attacks on the West, they don’t always deliver. Either they can’t or they have other priorities, like attacking closer to home. So jihadi propaganda alone does not tell us much about how the group is going to behave in the future. 

Zawahiri, for example, has publicly called on al-Qaida’s affiliates to carry out attacks on the West. But privately, he has instructed his affiliate in Syria to hold off. And for most of its history, the Islamic State focused on attacking the near enemy in the Middle East rather than the far enemy overseas, despite repeatedly vowing to hit the United States. Both groups will take advantage of any easy opportunity to strike the United States. However, continuing to frame future forecasts through an America-centric lens will yield analysis that’s off the mark and of questionable utility.

[J]ihadi propaganda alone does not tell us much about how the group is going to behave in the future.

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State don’t control all of the actions of their affiliates. News headlines lead casual readers to believe al-Qaida and the Islamic State command and control vast networks operating under a unified strategic plan. But a year ago, the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris caught al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) completely by surprise—despite one of the attackers attributing the assault to the group. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's (AQIM) recent spate of attacks in Mali and Burkina Faso were likely conducted independently of al-Qaida’s central leadership. While the Islamic State has clearly mobilized its network and inspired others to execute a broad range of international attacks, the group’s central leadership in Iraq and Syria closely manages only a small subset of these plots. 

At no time since the birth of al-Qaida have jihadi affiliates and networks operated with such independence. Since Osama bin Laden’s death, al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen, the Sahel, Somalia, and Syria all aggressively sought to form states—a strategy bin Laden advised against. Target selections and the rapid pace of plots by militants in both networks suggest local dynamics rather than a cohesive, global grand strategy drive today’s jihad. Accurately anticipating the competition and cooperation of such a wide array of terrorist affiliates with overlapping allegiances to both groups will require examination by teams of analysts with a range of expertise rather than single pundits. 

At no time since the birth of al-Qaida have jihadi affiliates and networks operated with such independence.

Both groups and their affiliates will be increasingly enticed to align with state sponsors and other non-jihadi, non-state actors. The more money al-Qaida and the Islamic State have, the more leverage they have over their affiliates. But when the money dries up—as it did in al-Qaida’s case and will in the Islamic State’s—the affiliates will look elsewhere to sustain themselves. Distant affiliates will seek new suitors or create new enterprises. 

Inevitably, some of the affiliates will look to states that are willing to fund them in proxy wars against their mutual adversaries. Iran, despite fighting the Islamic State in Syria, might be enticed to support Islamic State terrorism inside Saudi Arabia’s borders. Saudi Arabia could easily use AQAP as an ally against the Iranian backed Houthi in Yemen. African nations may find it easier to pay off jihadi groups threatening their countries than face persistent destabilizing attacks in their cities. When money becomes scarce, the affiliates of al-Qaida and the Islamic State will have fewer qualms about taking money from their ideological enemies if they share common short-term interests. 

If you want to predict the future direction of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, avoid the flawed assumptions noted above. Instead, I offer these three notes: 

1. First, look to regional terrorism forecasts illuminating local nuances routinely overlooked in big global assessments of al-Qaida and the Islamic State. Depending on the region, either the Islamic State or al-Qaida may reign supreme and their ascendance will be driven more by local than global forces. 
2. Second, watch the migration of surviving foreign fighters from the Islamic State’s decline in Iraq and Syria. Their refuge will be our future trouble spot. 
3. Third, don’t try to anticipate too far into the future. Since bin Laden’s death, the terrorist landscape has become more diffuse, a half dozen affiliates have risen and fallen, and the Arab Spring went from great hope for democracies to protracted quagmires across the Middle East. 

Today’s terrorism picture remains complex, volatile, and muddled. There’s no reason to believe tomorrow’s will be anything different.

      

Will McCants: As we continue onwards in the so-called Long War, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in. First was Barak Mendelsohn, who analyzed the factors that explain the resilience and weaknesses of both groups. Then Clint Watts offered ways to avoid the flawed assumptions that have led to mistaken counterterrorism forecasts in recent years. 

Next up is Charles Lister, a resident fellow at the Middle East Institute, to examine the respective courses each group has charted to date and whether that's likely to change. 

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Charles Lister: The world of international jihad has had a turbulent few years, and only now is the dust beginning to settle. The emergence of the Islamic State as an independent transnational jihadi rival to al-Qaida sparked a competitive dynamic. That has heightened the threat of attacks in the West and intensified the need for both movements to demonstrate their value on local battlefields. Having spent trillions of dollars pushing back al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan and al-Qaida in Iraq, the jihadi threat we face today far eclipses that seen in 2000 and 2001.

As has been the case for some time, al-Qaida is no longer a grand transnational movement, but rather a loose network of semi-independent armed groups dispersed around the world. Although al-Qaida’s central leadership appears to be increasingly cut off from the world, frequently taking many weeks to respond publicly to significant events, its word remains strong within its affiliates. For example, a secret letter from al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to his Syrian affiliate the Nusra Front in early 2015 promptly caused the group to cease plotting attacks abroad.

Seeking rapid and visible results, ISIS worries little about taking the time to win popular acceptance and instead controls territory through force.

While the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2010 challenged al-Qaida’s insistence that only violent jihad can secure political change, the subsequent repression and resulting instability provided an opportunity. What followed was a period of extraordinary strategic review. Beginning with Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen (in 2010 and 2011) and then with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar al-Din, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) in Mali (2012), al-Qaida began developing a new strategy focused on slowly nurturing unstable and vulnerable societies into hosts for an al-Qaida Islamic state. Although a premature imposition of harsh Shariah norms caused projects in Yemen and Mali to fail, al-Qaida’s activities in Syria and Yemen today look to have perfected the new “long game” approach.

In Syria and Yemen, al-Qaida has taken advantage of weak states suffering from acute socio-political instability in order to embed itself within popular revolutionary movements. Through a consciously managed process of “controlled pragmatism,” al-Qaida has successfully integrated its fighters into broader dynamics that, with additional manipulation, look all but intractable. Through a temporary renunciation of Islamic hudud (fixed punishments in the Quran and Hadith) and an overt insistence on multilateral populist action, al-Qaida has begun socializing entire communities into accepting its role within their revolutionary societies. With durable roots in these operational zones—“safe bases,” as Zawahiri calls them—al-Qaida hopes one day to proclaim durable Islamic emirates as individual components of an eventual caliphate.

Breadth versus depth

The Islamic State (or ISIS), on the other hand, has emerged as al-Qaida’s obstreperous and brutally rebellious younger sibling. Seeking rapid and visible results, ISIS worries little about taking the time to win popular acceptance and instead controls territory through force and psychological intimidation. As a militarily capable and administratively accomplished organization, ISIS has acquired a strong stranglehold over parts of Iraq and Syria—like Raqqa, Deir el-Zour, and Mosul—but its roots are shallow at best elsewhere in both countries. With effective and representative local partners, the U.S.-led coalition can and will eventually take back much of ISIS’s territory, but evidence thus far suggests progress will be slow.

Meanwhile, ISIS has developed invaluable strategic depth elsewhere in the world, through its acquisition of affiliates—or additional “states” for its Caliphate—in Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Russia. Although it will struggle to expand much beyond its current geographical reach, the growing importance of ISIS in Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan-Pakistan in particular will allow the movement to survive pressures it faces in Syria and Iraq. 

As that pressure heightens, ISIS will seek to delegate some level of power to its international affiliates, while actively encouraging retaliatory attacks—both centrally directed and more broadly inspired—against high-profile Western targets. Instability breeds opportunity for groups like ISIS, so we should also expect it to exploit the fact that refugee flows from Syria towards Europe in 2016 look set to dramatically eclipse those seen in 2015.

Instability breeds opportunity for groups like ISIS.

Charting a new course?

That the world now faces threats from two major transnational jihadist movements employing discernibly different strategies makes today’s counterterrorism challenge much more difficult. The dramatic expansion of ISIS and its captivation of the world’s media attention has encouraged a U.S.-led obsession with an organization that has minimal roots into conflict-ridden societies. Meanwhile the West has become distracted from its long-time enemy al-Qaida, which has now grown deep roots in places like Syria and Yemen. Al-Qaida has not disappeared, and neither has it been defeated. We continue this policy imbalance at our peril.

In recent discussions with Islamist sources in Syria, I’ve heard that al-Qaida may be further adapting its long-game strategy. The Nusra Front has been engaged in six weeks of on/off secret talks with at least eight moderate Islamist rebel groups, after proposing a grand merger with any interested party in early January. Although talks briefly came to a close in mid-January over the troublesome issue of the Nusra Front’s allegiance to al-Qaida, the group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani now placed those ties as an issue on the table for negotiation. 

Al-Qaida has not disappeared, and neither has it been defeated.

The fact that this sensitive subject is now reportedly open for discussion is a significant indicator of how far the Nusra Front is willing to stretch its jihadist mores for the sake of integration in Syrian revolutionary dynamics. However, the al-Nusra Front's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is a long-time Al-Qaeda loyalist and doesn't fit the profile of someone willing to break a religious oath purely for the sake of an opportunistic power play. It is therefore interesting that this secret debate inside Syria comes amid whispers within Salafi-jihadi and pro-al-Qaida circles that Zawahiri is considering “releasing” his affiliates from their loyalty pledges in order to transform al-Qaida into an organic network of locally-inspired movements—led by and loosely tied together by an overarching strategic idea.

Whether al-Qaida and its affiliates ultimately evolve along this path or not, the threat they pose to local, regional, and international security is clear. When compounded by ISIS’s determination to continue expanding and to conduct more frequent and more deadly attacks abroad, jihadist militancy looks well-placed to pose an ever present danger for many years to come. 

       

       

The tenth anniversary meeting of the “Valdai International Discussion Club” –a forum that brings together foreign Russia experts with top Russian officials, politicians, journalists and academics—conveyed two strong messages from the Kremlin: Russia is fully back on the world stage seeking a leadership role; and Russia offers the world an alternative value system to that of the West, which has lost its moral compass. No one made these points more vigorously than Vladimir Putin himself, who has dined with the group for the past decade. He was in top form, exuding self-confidence and decisiveness. Yet the forum itself, though Kremlin-sponsored, also had discordant voices, including several vocal critics of the way Putin’s Russia is run.

The meeting this year took place in a picturesque resort on Lake Valdai, 250 miles from Moscow. It was the largest ever, with more than 200 participants. The official theme was “Russia’s Diversity for the Modern World” and focused on how Russia should define its national identity. In some ways, every Valdai meeting—and I have attended all ten—has had as its underlying theme the “whither Russia question”, even at the session in Siberia when we were discussing whether Russia was indeed an energy superpower. But this year the question of Russia’s uniqueness and its place in the world was the main focus.

Sergei Karaganov, one of the meeting’s co-organizers, was hardly upbeat. He began the forum on a cautionary note, saying that Russia had wasted the last twenty years and that the only idea that still unites Russians is their victory in World War Two.

Unlike in previous years, both the liberal and moderate nationalist political opposition was represented. Two of the most notable interventions were by Yevgeny Roizman, the controversial newly-elected major of Yekaterinburg and Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg who gave Putin his post-Soviet political start in the early 1990s. Roizman gave a spirited defense of the importance of ending politics as usual in the corrupt provinces. Sobchak made an impassioned plea for her generation of urban, educated 30 –somethings. Her message: we reject the traditional Russian political patronage model, we don’t want a president who addresses us as a father talks to his children, we want to be treated as independent adults responsible for the decisions they make and we don’t want to rely on the state. And, she added, we didn’t grow up in the USSR, we have no nostalgia for the Soviet Union, we don’t care about Russia being a great power and we reject anti-Americanism. Indeed, we like the West.

One of the eternal questions about Russia’s identity—whether Russia is European, Asian or Eurasian—was addressed in a day-long session at the Iversky monastery, founded in 1653 and elegantly restored in recent years. In a panel highlighting Russia’s role as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state whose inhabitants have for centuries included Orthodox Christians, Jews, Moslems and Buddhists, Metropolitan Hilarion delivered a strong message. Russian Orthodox Christians, he said, are the true harbingers of traditional Christian values, while Western Protestants have embraced liberal values on issues such as abortion, homosexual rights and gay marriage that undermine Christian morality. These views were reflected in President Putin’s prepared speech, when he reiterated that Russia supports traditional Christian morality and opposes same-sex marriage. Moreover, both Putin and the Russian clergy emphasized that Orthodox Christians and Moslems share a commitment to traditional morality, highlighting their common bonds – and differentiating them on common grounds from the West.

One of Putin’s main foreign policy projects for his third term is his proposed Eurasian Union, a topic that provoked some lively discussion. Russian speakers argued that the Kremlin had “left the imperial paradigm behind”, and that this union would be an organization of equals akin to the European Union. Moldovan and Ukrainian speakers, by contrast, discussed the growing economic and political pressure that Russia is putting on them to reject the EU in the run-up to the Vilnius summit in November. Brussels is poised to offer Ukraine and Moldova Association Agreements that Russia claims would adversely impact both countries’ continuing economic ties to Moscow. Without Ukraine, the Eurasian Union will not fulfill the Kremlin’s ambition to create a grouping of post-Soviet states as a counterbalance to the European Union.

Russia’s growing global role in the wake of its Syria initiative was the main focus of discussions with the top officials who came to Valdai—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Ivanov. They were clearly buoyed by the fact that Russia had taken the initiative in organizing the agreement to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, and stressed that, they favor a strong, secular Syria. The Opposition, they claimed, was up to 75% controlled by Al Qaeda. There seemed to be agreement that not all of the chemical weapons would be found and destroyed, but that enough could be destroyed to accomplish Russian and American goals. And they repeated Russia’s claim that chemical weapons were used only by the Opposition and not by Assad’s own forces.

Shoigu addressed the question of military reform by quoting Russia’s pre-revolutionary Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin who said “Give us money and time, and you won’t recognize our armed forces.” He expressed concern about the situation in Afghanistan after NATO’s withdrawal next year, and questioned who would form the next generation of leaders in Kabul. He reiterated that U.S. missile defense programs were ultimately aimed at Russia, not Iran or North Korea, but also suggested developing joint U.S-Russian ABM systems. NATO, he said, is a threat to Russia. What else was NATO enlargement, if not directed against Russia? His message to the group-no more new entrants to NATO.

In previous years, President Putin has met with foreign participants only in a private setting, but for this tenth anniversary the format of the Putin meeting changed. He sat on the stage with four discussants—former German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon and President of the U.S-based Center for the National Interest Dimitri Simes. They addressed foreign and Russian participants and the four-hour meeting was televised.

Putin gave a vigorous defense of Russia as the standard-bearer of traditional Christian morality, arguing that the United States and Europe had rejected the Christian roots that form the basis of Western civilization. Criticizing “excessive political correctness” he declared that the European multicultural project had failed. He also warned that attempts by un-named powers to revive the model of a unipolar world had also failed. Stressing Russia’s right to have a seat at the table on all decisions of major international importance, he invoked the times when Russia had made an important contribution to world peace—the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Yalta Conference in 1945. He warned that when Russia was excluded—for instance from the 1919 Treaty of Versailles—this led to war. His message on Syria was clear—Russia took the initiative and had helped the United States by proposing an agreement to rid Syria of its chemical weapons stockpiles. And it expects to continue to be respected as an indispensable global player.

For anyone who has followed the Kremlin’s fraught relationship with the Opposition since the December 2011 Bolotnaya demonstrations protesting the results of the Duma elections, Putin’s interactions with representatives of the Opposition appeared to represent a shift in policy. He answered their questions about the need for political reform and more individual freedom by suggesting that these issues will be examined in the future—without committing himself to any particular course of action. The fact that these exchanges were televised live gave the impression that the Kremlin feels confident enough that the Opposition represents no real threat that it can engage in a dialogue with its more mainstream representatives. After all, there were no extreme nationalists or hard-core socialists there. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who won 27% of the vote in the recent Moscow mayoral elections, was also absent, having apparently turned down an invitation to participate.

Putin was evasive about his future plans. When asked if he would run for office again in 2018, he did not rule it out. He noted approvingly that Angela Merkel was about to win a third term, as he had last year. He certainly gave the impression of being fully engaged, with ambitious—albeit undefined-- plans for Russia. The Russian economy may be experiencing low growth rates, but the main Valdai message was that Putin’s Russia is eager to engage the world, offering an alternative to a troubled West that has rejected major tenets of its own civilizational heritage.

       

Event Information

A conversation with Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka

Today, the European Union faces critical risks to its stability. The possibility of a Brexit. The ongoing Ukraine/Russia conflict. The strain of mass migration. ISIL and other terrorism threats. The lingering financial crisis in Greece and beyond. These issues pose distinct challenges for the EU, its 28 member countries, and their 500 million citizens. How will these developing problems affect Europe?          

On March 31, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka to discuss the current status of the EU as seen through the lens of a Central European nation, close U.S. NATO ally and current Chair of the Visegrad Group. Prime Minister Sobotka offered insight into how the EU will address these issues, and where its future lies.

Video

• Challenges to the future of the EU: A Central European perspective

Audio

• Challenges to the future of the EU: A Central European perspective (English)

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160331_czech_eu_transcript

       

Introduction

It was 2025 when Facebook decided to post live feeds from public and private surveillance cameras, so they could be searched online. The decision hardly came as a surprise. Ever since Facebook passed the 500 million-member mark in 2010, it found increasing consumer demand for applications that allowed users to access surveillance cameras with publicly accessible IP addresses. (Initially, live feeds to cameras on Mexican beaches were especially popular.) But in the mid-2020s, popular demand for live surveillance camera feeds were joined by demands from the U.S. government that an open circuit television network would be invaluable in tracking potential terrorists. As a result, Facebook decided to link the public and private camera networks, post them live online, and store the video feeds without restrictions on distributed servers in the digital cloud.

Once the new open circuit system went live, anyone in the world could log onto the Internet, select a particular street view on Facebook maps and zoom in on a particular individual. Anyone could then back click on that individual to retrace her steps since she left the house in the morning or forward click on her to see where she was headed in the future. Using Facebook’s integrated face recognition app, users could click on a stranger walking down any street in the world, plug her image into the Facebook database to identify her by name, and then follow her movements from door-to-door. Since cameras were virtually ubiquitous in public and commercial spaces, the result was the possibility of ubiquitous identification and surveillance of all citizens virtually anywhere in the world—and by anyone. In an enthusiastic launch, Mark Zuckerberg dubbed the new 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance system “Open Planet.”

Open Planet is not a technological fantasy. Most of the architecture for implementing it already exists, and it would be a simple enough task for Facebook or Google, if the companies chose, to get the system up and running: face recognition is already plausible, storage is increasing exponentially; and the only limitation is the coverage and scope of the existing cameras, which are growing by the day. Indeed, at a legal Futures Conference at Stanford in 2007, Andrew McLaughlin, then the head of public policy at Google, said he expected Google to get requests to put linked surveillance networks live and online within the decade. How, he, asked the audience of scholars and technologists, should Google respond?

If “Open Planet” went live, would it violate the Constitution? The answer is that it might not under Supreme Court doctrine as it now exists—at least not if it were a purely-private affair, run by private companies alone and without government involvement. Both the First Amendment, which protects free speech, and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, only restrict actions by the government. On the other hand, if the government directed Open Planet’s creation or used it to track citizens on government-owned, as well as private-sector, cameras, perhaps Facebook might be viewed as the equivalent of a state actor, and therefore restricted by the Constitution.

At the time of the framing of the Constitution, a far less intrusive invasion of privacy – namely, the warrantless search of private homes and desk drawers for seditious papers – was considered the paradigmatic case of an unreasonable and unconstitutional invasion of privacy. The fact that 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance may not violate the Constitution today suggests the challenge of translating the framers’ values into a world in which Google and Facebook now have far more power over the privacy and free speech of most citizens than any King, president, or Supreme Court justice. In this essay, I will examine four different areas where the era of Facebook and Google will challenge our existing ideas about constitutional protections for free speech and privacy: ubiquitous surveillance with GPS devices and online surveillance cameras; airport body scanners; embarrassing Facebook photos and the problem of digital forgetting; and controversial YouTube videos. In each area, I will suggest, preserving constitutional values requires a different balance of legal and technological solutions, combined with political mobilization that leads to changes in social norms.

Let’s start with Open Planet, and imagine sufficient government involvement to make the courts plausibly consider Facebook’s program the equivalent of state action. Imagine also that the Supreme Court in 2025 were unsettled by Open Planet and inclined to strike it down. A series of other doctrines might bar judicial intervention. The Court has come close to saying that we have no legitimate expectations of privacy in public places, at least when the surveillance technologies in question are in general public use by ordinary members of the public.[1]  As mobile camera technology becomes ubiquitous, the Court might hold that the government is entitled to have access to the same linked camera system that ordinary members of the public have become accustomed to browsing. Moreover, the Court has said that we have no expectation of privacy in data that we voluntarily surrender to third parties.[2] In cases where digital images are captured on cameras owned by third parties and stored in the digital cloud—that is, on distributed third party servers--we have less privacy than citizens took for granted at the time of the American founding. And although the founders expected a degree of anonymity in public, that expectation would be defeated by the possibility of 24/7 surveillance on Facebook.

The doctrinal seeds of a judicial response to Open Planet, however, do exist. A Supreme Court inclined to strike down ubiquitous surveillance might draw on recent cases involving decisions by the police to place a GPS tracking device on the car of a suspect without a warrant, tracking his movements 24/7. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether prolonged surveillance, in the form of “dragnet-type law enforcement practices” violates the Constitution.[3] Three federal circuits have held that the use of a GPS tracking device to monitor someone’s movements in a car over a prolonged period is not a search because we have no expectations of privacy in our public movements.[4] But in a visionary opinion in 2010, Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed. Prolonged surveillance is a search, he recognized, because no reasonable person expects that his movements will be continuously monitored from door to door; all of us have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the “whole” of our movements in public. [5] Ginsburg and his colleagues struck down the warrantless GPS surveillance of a suspect that lasted 24 hours a day for nearly a month on the grounds that prolonged, ubiquitous tracking of citizen’s movements in public is constitutionally unreasonable. “Unlike one’s movements during a single journey, the whole of one’s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil,” Ginsburg wrote. Moreover, “That whole reveals more – sometimes a great deal more – than does the sum of its parts.”[6] Like the “mosaic theory” invoked by the government in national security cases, Ginsburg concluded that “Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble.  These types of information can each reveal more about a person than does any individual trip viewed in isolation.”[7] Ginsburg understood that 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance differs from more limited tracking not just in degree but in kind – it looks more like virtual stalking than a legitimate investigation – and therefore is an unreasonable search of the person.

Because prolonged surveillance on “Open Planet” potentially reveals far more about each of us than 24/7 GPS tracking does, providing real time images of all our actions, rather than simply tracking the movements of our cars, it could also be struck down as an unreasonable search of our persons. And if the Supreme Court struck down Open Planet on Fourth Amendment grounds, it might be influenced by the state regulations of GPS surveillance that Ginsburg found persuasive, or by Congressional attempts to regulate Facebook or other forms of 24/7 surveillance, such as the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would require officers to get a warrant before electronically tracking cell phones or cars.[8]

The Supreme Court in 2025 might also conceivably choose to strike down Open Planet on more expansive grounds, relying not just on the Fourth Amendment, but on the right to autonomy recognized in cases like Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Lawrence v. Texas. The right to privacy cases, beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut and culminating in Roe v. Wade and Lawrence, are often viewed as cases about sexual autonomy, but in Casey and Lawrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy recognized a far more sweeping principle of personal autonomy that might well protect individuals from totalizing forms of ubiquitous surveillance. Imagine an opinion written in 2025 by Justice Kennedy, still ruling the Court and the country at the age of 89. “In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence,” Kennedy wrote in Lawrence. “Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”[9] Kennedy’s vision of an “autonomy of self” that depends on preventing the state from becoming a “dominant presence” in public as well as private places might well be invoked to prevent the state from participating in a ubiquitous surveillance system that prevents citizens from defining themselves and expressing their individual identities. Just as citizens in the Soviet Union were inhibited from expressing and defining themselves by ubiquitous KGB surveillance, Kennedy might hold, the possibility of ubiquitous surveillance on “Open Planet” also violates the right to autonomy, even if the cameras in question are owned by the private sector, as well as the state, and a private corporation provides the platform for their monitoring.  Nevertheless, the fact that the system is administered by Facebook, rather than the Government, might be an obstacle to a constitutional ruling along these lines. And if Kennedy (or his successor) struck down “Open Planet” with a sweeping vision of personal autonomy that didn’t coincide with the actual values of a majority of citizens in 2025, the decision could be the Roe of virtual surveillance, provoking backlashes from those who don’t want the Supreme Court imposing its values on a divided nation.

Would the Supreme Court, in fact, strike down “Open Planet” in 2025? If the past is any guide, the answer may depend on whether the public, in 2025, views 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance as invasive and unreasonable, or whether citizens have become so used to ubiquitous surveillance on and off the web, in virtual space and real space, that the public demands “Open Planet” rather than protesting against it. I don’t mean to suggest that the Court actually reads the polls. But in the age of Google and Facebook, technologies that thoughtfully balance privacy with free expression and other values have tended to be adopted only when companies see their markets as demanding some kind of privacy protection, or when engaged constituencies have mobilized in protest against poorly designed architectures and demanded better ones, helping to create a social consensus that the invasive designs are unreasonable.

The paradigmatic case of the kind of political mobilization on behalf of constitutional values that I have in mind is presented by my second case: the choice between the naked machine and the blob machine in airport security screening. In 2002, officials at Orlando International airport first began testing the millimeter wave body scanners that are currently at the center of a national uproar. The designers of the scanners at Pacific Northwest Laboratories offered U.S. officials a choice: naked machines or blob machines? The same researchers had developed both technologies, and both were equally effective at identifying contraband. But, as their nicknames suggest, the former displays graphic images of the human body, while the latter scrambles the images into a non-humiliating blob.[10]

Since both versions of the scanners promise the same degree of security, any sane attempt to balance privacy and safety would seem to favor the blob machines over the naked machines. And that’s what European governments chose. Most European airport authorities have declined to adopt body scanners at all, because of persuasive evidence that they’re not effective at detecting low-density contraband such as the chemical powder PETN that the trouser bomber concealed in his underwear on Christmas day, 2009. But the handful of European airports that have adopted body scanners, such as Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, have opted for a version of the blob machine. This is in part due to the efforts of European privacy commissioners, such as Germany’s Peter Schaar, who have emphasized the importance of designing body scanners in ways that protect privacy.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security made a very different choice. It deployed the naked body scanners without any opportunity for public comment—then appeared surprised by the backlash. Remarkably, however, the backlash was effective. After a nationwide protest inspired by the Patrick Henry of the anti-Naked Machines movement, a traveler who memorably exclaimed “Don’t Touch my Junk,” President Obama called on the TSA to go back to the drawing board. And a few months after authorizing the intrusive pat downs, in February 2011, the TSA announced that it would begin testing, on a pilot basis, versions of the very same blob machines that the agency had rejected nearly a decade earlier. According to the latest version, to be tested in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C, the TSA will install software filters on its body scanner machines that detects potential threat items and indicates their location on a generic, blob like outline of each passenger that will appear on a monitor attached to the machine. Passengers without suspicious items will be cleared as “OK,” those with suspicious items will be taken aside for additional screening. The remote rooms in which TSA agents view images of the naked body will be eliminated. According to news reports, TSA began testing the filtering software in the fall of 2010 – precisely when the protests against the naked machines went viral. If the filtering software is implemented across the country, converting naked machines into blob machines, the political victory for privacy will be striking.

Of course, it’s possible that courts might strike down the naked machines as unreasonable and unconstitutional, even without the political protests. In a 1983 opinion upholding searches by drug-sniffing dogs, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recognized that a search is most likely to be considered constitutionally reasonable if it is very effective at discovering contraband without revealing innocent but embarrassing information.[11] The backscatter machines seem, under O'Connor's view, to be the antithesis of a reasonable search: They reveal a great deal of innocent but embarrassing information and are remarkably ineffective at revealing low-density contraband.

It’s true that the government gets great deference in airports and at the borders, where routine border searches don’t require heightened suspicion. But the Court has held that non-routine border searches, such as body cavity or strip searches, do require a degree of individual suspicion.  And although the Supreme Court hasn't evaluated airport screening technology, lower courts have emphasized, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in 2007, that "a particular airport security screening search is constitutionally reasonable provided that it 'is no more extensive nor intensive than necessary, in the light of current technology, to detect the presence of weapons or explosives.'"[12]

It’s arguable that since the naked machines are neither effective nor minimally intrusive – that is, because they might be designed with blob machine like filters that promise just as much security while also protecting privacy – that courts might strike them down. As a practical matter, however, both lower courts and the Supreme Court seem far more likely to strike down strip searches that have inspired widespread public opposition – such as the strip search of a high school girl wrongly accused of carrying drugs, which the Supreme Court invalidated by a vote of 8-1,[13] then they are of searches that, despite the protests of a mobilized minority, the majority of the public appears to accept.

The tentative victory of the blob machines over the naked machines, if it materializes, provides a model for successful attempts to balance privacy and security: government can be pressured into striking a reasonable balance between privacy and security by a mobilized minority of the public when the privacy costs of a particular technology are dramatic, visible, widely distributed, and people experience the invasions personally as a kind of loss of control over the conditions of their own exposure.

But can we be mobilized to demand a similarly reasonable balance when the threats to privacy come not from the government but from private corporations and when those responsible for exposing too much personal information about us are none other than ourselves? When it comes to invasions of privacy by fellow citizens, rather than by the government, we are in the realm not of autonomy but of dignity and decency. (Autonomy preserves a sphere of immunity from government intrusion in our lives; dignity protects the norms of social respect that we accord to each other.) And since dignity is a socially constructed value, it’s unlikely to be preserved by judges--or by private corporations--in the face of the expressed preferences of citizens who are less concerned about dignity than exposure.

This is the subject of our third case, which involves a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.[14] Consider the case of Stacy Snyder. Four years ago, Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.[15]

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.”[16] But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has more than 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month.

Today, as in Brandeis’s day, the value threatened by gossip on the Internet – whether posted by us our by others – is dignity. (Brandeis called it an offense against honor.) But American law has never been good at regulating offenses against dignity – especially when regulations would clash with other values, such as protections for free speech. And indeed, the most ambitious proposals in Europe to create new legal rights to escape your past on the Internet are very hard to reconcile with the American free speech tradition.

The cautionary tale here is Argentina, which has dramatically expanded the liability of search engines like Google and Yahoo for offensive photographs that harm someone’s reputation. Recently, an Argentinean judge held Google and Yahoo liable for causing “moral harm” and violating the privacy of Virginia Da Cunha, a pop star, by indexing pictures of her that were linked to erotic content. The ruling against Google and Yahoo was overturned on appeal in August, but there are at least 130 similar cases pending in Argentina to force search engines to remove or block offensive content. In the U.S., search engines are protected by the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes Internet service providers from hosting content posted by third parties. But as liability against search engines expands abroad, it will seriously curtain free speech:  Yahoo says that the only way to comply with injunctions about is to block all sites that refer to a particular plaintiff.[17]

In Europe, recent proposals to create a legally enforceable right to escape your past have come from the French. The French data commissioner, Alex Turc, who has proposed a right to oblivion – namely a right to escape your past on the Internet. The details are fuzzy, but it appears that the proposal would rely on an international body – say a commission of forgetfulness – to evaluate particular take down requests and order Google and Facebook to remove content that, in the view of commissioners, violated an individuals’ dignitary rights.

From an American perspective, the very intrusiveness of this proposal is enough to make it implausible: how could we rely on bureaucrats to protect our dignity in cases where we have failed to protect it on our own? Europeans, who have less of a free speech tradition and far more of a tradition of allowing people to remove photographs taken and posted against their will, will be more sympathetic to the proposal. But from the perspective of most American courts and companies, giving people the right selectively to delete their pasts from public discourse would pose unacceptably great threats to free speech.

A far more promising solution to the problem of forgetting on the Internet is technological. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days, after which the text disappears from the company’s servers, on which it is stored, and therefore, from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)[18]

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data don’t linger forever.

Facebook, if it wanted to, could implement expiration dates on its own platform, making our data disappear after, say, three days or three months unless a user specified that he wanted it to linger forever. It might be a more welcome option for Facebook to encourage the development of Vanish-style apps that would allow individual users who are concerned about privacy to make their own data disappear without imposing the default on all Facebook users.

So far, however, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., has been moving in the opposite direction — toward transparency, rather than privacy. In defending Facebook’s recent decision to make the default for profile information about friends and relationship status public, Zuckerberg told the founder of the publication TechCrunch that Facebook had an obligation to reflect “current social norms” that favored exposure over privacy. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people, and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time,” [19] he said.

It’s true that a German company, X-Pire, recently announced the launch of a Facebook app that will allow users automatically to erase designated photos. Using electronic keys that expire after short periods of time, and obtained by solving a Captcha, or graphic that requires users to type in a fixed number combinations, the application ensures that once the time stamp on the photo has expired, the key disappears.[20] X-Pire is a model for a sensible, blob-machine-like solution to the problem of digital forgetting. But unless Facebook builds X-Pire-like apps into its platform – an unlikely outcome given its commercial interests – a majority of Facebook users are unlikely to seek out disappearing data options until it’s too late. X-Pire, therefore, may remain for the foreseeable future a technological solution to a grave privacy problem—but a solution that doesn’t have an obvious market.

The courts, in my view, are better equipped to regulate offenses against autonomy, such as 24/7 surveillance on Facebook, than offenses against dignity, such as drunken Facebook pictures that never go away. But that regulation in both cases will likely turn on evolving social norms whose contours in twenty years are hard to predict.

Finally, let’s consider one last example of the challenge of preserving constitutional values in the age of Facebook and Google, an example that concerns not privacy but free speech.[21]

At the moment, the person who arguably has more power than any other to determine who may speak and who may be heard around the globe isn’t a king, president or Supreme Court justice. She is Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, and her colleagues call her “The Decider.” It is Wong who decides what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.

At the moment, Wong seems to be exercising that responsibility with sensitivity to the values of free speech. Google and Yahoo can be held liable outside the United States for indexing or directing users to content after having been notified that it was illegal in a foreign country. In the United States, by contrast, Internet service providers are protected from most lawsuits involving having hosted or linked to illegal user-generated content. As a consequence of these differing standards, Google has considerably less flexibility overseas than it does in the United States about content on its sites, and its “information must be free” ethos is being tested abroad.

For example, on the German and French default Google search engines, Google.de and Google.fr, you can’t find Holocaust-denial sites that can be found on Google.com, because Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France. Broadly, Google has decided to comply with governmental requests to take down links on its national search engines to material that clearly violates national laws. But not every overseas case presents a clear violation of national law. In 2006, for example, protesters at a Google office in India demanded the removal of content on Orkut, the social networking site, that criticized Shiv Sena, a hard-line Hindu political party popular in Mumbai. Wong eventually decided to take down an Orkut group dedicated to attacking Shivaji, revered as a deity by the Shiv Sena Party, because it violated Orkut terms of service by criticizing a religion, but she decided not to take down another group because it merely criticized a political party. “If stuff is clearly illegal, we take that down, but if it’s on the edge, you might push a country a little bit,” Wong told me. “Free-speech law is always built on the edge, and in each country, the question is: Can you define what the edge is?”

Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly pressuring telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon to block controversial speech at the network level. Europe and the U.S. recently agreed to require Internet service providers to identify and block child pornography, and in Europe there are growing demands for network-wide blocking of terrorist-incitement videos. As a result, Wong and her colleagues worry that Google’s ability to make case-by-case decisions about what links and videos are accessible through Google’s sites may be slowly circumvented, as countries are requiring the companies that give us access to the Internet to build top-down censorship into the network pipes.

It is not only foreign countries that are eager to restrict speech on Google and YouTube. In May, 2006, Joseph Lieberman who has become the A. Mitchell Palmer of the digital age, had his staff contacted Google and demanded that the company remove from YouTube dozens of what he described as jihadist videos. After viewing the videos one by one, Wong and her colleagues removed some of the videos but refused to remove those that they decided didn’t violate YouTube guidelines. Lieberman wasn’t satisfied. In an angry follow-up letter to Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, Lieberman demanded that all content he characterized as being “produced by Islamist terrorist organizations” be immediately removed from YouTube as a matter of corporate judgment — even videos that didn’t feature hate speech or violent content or violate U.S. law. Wong and her colleagues responded by saying, “YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view.” Recently, Google and YouTube announced new guidelines prohibiting videos “intended to incite violence.”

That category scrupulously tracks the Supreme Court’s rigorous First Amendment doctrine, which says that speech can be banned only when it poses an imminent threat of producing serious lawless action. Unfortunately, Wong and her colleagues recently retreated from that bright line under further pressure from Lieberman. In November, 2010, YouTube added a new category that viewers can click to flag videos for removal: “promotes terrorism.” There are 24 hours of video uploaded on YouTube every minute, and a series of categories viewers can use to request removal, including “violent or repulsive content” or inappropriate sexual content. Although hailed by Senator Lieberman, the new “promotes terrorism category” is potentially troubling because it goes beyond the narrow test of incitement to violence that YouTube had previously used to flag terrorism related videos for removal. YouTube’s capitulation to Lieberman shows that a user generated system for enforcing community standards will never protect speech as scrupulously as unelected judges enforcing strict rules about when speech can be viewed as a form of dangerous conduct.

Google remains a better guardian for free speech than internet companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, an industry-wide coalition committed to upholding free speech and privacy. But the recent capitulation of YouTube shows that Google’s “trust us” model may not be a stable way of protecting free speech in the twenty-first century, even though the alternatives to trusting Google – such as authorizing national regulatory bodies around the globe to request the removal of controversial videos – might protect less speech than Google’s “Decider” model currently does.

I’d like to conclude by stressing the complexity of protecting constitutional values like privacy and free speech in the age of Google and Facebook, which are not formally constrained by the Constitution. In each of my examples – 24/7 Facebook surveillance, blob machines, escaping your Facebook past, and promoting free speech on YouTube and Google -- it’s possible to imagine a rule or technology that would protect free speech and privacy, while also preserving security—a blob-machine like solution. But in some areas, those blob-machine-like solutions are more likely, in practice, to be adopted then others. Engaged minorities may demand blob machines when they personally experience their own privacy being violated; but they may be less likely to rise up against the slow expansion of surveillance cameras, which transform expectations of privacy in public. Judges in the American system may be more likely to resist ubiquitous surveillance in the name of Roe v. Wade-style autonomy than they are to create a legal right to allow people to edit their Internet pasts, which relies on ideas of dignity that in turn require a social consensus that in America, at least, does not exist. As for free speech, it is being anxiously guarded for the moment by Google, but the tremendous pressures, from consumers and government are already making it hard to hold the line at removing only speech that threatens imminent lawless action.

In translating constitutional values in light of new technologies, it’s always useful to ask: What would Brandeis do? Brandeis would never have tolerated unpragmatic abstractions, which have the effect of giving citizens less privacy in the age of cloud computing than they had during the founding era. In translating the Constitution into the challenges of our time, Brandeis would have considered it a duty actively to engage in the project of constitutional translation in order to preserve the Framers’ values in a startlingly different technological world. But the task of translating constitutional values can’t be left to judges alone: it also falls to regulators, legislators, technologists, and, ultimately, to politically engaged citizens. As Brandeis put it, “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”

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Executive Summary

In recent years, growth in demand for wireless services has sparked a boom in the mobile phone and wireless data sector.[i] During the past four years, the number of mobile phone subscribers tripled,[ii] and the number of jobs in the telecommunications field has nearly quintupled.[iii] New, better, and faster mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, have created multi-billion dollar industries of their own, such as Google Android and the Apple iOS “app stores.”[iv] And those technologies have contributed to the dawning of an always-on, always-connected culture.

But this growing demand for mobile Internet access requires a growing amount of wireless radio spectrum, portending serious problems for the future. At the moment, the United States has designated 547 MHz of spectrum to wireless broadband services, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) predicts a need for 637 MHz of spectrum by 2013, and 822 MHz of spectrum by 2014.[v] Without more spectrum allocated to wireless Internet connectivity, America risks short-circuiting the mobile broadband revolution.

The National Broadband Plan proposes a solution. It sets forth a detailed plan to make 300 MHz of spectrum available for wireless broadband use within the next five years, and another 200 MHz in the five years after that.[vi] It seeks to achieve this freeing of spectrum by auctioning unused spectrum, lifting burdensome regulations to enable wireless broadband service in certain spectrum ranges, and reallocating spectrum from other services – notably broadcast television – to enable such spectrum to be used for wireless broadband.[vii] Though many of these provisions are controversial, the FCC has already done serious work to achieve these goals. If the FCC can achieve its goals to enable the growth of wireless broadband, America will be able to unlock the full potential of the wireless broadband revolution and realize the potential of a new wave of American innovation.

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The African Union (AU) will hold its 27th Heads of State Assembly in Kigali from July 17-18, 2016, as part of its ongoing annual meetings, during which time it will elect individuals to lead the AU Commission for the next four years. Given the fierce battle for the chairperson position in 2012; and  as the AU has increasingly been called upon to assume more responsibility for various issues that affect the continent—from the Ebola pandemic that ravaged West Africa in 2013-14 to civil wars in several countries, including Libya, Central African Republic, and South Sudan, both the AU Commission and its leadership have become very important and extremely prestigious actors. The upcoming elections are not symbolic: They are about choosing trusted and competent leaders to guide the continent in good times and bad.

Structure of the African Union

The African Union (AU) [1] came into being on July 9, 2002 and was established to replace the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The AU’s highest decisionmaking body is the Assembly of the African Union, which consists of all the heads of state and government of the member states of the AU. The chairperson of the assembly is the ceremonial head of the AU and is elected by the Assembly of Heads of State to serve a one-year term. This assembly is currently chaired by President Idriss Déby of Chad.

The AU’s secretariat is called the African Union Commission [2] and is based in Addis Ababa. The chairperson of the AU Commission is the chief executive officer, the AU’s legal representative, and the accounting officer of the commission. The chairperson is directly responsible to the AU’s Executive Council. The current chairperson of the AU Commission is Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma of South Africa and is assisted by a deputy chairperson, who currently is Erastus Mwencha of Kenya.

The likely nominees for chairperson

Dr. Zuma has decided not to seek a second term in office and, hence, this position is open for contest. The position of deputy chairperson will also become vacant, since Mwencha is not eligible to serve in the new commission.

Notably, the position of chairperson of the AU Commission does not only bring prestige and continental recognition to the person that is elected to serve but also to the country and region from which that person hails. Already, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Dr. Zuma’s region, is arguing that it is entitled to another term since she has decided not to stand for a second. Other regions, such as eastern and central Africa, have already identified their nominees. It is also rumored that some regions have already initiated diplomatic efforts to gather votes for their preferred candidates.

In April 2016, SADC chose Botswana’s minister of foreign affairs, Dr. Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, as its preferred candidate. Nevertheless, experts believe that even if South Africa flexes its muscles to support Venson-Moitoi’s candidacy (which it is most likely to do), it is not likely to succeed this time because Botswana has not always supported the AU on critical issues, such as the International Criminal Court, and hence, does not have the goodwill necessary to garner the support for its candidate among the various heads of state.

Venson-Moitoi is expected to face two other candidates—Dr. Specioza Naigaga Wandira Kazibwe of Uganda (representing east Africa) and Agapito Mba Mokuy of Equatorial Guinea (representing central Africa). Although Mokuy is relatively unknown, his candidacy could be buoyed by the argument that a Spanish-speaking national has never held the chairperson position, as well as the fact that, despite its relatively small size, Equatorial Guinea—and its president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema—has given significant assistance to the AU over the years. Obiang Nguema’s many financial and in-kind contributions to the AU could endear his country and its candidate to the other members of the AU.

In fact, during his long tenure as president of Equatorial Guinea, Obiang Nguema has shown significant interest in the AU, has attended all assemblies, and has made major contributions to the organization. In addition to the fact that Equatorial Guinea hosted AU summits in 2011 and 2014, Obiang Nguema served as AU chairperson in 2011. Thus, a Mokuy candidacy for the chairperson of the AU Commission could find favor among those who believe it would give voice to small and often marginalized countries, as well as members of the continent’s Spanish-speaking community. Finally, the opinion held by South Africa, one of the continent’s most important and influential countries, on several issues (from the political situation in Burundi to the International Criminal Court and its relations with Africa) appears closer to that of Equatorial Guinea’s than Botswana’s.

Of course, both Venson-Moitoi and Kazibwe are seasoned civil servants with international and administrative experience and have the potential to function as an effective chairperson. However, the need to give voice within the AU to the continent’s historically marginalized regions could push Mokuy’s candidacy to the top.

Nevertheless, supporters of a Mokuy candidacy may be worried that accusations of corruption and repression labeled on Equatorial Guinea by the international community could negatively affect how their candidate is perceived by voters.

Also important to voters is their relationship with former colonial powers. In fact, during the last election, one argument that helped defeat then-Chairperson Jean Ping was that both he and his (Gabonese) government were too pro-France. This issue may not be a factor in the 2016 elections, though: Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, and Botswana are not considered to be extremely close to their former colonizers.

Finally, gender and regional representation should be important considerations for the voters who will be called upon to choose a chairperson for the AU Commission. Both Venson-Moitoi and Kazibwe are women, and the election of either of them would continue to support diversity within African leadership. Then again, Mr. Mokuy’s election would enhance regional and small-state representation.

The fight to be commissioner of peace and security

Also open for contest are the portfolios of Peace and Security, Political Affairs, Infrastructure and Energy, Rural Economy and Agriculture, Human Resources, and Science and Technology. Many countries are vying for these positions on the commission in an effort to ensure that their status within the AU is not marginalized. For example, Nigeria and Algeria, both of which are major regional leaders, are competing to capture the position of commissioner of Peace and Security. Algeria is keen to keep this position: It has held this post over the last decade, and, if it loses this position, it would not have any representation on the next commission—significantly diminishing the country’s influence in the AU.

Nigeria’s decision to contest the position of commissioner of Peace and Security is based on the decision by the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to give up the leadership of Political Affairs. Historically, Nigeria has been unwilling to compete openly against regional powers for leadership positions in the continent’s peace and security area. Buhari’s decision to contest the portfolio of Peace and Security is very risky, since a loss to Algeria and the other contesting countries will leave Nigeria without a position on the commission and would be quite humiliating to the president and his administration.

Struggling to maintain a regional, gender, and background balance

Since the AU came into being in 2002, there has been an unwritten rule that regional powers (e.g., Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa) should not lead or occupy key positions in the AU’s major institutions. Thus, when Dr. Zuma was elected in 2012, South Africa was severely criticized, especially by some smaller African countries, for breaking that rule. The hope, especially of the non-regional leaders, is that the 2016 election will represent a return to the status quo ante since most of the candidates for the chairperson position hail from small- and medium-sized countries.

While professional skills and international experience are critical for an individual to serve on the commission, the AU is quite concerned about the geographical distribution of leadership positions, as well as the representation of women on the commission, as noted above. In fact, the commission’s statutes mandate that each region present two candidates (one female and the other male) for every portfolio. Article 6(3) of the commission’s statutes states that “[a]t least one Commissioner from each region shall be a woman.” Unfortunately, women currently make up only a very small proportion of those contesting positions in the next commission. Thus, participants must keep in mind the need to create a commission that reflects the continent’s diversity, especially in terms of gender and geography.

Individuals that have served in government and/or worked for an international organization dominate leadership positions in the commission. Unfortunately, individuals representing civil society organizations are poorly represented on the nominee lists; unsurprisingly, given the fact that the selection process is controlled by civil servants from states and regional organizations. Although this approach to the staffing of the commission guarantees the selection of skilled and experienced administrators, it could burden the commission with the types of bureaucratic problems that are common throughout the civil services of the African countries, notably, rigidity, tunnel vision, and the inability, or unwillingness to undertake bold and progressive initiatives.

No matter who wins, the African Union faces an uphill battle

The AU currently faces many challenges, some of which require urgent and immediate action and others, which can only be resolved through long-term planning. For example, the fight against terrorism and violent extremism, and securing the peace in South Sudan, Burundi, Libya, and other states and regions consumed by violent ethno-cultural conflict require urgent and immediate action from the AU. Issues requiring long-term planning by the AU include helping African countries improve their governance systems, strengthening the African Court of Justice and Human Rights, facilitating economic integration, effectively addressing issues of extreme poverty and inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, responding effectively and fully to pandemics, and working towards the equitable allocation of water, especially in urban areas.

Finally, there is the AU’s dependence on foreign aid for its financing. When Dr. Dlamini Zuma took over as chairperson of the AU Commission in 2012, she was quite surprised by the extent to which the AU depends on budget subventions from international donors and feared that such dependence could interfere with the organization’s operations. The AU budget for 2016 is $416,867,326, of which $169,833,340 (40 percent) is assessed on Member States and $247,033,986 (59 percent) is to be secured from international partners.  The main foreign donors are the United States, Canada, China, and the European Union.

Within Africa, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, and Algeria are the best paying rich countries. Other relatively rich countries, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Cameroon, are struggling to pay. Libya’s civil war and its inability to form a permanent government is interfering with its ability to meet its financial obligations, even to its citizens. Nevertheless, it is hoped that South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Egypt, and Libya, the continent’s richest countries, are expected to eventually meet as much as 60% of the AU’s budget and help reduce the organization’s continued dependence on international donors. While these major continental and international donors are not expected to have significant influence on the elections for leadership positions on the AU Commission, they are likely to remain a determining factor on the types of programs that the AU can undertake.

Dealing fully and effectively with the multifarious issues that plague the continent requires AU Commission leadership that is not only well-educated and skilled, but that has the foresight to help the continent develop into an effective competitor in the global market and a full participant in international affairs. In addition to helping the continent secure the peace and provide the enabling environment for economic growth and the creation of wealth, this crop of leaders should provide the continent with the leadership necessary to help states develop and adopt institutional arrangements and governing systems that guarantee the rule of law, promote the protection of human rights, and advance inclusive economic growth and development.

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[1] The AU consists of all the countries on the continent and in the United Nations, except the Kingdom of Morocco, which left the AU after the latter recognized the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara). Morocco claims that the Western Sahara is part of its territory.

[2] The AU Commission is made up of a number of commissioners who deal with various policy areas, including peace and security, political affairs, infrastructure and energy, social affairs, trade and industry, rural economy and agriculture, human resources, science and technology, and economic affairs. According to Article 3 of its Statutes, the Commission is empowered to “represent the Union and defend its interests under the guidance of and as mandated by the Assembly and Executive Council.”