SIPA Magazine

Staying Two Steps Ahead: SIPA’s Interdisciplinary Edge

By Agatha Bordonaro
Posted Oct 10 2024
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SIPA Magazine Feature Illustration
Illustrations By Dan Matutina

When Keren Yarhi-Milo became dean of SIPA in July 2022, she envisioned a school transformed not only to “confront challenges but to anticipate them to help decision-makers stay two steps ahead.”

To that end, Yarhi-Milo and her faculty colleagues framed the School’s research and engagement efforts around five global policy challenges: climate and sustainable development, democratic resilience, geopolitical stability, inclusive prosperity and macroeconomic performance, and technology and innovation.

“We are defining issues where SIPA can make the most difference: in our interdisciplinary research, in our teaching, and in our impact on policy,” Yarhi-Milo said in 2022. “And we bring to these issues not just new ideas but a basis in rigorous research and an appreciation for complexity. That’s how we can help leaders in government, corporations, and NGOs go beyond reacting to each crisis to also seeing the bigger picture and planning strategically for the future.”

Two years into Yarhi-Milo’s tenure, SIPA has doubled down on its commitment to leveraging partnerships with community organizations, governments, lawmakers, and industry leaders to identify, study, and ultimately create effective solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Case in point: the 2023 launch of the Institute of Global Politics (IGP), which has become a high-profile platform for critical policy dialogue and a hub for collaborative, cross-cutting policy research.

SIPA Magazine spoke with some of the School’s leading faculty researchers about projects that tackle the policy issues that matter most, locally and globally.

Real-Time Data Transforming Life At The Local Level

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Columbia University’s medical school, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, developed an online survey intended to track the short- and long-term health impacts of the coronavirus in New York.

Medical school faculty were experienced in administering surveys to hospital patients, who, with limited activities and mobility, were an easy group to survey. In order to track the effects of the virus, researchers need a representative sample of city residents to fill out the survey. That’s when medical school researchers contacted Ester Fuchs, professor of international and public affairs and political science, and director of the Urban and Social Policy concentration at SIPA.

“You have to have a dissemination plan,” Fuchs says. “You can’t just put a survey on line and think people will respond.”

In the early 2000s, Fuchs had successfully brought together New York City government officials and hundreds of community organizations to redesign the city’s after-school system. “It was a politically contentious, difficult process, but we did it,” Fuchs says. “And everybody was mostly happy with the outcome.”

That experience had highlighted for Fuchs the importance of community engagement in crafting relevant policy and bringing about change. She recognized a similar situation now with the medical school’s COVID survey: To get significant participation and usable data, the community would need to be involved.

“Community organizations understand the issues, on the ground,” she says, “and they can disseminate information and surveys because they’re trusted messengers.”

Fuchs reached out to her network of local leaders and nonprofits and began homing in on what data would be most useful to gather. Since hospitals and governments were now effectively collecting health information, Fuchs and her partners altered the survey to focus on the secondary impacts of COVID: “the impacts on people’s economic well-being and on their mental health and social condition,” she says. “What’s really needed is for us to better understand what’s going on with people in their lives. And then you can target resources to where the needs are.”

The resulting project, called Communities Speak, harnesses the power of real-time data to identify citizens’ needs and help cities create effective, evidence-based policies, budgets, and economic plans to address them.

Funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, since its inception Communities Speak has employed more than 20 SIPA students for hands-on research, data collection and analysis, survey design, community engagement, social media, and policy brief development roles. Fuchs even pulled in a former SIPA student of hers, Ashley MacQuarrie MPA ’17, to serve as project director. The success of the project in New York has led Bloomberg Philanthropies to charge Fuchs with adjusting the model for other cities, including Reno, Nevada, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The Communities Speak survey is administered twice a year to ensure that the most accurate, up-to-date information is collected. “If you’re using census data and it’s two years old,” Fuchs says, “it’s actually not that useful.”

For example, one of the needs identified by the community was access to affordable day care. During the height of  COVID in 2020–21, as many as 20 percent of national childcare centers closed down, so that even in affluent areas where citizens could afford day care, there was nowhere to enroll their children. The Communities Speak survey identified the populations with the greatest need for childcare— in the Bronx, for example, a whopping 60 percent of respondents with children reported difficulty finding childcare— while also demonstrating how that need correlates with many other critical insecurities.

“Food insecurity, housing insecurity, inability to pay rent, and inability to get back to work are all connected to the inability to get affordable and accessible day care,” Fuchs says. “What this data does is light a fire under policymakers. We can say, ‘If you focus on day care, you have a cascading positive impact on people’s lives.’”

In April SIPA’s newly launched Institute of Global Politics (IGP) and its Women’s Initiative held a special event, “The State of Child Care in New York City,” which brought together city council members with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton. The event comprised two panels, the first of which was moderated by Fuchs and centered on day care; the second panel, moderated by SIPA adjunct associate professor Jeri Powell, focused on after-school programs.

“I think we figured something out that’s really valuable,” Fuchs says.

Creating A Targeted Initiative to Advance Women’s Full and Equal Participation

Women’s rights around the globe are backsliding, from the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States to the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan to the calls in China for women to exit the workforce and focus on child-bearing. So there is an urgent need to launch a targeted initiative focused on women — one that provides evidence-based, actionable research and realistic policy proposals to advance women’s full and equal participation in society.

That’s where IGP’s Women’s Initiative comes in. Launched in March, the Women’s Initiative has convened some of the world’s leading policymakers, scholars, and advocates— including Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, IGP Carnegie Distinguished Fellow Stacey Abrams, Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo, and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani— to discuss a wide range of pressing issues facing women and girls today, including reproductive rights, gender equity in the workplace, women and girls in conflict zones, and peace processes. A focus on women’s issues was foundational to the very development of IGP, says Yarhi-Milo.

“We were determined to approach this, not as an afterthought, but rather as a core focus of IGP,” she says. “Every global challenge is a women’s issue, and addressing these challenges through that lens is an urgent imperative.”

Clinton, who serves as IGP Faculty Advisory Board chair, added at the Launch Summit, “We need this IGP Women’s Initiative because women are not free or equal yet.”

To advance gender equality in the United States and around the world, the initiative develops evidence-based strategies tackling four key areas: women’s economic opportunity; women’s health; women’s safety and security; and women’s leadership, democracy, and human rights.

While many organizations taking on these issues have  either a local or a global focus, IGP’s Women’s Initiative is unique in that it approaches the issues from all angles— local to global. Christina Shelby, executive director of IGP, adds that the goal is for IGP to engage with experts and partners across the University to address challenges holistically.

Clinton notes that she and Yarhi-Milo believe IGP’s Women’s Initiative is groundbreaking and different from other women-focused projects because of “world-class scholarship that will produce impactful policy recommendations; the convening of smart, inspiring women with expertise and experience to move us forward; the training of the next generation of women leaders; and men who believe in equality, too.”

One example of Women’s Initiative work is a report in partnership with Vital Voices Global Partnership on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), published this fall.

TFGBV— which encompasses a wide range of online harms, including distribution of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII), AI-generated NCII, and deepfake pornography— is an important issue that silences women’s participation in public and civic life.

The Women’s Initiative also held a July webinar on paid family leave featuring Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who are cochairs of the Senate Bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group, and Columbia professors Jane Waldfogel and Sandra E. Black. The webinar covered the history of this issue, recent bicameral and bipartisan progress on national paid leave policies, and the work remaining for the 118th Congress and beyond.

Preserving Democracy from AI’s Harmful Effects

In addition to its Women’s Initiative, IGP also announced a new, independent Innovation Lab that will tackle the challenges that AI poses to democracies around the world. Part of French President Emmanuel Macron’s new États  généraux de l’information program, the lab is helmed by Camille François MIA ’13, an associate professor of practice at SIPA, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel laureate, professor of professional practice at SIPA, and seasoned journalist who knows first-hand about the dangers that technology poses to democratic principles. 

The lab is providing a robust platform for researchers, policymakers, and technologists to collaborate on the multifaceted challenges and opportunities that AI technologies pose to democratic institutions and norms.

Among the focus areas François and Ressa are studying are generative AI and disinformation, leveraging open-source AI, generative AI’s impact on content moderation, and decoding red teaming (a process in which organizations test their own vulnerability to hacking).

“We want to help bridge the knowledge gap between experts on democratic theory and the developers at the cutting edge of AI technology,” says François, who as former chief innovation officer at the cybersecurity firm Graphika oversaw the firm’s analysis, investigation, and R&D teams. “Our goal is to translate these two groups’ most urgent insights for wider audiences and to shape policies that encourage innovation while protecting vital democratic and social institutions.”

Translating Economic Data Into Greener Policy

“The beauty of being an economist in a school of public policy is it’s just a very natural check on that sort of meta, talking-to-yourselves type of conversation that academics are really good at,” says Douglas Almond, a professor of economics and international and public affairs at SIPA who specializes in health and environmental economics. With the School plugged into the policymaking community, he says, “I think we have a skill set where we can provide evidence on topics that are very much at the forefront of DC debates.”

Almond does just that through a powerful combination of economic research, a “modest dose” of science, and close relationships with policymakers.

As one example of how he seeks to address current policy challenges, Almond pointed to recent research he’s done on Bitcoin, which is the top cryptocurrency in the world and is unique in that it has a limited supply and is decentralized— meaning Bitcoin can be bought, sold, and exchanged directly without any intermediary, such as a bank. In 2021 the United States surpassed China to become the largest Bitcoin miner in the world. Because Bitcoin mining requires an extraordinary amount of electricity— up to 1.3 percent of global electricity production, or roughly the electricity demand of Portugal — Almond became interested in the climate impact of Bitcoin mining in the US.

In a recent working paper, he and his coauthors found that for a crypto miner in Pennsylvania, a $1 increase in Bitcoin price leads to $3.11–$6.79 in external damages from carbon emissions alone. Almond and his colleagues are working now on a follow-up paper showing how high Bitcoin prices result in increased air pollution in areas of Pennsylvania, which in turn can adversely affect worker productivity and cause other negative effects.

These findings have real-world policy implications, as they inform any new cryptocurrency and crypto-mining regulations that the US develops.

“If what you’re doing is related to something [lawmakers] are discussing, it’s not a heavy lift to get them to be interested in your research,” says Almond, who also serves on IGP’s Faculty Advisory Board. “Then it can really have some serious impact.”

In the past few years, Almond has published many other pieces of actionable research on pressing issues, including a 2020 article linking livestock processing plants with the spread of COVID, and a 2023 article demonstrating the continuing cost of motherhood for women's careers (sometimes called the motherhood penalty). He is now exploring the effects of moral licensing— the concept of behaving well in one area and giving oneself a pass to behave badly in another — on people’s behavior with respect to sustainability and going green.

“If I’ve been good environmentally in one sphere, am I bad environmentally in another sphere?” he says. “If I have an electric car, then do I feel better about flying to China? It’s very plausible to me that something like that would exist. And if so, What’s the magnitude of that offset? It’s a policy question, too, because it’s like, What’s the full effect of that ‘good’ thing?”

From Empirical Model to Industrial Impact

Before entering the field of economics, Eric Verhoogen was working for a research organization that was looking into working conditions in Haiti. His work was a kind of follow-up to an exposé from several years prior that showed the conditions across Haiti’s baseball factories were abysmal: Employees were overworked, vastly underpaid, and harassed and abused. When he tried to revisit these sweatshops to check on the status of the conditions, Verhoogen couldn’t find the shops. “All the baseball factories basically had left,” he says. Rather than improve, they’d simply relocated.

“That was not the ideal outcome,” says Verhoogen, professor of international and public affairs and of economics at SIPA. “The question becomes, How do you both raise wages and improve working conditions, and attract capital at the same time? This concept is sometimes called a high-road strategy, where you pay higher wages and treat people well and that also ends up being profitable for the company. Understanding under what conditions that can work and what are the things that lead firms to pursue those sorts of strategies has been part of what I’ve been working on.”

One of his most recent research projects on this topic involves the upgrading of stitching motors at leather goods factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Motivated by a real-world issue, the ever-increasing demand for energy and the climate impact of producing more energy, Verhoogen is studying ways in which to improve the energy efficiency of factories. While a much more energy-efficient motor for stitching exists— it’s called a servo motor— most firms have not adopted it. So Verhoogen and his coauthors engaged in a randomized intervention to demonstrate the advantages of the servo motor to factory managers.

“The motor has some other attractive characteristics, too,” Verhoogen says. “It makes less noise. It requires less physical force to operate. It doesn’t generate so much heat. So workers like it, and it’s saving electricity.”

Not surprisingly, Verhoogen says many of the factories he and his research team educated about the servo motor adopted it. But one surprising result was that many of the factories in the study’s control group— the group that did not receive the new motor or information about it— adopted the servo motor as well.

The team’s research paper is focusing on these sorts of knowledge spillovers. “Parts of the neighborhood in Dhaka are superdense: A block will have 25 factories on it, and another block will have 15 factories,” Verhoogen says. “So they see us going in and installing the new motor in one factory. And then the guys next door are like, What’s going on? So the paper is quantifying these spillovers, sometimes called social learning. It’s knowledge flow.”

By revealing the factors that influence how technology is adopted, such as this social learning, and studying the extent of their effects, Verhoogen’s research has the capacity to directly inform policies around sustainability and industrial development.

“Why do some places, and some industries, and some people tend to be more innovative than others? What can policy do to try to promote that sort of innovation and adoption of new technologies?” Verhoogen says, noting that being at SIPA encourages him to focus on such important real-world questions. “SIPA keeps me grounded in stuff that matters for the world.”

Preparing Us For What’s Next

In 2019 then-President Lee C. Bollinger called upon the Columbia University community to embrace “the fourth purpose” (in addition to research, education, and public service): to leverage interdisciplinary scholarly knowledge in an effort to create societal and global impact in close partnership with government agencies, civil society organizations, industry, nonprofits, and community groups.

Yarhi-Milo and SIPA’s faculty have taken this call to heart not only through their research—creating new knowledge in emerging areas like sustainable finance, food security, and the intersection of technology and conflict— but also through their dedication to civic engagement. Faculty members have recently served in roles in the Biden-Harris administration, the Finance Commission of India, and the Bank of England, to name a few.

The dean’s mission for SIPA, and that of the fourth purpose, is to further thought leadership that meets the current moment — climate collapse, geopolitical challenges, democratic backsliding, and rapidly expanding technology— head on.

“While we’re an academic institution, we’re doing more than engaging with academic literature,” Yarhi-Milo says. “We’re creating knowledge that allows us to engage with problems around the world while seeing comparative trends and patterns that help prepare us for what’s next.”