Editors' Note: U.S.-Israeli relations have taken a hit in recent years as the United States has become increasingly frustrated with the Netanyahu government's lack of initiative on advancing a peace process with the Palestinians. Tamara Wittes examines the domestic Israeli and American trends poised to further strain relations if the countries' leaders do not address these challenges head on. This article originally appeared in Haaretz on December 3, 2015—before the annual Saban Forum.

The past year brought unprecedented tensions in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, with many arguments and counterarguments about who is to blame. Beyond the tactical debates—about personality clashes, or the propriety of Israel parachuting into arguments between Congress and the U.S. president—are deeper challenges facing these two close allies. Last weekend, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings convened the Saban Forum in Washington to address these issues and to understand the future trajectory of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The first question that needs to be asked is why a bilateral relationship that for so long was kept above politics has now become a subject of bitter partisanship—in Israel, as well as in the United States. How did distasteful personal rhetoric become politically acceptable in a relationship that used to be carefully protected? Why did politicians lose their self-restraint about using the U.S.-Israel relationship as a wedge issue against their opponents? Why were opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, in Israel and in the United States, prepared to drag the American Jewish community and Democratic friends of Israel into the fray and force them to choose between supporting Israel and supporting their president?

Some argue that these trends result from differing levels of public support for Israel among Democratic and Republican voters. Polls show that Democratic voters are less supportive of the current Israeli government’s policies than Republican voters. If voters in the United States are splitting on partisan lines, the theory goes, then their elected representatives should follow. But polls that ask simplistic questions produce crude results.

A more detailed survey by my colleague Shibley Telhami shows us something deeper: the lenses Americans use to evaluate Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians have changed over time. Today, Americans increasingly look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of human rights—and this is especially true for younger Americans, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. This makes them sensitive to the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and to heavy handed Israeli counter-terrorism policies. These groups form a larger proportion of the voting public than they have in past, and a growing proportion of the Democratic Party’s core constituency. Likewise, American Evangelical Christians look at Israel through a lens of prophetic fulfillment, which combined with their conservative political preferences puts them squarely on the side of more hawkish Israeli policies. And Evangelicals are a core constituency for the Republican Party. These underlying changes in attitudes have shifted the calculus for American politicians. But that doesn’t mean a partisan split on “support for Israel” is inevitable. It does point to specific aspects of Israeli policy that affect how Israel is viewed. As American society becomes “majority-minority,” where no group, including Americans of European origin, constitutes a majority of the population, Israelis should keep these underlying lenses in mind.

[T]he lenses Americans use to evaluate Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians have changed over time.

A second issue to examine is Israelis’ combination of vulnerability and national pride. Even in a post-9/11 era, Americans have a hard time appreciating the sense of vulnerability and fear that Israelis face from ongoing terrorism and rocket fire. The Gaza War last year brought this vulnerability into sharp focus—the war went on longer than any in Israel’s history other than War of Independence, and the rocket threat affected most of the country’s civilian population. The large numbers of Palestinians killed and wounded led some in America to question Israeli tactics.  U.S.-Israeli cooperation on Iron Dome produced impressive results and was trumpeted in the American media—but when you are walking outside and an air raid siren goes off, your faith in Iron Dome does not erase your sharp sense of fear.

Israelis’ sense of vulnerability is compounded by the asymmetric nature of the threats Israel is facing, and by the sense among many Israelis that their effort to reach a resolution of their conflict with the Palestinians has reached a dead end. The fear of another war and a sense that the neighborhood has turned deeply hostile, weigh heavily, in a way Americans have trouble understanding. Israelis become all the more anxious when they sense that their most important international ally might not see their security threats the same way they do.

Paradoxically, though, this sense of vulnerability coexists for Israelis with a sense of greater self-confidence about Israel’s military strength, its economic dynamism, and its wider relationships with the world. Particularly on the Israeli political right, there is today a stronger strain of nationalism and national pride (as evidenced in the “No Apologies” slogan of the Jewish Home Party in the last elections). In many countries around the world, including U.S. allies, the rise of right-wing nationalism is marked in part by politicians thumbing their nose at the global superpower: the United States. Israel, it appears, is no longer an exception to that rule.

Israelis become all the more anxious when they sense that their most important international ally might not see their security threats the same way they do.

These issues—Americans’ perceptions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and Israelis’ combination of fear and self-confidence—go beyond the personalities of leaders or the choices of politicians. To bridge these gaps, the U.S.-Israel dialogue must reach beyond government meetings and Israel-Diaspora engagement— instead, Israelis and Americans must commit to understanding one another’s societies better than we do today.

Finally, and unavoidably, there is a policy problem driving U.S.-Israeli tensions—but it’s not what you might think. The Israeli and American governments are both struggling to deal with the disintegration of a twenty-year-old framework for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Oslo Declaration was signed in September, 1993, Americans, Israelis and Palestinians shared an approach to settling the conflict: direct bilateral negotiations mediated by the United States. But after the failure of the Kerry talks last spring, the two leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah have no inclination to return to direct bilateral talks, and each of them in their own way emerged from the latest effort with questions about the role of the United States.

In the international community and the region, meanwhile, the loss of faith in the U.S.-led bilateral process has led to experiments with other modes of shaping the conflict, from economic pressure on Israel to new proposals for action by the UN Security Council. Netanyahu’s controversial words before Election Day last spring— that there would be no Palestinian state under his watch—were less of a unilateral declaration than a recognition of reality. The White House now more-or-less agrees, with Obama aides telling reporters that they did not expect peace on Obama’s watch. The longstanding, bilateral negotiating process was Washington’s main leverage in pushing back against other international efforts—and now that the negotiating process has ended, these efforts will inevitably escalate. Without U.S.-Israeli agreement on a way forward, further policy gaps are likely.

The Israeli and American governments are both struggling to deal with the disintegration of a twenty-year-old framework for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This begs a question many American officials and analysts are asking: If there is no prospect for renewed bilateral talks toward a two-state solution, what is Israel’s Plan B? Does the Israeli government have a clear vision for its future relationship with the Palestinians? Israel expects American understanding as it takes steps it deems necessary to protect its citizens and ensure their future security. But American patience with Israel’s control over the West Bank is predicated on that control being temporary. There is impatience in Washington that Israel’s leadership has not tried to articulate a path forward beyond the immediate crisis—indeed, my colleague Natan Sachs argues that the current Israeli leadership has embraced “anti-solutionism” as a strategy. That's a very difficult position for any American administration to support.

If their modern history is any guide, Israelis will not remain passive before the forces now reshaping the Middle East; instead, they will insist on charting their own path into the future. When Israelis finally do develop a clear view of their chosen road, their first stop to explain it and seek support will inevitably be Washington. But Washington may not wait forever—especially as the stalemate is generating sustained violence. The time is now to lay the foundations for that crucial policy discussion, by updating American and Israeli understandings of one another’s dynamic societies, and by building on the Saban Forum and similar platforms to enrich our bilateral dialogue.

The weakness of the economic recovery in advanced economies raises questions about the ability of new technologies to drive growth. After all, in the years since the global financial crisis, consumers in advanced economies have adopted new technologies such as mobile Internet services, and companies have invested in big data and cloud computing. More than 1 billion smartphones have been sold around the world, making it one of the most rapidly adopted technologies ever. Yet nations such as the United States that lead the world in technology adoption are seeing only middling GDP growth and continue to struggle with high unemployment.

There are many reasons for the restrained expansion, not least of which is the severity of the recession, which wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth and more than 7 million US jobs. Relatively weak consumer demand since the end of the recession in 2009 has restrained hiring and there are also structural issues at play, including a growing mismatch between the increasingly technical needs of employers and the skills available in the labor force. And technology itself plays a role: companies continue to invest in labor-saving technologies that reduce demand for less-skilled workers.

So are we witnessing a failure of technology? Our answer is "no." Over the longer term, in fact, we see that technology continues to drive productivity and growth, a pattern that has been evident since the Industrial Revolution; steam power, mass-produced steel, and electricity drove successive waves of growth, which has continued into the 21st century with semiconductors and the Internet. Today, we see a dozen rapidly-evolving technology areas that have the potential for economic disruption as well in the next decade. They fall into four groups: IT and how we use it; machines that work for us; energy; and the building blocks of everything (next-gen genomics and synthetic biology).

Wide ranging impacts

These disruptive technologies not only have potential for economic impact—hundreds of billions per year and even trillions for the applications we have sized—but also are broad-based (affecting many people and industries) and have transformative effects: they can alter the status quo and create opportunities for new competitors.

While these technologies will contribute to productivity and growth, we must look at economic impact in a broader sense, which includes measures of surplus created and value shifted (for instance from producers to consumers, which has been a common result of Internet adoption). The greatest benefit we measured for autonomous vehicles—cars and trucks that can proceed from point A to point B with little or no human intervention. The largest economic impact we sized for autonomous vehicles is the enormous benefit to consumers that may be possible by reducing accidents caused by human error by 70 to 90 percent. That could translate into hundreds of billions a year in economic value by 2025.

Predicting how quickly even the most disruptive technologies will affect productivity is difficult. When the first commercial microprocessor appeared there was no such thing as a microcomputer—marketers at Intel thought traffic signal controllers might be a leading application for their chip. Today we see that social technologies, which have changed how people interact with friends and family and have provided new ways for marketers to connect with consumers, may have a much larger impact as a way to raise productivity in organizations by improving communication, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration.

There are also lags and displacements as new technologies are adopted and their effects on productivity are felt. Over the next decade, advances in robotics may make it possible to automate assembly jobs that require more dexterity than machines have provided or are assumed to be more economical to carry out with low-cost labor. Advances in artificial intelligence, big data, and user interfaces (e.g., computers that can interpret ordinary speech) make it possible to automate many knowledge worker tasks.

More good than bad

There are clearly challenges for societies and economies as disruptive technologies take hold, but the long-term effects, we believe, will continue to be higher productivity and growth across sectors and nations. In earlier work, for example, we looked at the relationship between productivity and employment, which are generally believed to be in conflict (i.e., when productivity rises, employment falls). And clearly, in the short term this can happen as employers find that they can substitute machinery for labor—especially if other innovations in the economy do not create demand for labor in other areas. However, if you look at the data for productivity and employment for longer periods—over decades, for example—you see that productivity and job growth do rise in tandem.

This does not mean that labor-saving technologies do not cause dislocations, but they also eventually create new opportunities. For example, the development of highly flexible and adaptable robots will require skilled workers on the shop floor who can program these machines and work out new routines as requirements change. And the same types of tools that can be used to automate knowledge worker tasks such as finding information can also be used to augment the powers of knowledge workers, potentially creating new types of jobs.

Over the next decade it will become clearer how these technologies will be used to raise productivity and growth. There will be surprises along the way—when mass-produced steel became practical in the 19th century nobody could predict how it would enable the automobile industry in the 20th. And there will be societal challenges that policy makers will need to address, for example by making sure that educational systems keep up with the demands of the new technologies.

For business leaders the emergence of disruptive technologies can open up great new possibilities and can also lead to new threats—disruptive technologies have a habit of creating new competitors and undermining old business models. Incumbents will want to ensure their organizations continue to look forward and think long-term. Leaders themselves will need to know how technologies work and see to it that tech- and IT-savvy employees are included in every function and every team. Businesses and other institutions will need new skill sets and cannot assume that the talent they need will be available in the labor market.

Neel Kashkari, the newly appointed President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is super-smart with extensive experience in the financial industry at Goldman Sachs and then running the government’s TARP program, but his call to break up the big banks misses the mark.

Sure, big banks, medium-sized banks and small banks all contributed to the devastating financial crisis, but so did the rating agencies and the state-regulated institutions (mostly small) that originated many of the bad mortgages.  It was vital that regulation be strengthened to avoid a repetition of what happened – and it has been.  There should never again be a situation where policymakers are faced with either bailing out failing institutions or letting them fail and seeing financial panic spread.

That’s why the Dodd-Frank Act gave the authorities a new tool to avoid that dilemma titled “Orderly Liquidation Authority,” which gives them the ability to fail a firm but sustain the key parts whose failure might cause financial instability.  Kashkari thinks that the authorities will not want to exercise this option in a crisis because they will be fearful of the consequences of imposing heavy losses on the original owners of the largest banks.  It’s a legitimate concern, but he underestimates the progress that has been made in making the orderly liquidation authority workable in practice.  He also underestimates the determination of regulators not to bail out financial institutions from now on.

To make orderly liquidation operational, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) devised something called the “single point of entry” approach, or SPOE, which provides a way of dealing with large failing banks.  The bank holding company is separated from the operating subsidiaries and takes with it all of the losses, which are then imposed on the shareholders and unsecured bond holders of the original holding company, and not on the creditors of the critical operating subs and not on  taxpayers.  The operating subsidiaries of the failing institution are placed into a new bank entity, and they are kept open and operating so that customers can still go into their bank branch or ATM and get their money, and the bank can still make loans to support household and business spending or the investment bank can continue to help businesses and households raise funds in securities markets.  The largest banks also have foreign subsidiaries and these too would stay open to serve customers in Brazil or Mexico.

This innovative approach to failing banks is not magic, although it is hard for most people to understand.  However, the reason that Kashkari and other knowledgeable officials have not embraced SPOE is that they believe the authorities will be hesitant to use it and will try to find ways around it.  When a new crisis hits, the argument goes, government regulators will always bail out the big banks.

First, let’s get the facts straight about the recent crisis.  The government did step in to protect the customers of banks of all sizes as well as money market funds.  In the process, they also protected most bondholders, and people who had lent money to the troubled institutions, including the creditors of Bear Stearns, a broker dealer, and AIG, an insurance company.  This was done for a good reason because a collapse in the banking and financial system more broadly would have been even worse if markets stopped lending to them.  Shareholders of banks and other systemically important institutions lost a lot of money in the crisis, as they should have.  The CEOs lost their jobs, as they should have (although not their bonuses).  Most bondholders were protected because it was an unfortunate necessity.

As a result of Dodd-Frank rules the situation is different now from what it was in 2007.  Banks are required to hold much more capital, meaning that there is more shareholder equity in the banks.  In addition, banks must hold long-term unsecured debt, bonds that essentially become a form of equity in the event of a bank failure.  It is being made clear to markets that this form of lending to banks will be subject to losses in the event the bank fails—unlike in 2008.  Under the new rules, both the owners of the shares of big banks and the holders of their unsecured bonds have a lot to lose if the bank fails, providing market discipline and a buffer that makes it very unlikely indeed that taxpayers would be on the hook for losses.

The tricky part is to understand the situation facing the operating subsidiaries of the bank holding company — the parts that are placed into a new bank entity and remain open for business.  The subsidiaries may in fact be the part of the bank that caused it to fail in the first place, perhaps by making bad loans or speculating on bad risks.  Some of these subsidiaries may need to be broken off and allowed to fail along with the holding company—provided that can be done without risking spillover to the economy.  Other parts may be sold separately or wound down in an orderly way.  In fact the systemically important banks are required to submit “living wills” to the FDIC and the Federal Reserve that will enable the critical pieces of a failing bank to be separated from the rest.

It is possible that markets will be reluctant to lend money to the new entity but the key point is that this new entity will be solvent because the losses, wherever they originated, have been taken away and the new entities recapitalized by the creditors of the holding company that have been “bailed in.”   Even if it proves necessary for the government to lend money to the newly formed bank entity, this can be done with reasonable assurance that the loans will be repaid with interest.  Importantly, it can be done through the orderly liquidation authority and would not require Congress to pass another TARP, the very unpopular fund that was used to inject capital into failing institutions.

There are proposals to enhance the SPOE approach by creating a new chapter of the bankruptcy code, so that a judge would control the failure process for a big bank and this could ensure there is no government bailout.  I support these efforts to use bankruptcy proceedings where possible, although I am doubtful if the courts could handle a severe crisis with multiple failures of global financial institutions.  But regardless of whether failing financial institutions are resolved through judicial proceedings or through the intervention of the FDIC (as specified under Title II of Dodd-Frank) the new regulations guaranty that shareholders and unsecured bondholders bear the losses so that the parts of the firm that are essential for keeping financial services going in the economy are kept alive.  That should assure the authorities that bankruptcy or resolution can be undertaken while keeping the economy relatively safe.

The Federal Reserve regulates the largest banks and it is making sure that the bigger the bank, the greater is the loss-absorbing buffer it must hold—and it will be making sure that systemically important nonbanks also have extra capital and can be resolved in an orderly manner.  Once that process is complete, it can be left to the market to decide whether or not it pays to be a big bank.  Regulators do not have to break up the banks or figure out how that would be done without disrupting the financial system.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Bloomberg Government. 

Event Information

The failed coup in Turkey on July 15 to 16, organized by factions within the Turkish military in an attempt to overthrow the government of President Erdoğan, represents both a victory and a new trial for Turkish democracy. Although the Turkish citizenry brought the country back from the brink of anarchy and civil war, many analysts see last week’s events as a consequence of the political instability and discord that has been mounting for years as Erdoğan has consolidated powers, marginalized the opposition, and redefined Turkey’s democracy. How will the president react in the aftermath of the coup? Will the democratic backsliding intensify, or can the thwarted coup offer new opportunity for reconciling the deeply-polarized nation?

The upheaval and political instability in Turkey also holds significant implications for Turkey’s foreign policy and the fate of a neighboring region already in turmoil from the war in Syria and insecurity in Iraq. The West desperately needs a stable, democratic, and predictable partner in its NATO-ally Turkey to address the many challenges besetting the region and to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS). How will recent events affect regional stability and Turkey’s cooperation with the West on security issues, including the resettlement of Syrian refugees? What does the failed coup mean for the coalition against ISIS engagement in Syria?

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program (FP) at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider these questions and other domestic and international consequences of the coup attempt in Turkey. Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe Fiona Hill introduced and moderated a wide-ranging conversation featuring FP Senior Fellows Shadi Hamid, Kemal Kirişci, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ömer Taşpınar.

After the discussion, the speakers took questions from the audience.

Video

• Turkey coup attempt was a shock
• Institutional collapse of Turkey unprecedented
• Disaster averted in failed Turkey coup
• Incirlik Air Base not irreplaceable
• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Audio

• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160720_turkey_coup_transcript

Event Information

The failed coup in Turkey on July 15 to 16, organized by factions within the Turkish military in an attempt to overthrow the government of President Erdoğan, represents both a victory and a new trial for Turkish democracy. Although the Turkish citizenry brought the country back from the brink of anarchy and civil war, many analysts see last week’s events as a consequence of the political instability and discord that has been mounting for years as Erdoğan has consolidated powers, marginalized the opposition, and redefined Turkey’s democracy. How will the president react in the aftermath of the coup? Will the democratic backsliding intensify, or can the thwarted coup offer new opportunity for reconciling the deeply-polarized nation?

The upheaval and political instability in Turkey also holds significant implications for Turkey’s foreign policy and the fate of a neighboring region already in turmoil from the war in Syria and insecurity in Iraq. The West desperately needs a stable, democratic, and predictable partner in its NATO-ally Turkey to address the many challenges besetting the region and to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS). How will recent events affect regional stability and Turkey’s cooperation with the West on security issues, including the resettlement of Syrian refugees? What does the failed coup mean for the coalition against ISIS engagement in Syria?

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program (FP) at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider these questions and other domestic and international consequences of the coup attempt in Turkey. Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe Fiona Hill introduced and moderated a wide-ranging conversation featuring FP Senior Fellows Shadi Hamid, Kemal Kirişci, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ömer Taşpınar.

After the discussion, the speakers took questions from the audience.

Video

• Turkey coup attempt was a shock
• Institutional collapse of Turkey unprecedented
• Disaster averted in failed Turkey coup
• Incirlik Air Base not irreplaceable
• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Audio

• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160720_turkey_coup_transcript

Published version of the CSED October 2007 Working Paper

ABSTRACT

Background

In classical mathematical epidemiology, individuals do not adapt their contact behavior during epidemics. They do not endogenously engage, for example, in social distancing based on fear. Yet, adaptive behavior is well-documented in true epidemics. We explore the effect of including such behavior in models of epidemic dynamics.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using both nonlinear dynamical systems and agent-based computation, we model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact dynamic, and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and can include multiple waves of infection. We also study flight as a behavioral response.

Conclusions/Significance

In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics. Self-isolation and spatial flight are only two of many possible actions that fear-infected individuals may take. Our main point is that behavioral adaptation of some sort must be considered.”

View full paper »
View factsheet »

Downloads

• Download

Event Information

From “American Crossroads” to “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” so-called "super PACs" have emerged as the dominant new force in campaign finance. Created in the aftermath of two landmark court decisions and regulatory action and inaction by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), these independent spending-only political action committees are collecting unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and unions to advocate for or against political candidates. The legal requirements they face—disclosure of donors and non-coordination with the candidates and campaigns they are supporting—have proven embarrassingly porous. Increasingly, super PACs are being formed to boost a single candidate and are often organized and funded by that candidate’s close friends, relatives and former staff members. Their presence is most visible in presidential elections but they are quickly moving to Senate and House elections.

On March 1, on the heels of the FEC’s February filing deadline, the Governance Studies program at Brookings hosted a discussion exploring the role of super PACs in the broader campaign finance landscape this election season. Anthony Corrado, professor of government at Colby College and a leading authority on campaign finance, and Trevor Potter, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former chairman of the FEC and lawyer to Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, presented. 

After the panel discussion, the speakers took audience questions. Participants joined the discussion on Twitter by using the hashtag #BISuperPAC.

Video

• Full Video: The Rise of Super PACs
• Why Corporations Spend on Elections
• GOP Likely to Benefit Most from Super PACs

Audio

• Campaign Finance in the 2012 Elections: The Rise of Super PACs

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20120301_super_pacs

Super PACs have already spent tens of millions of dollars in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, with more to come. Expert Anthony Corrado says that the unlimited spending by the PACs, made possible by two Supreme Court decisions, is giving wealthy individuals unprecedented influence in the 2012 elections.

Video

• The Influence of Super PACs on the 2012 Elections

Audio

• @Brookings Podcast: The Influence of Super PACs on the 2012 Elections

The Syndrome, the villain in the 2004 animated movie “The Incredibles,” is an ordinary guy who has a plan to put an end to superheroes by making everyone a superhero.

Syndrome’s evil machinations came to fruition on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008.

The political parties permit states to hold their presidential nominating contests as early as the first Tuesday in February, with familiar states such as Iowa and New Hampshire given exemptions. Other states jealous of the attention lavished on those early states plotted to make their primaries or caucuses sooner, sometimes even violating party rules and suffering a penalty as a consequence.

To quote Syndrome, when everyone is a super, no one is a super. And so it was with the Super Tuesday states.

Although not intended, a national primary emerged as 24 states fell over one another in a Keystone Kop spectacle by moving up their primaries and caucuses to Feb. 5.

Some argued that this would be good for the political parties in the general election since only a candidate who could run a national campaign would win the nomination.

Ironically, the candidates acted just like they do in a general election, where they concentrate on the competitive battleground states. On Super Tuesday they decided where they could be competitive, where they could pick up delegates, and targeted their scarce resources to those states.

States that thought they would be relevant found themselves irrelevant safe states that the candidates passed by and simply helped run up delegate totals for their favored candidate.

A year ago, the campaigns were focused on building organizations and cultivating supporters in the early contest states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Some candidate strategies were solely focused on jump-starting their campaigns by winning these early states, and others hoped that decisive wins would quickly seal the nomination. Some of the better-financed campaigns could be forward-looking, but they still would not want to spend time and money on Super Tuesday states unless they were sure they would need to.

By the time the nomination process was whittled down to the remaining players and the campaigns could start their Super Tuesday planning, little time was left to advertise, send direct mail and build volunteer organizations. Even where the campaigns decided they could be competitive, too many states were in play for the campaigns to pour in the same resources they did in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The resulting dynamic had a twofold effect on voter participation in this year of high voter interest.

Lack of competition drove down turnout in states such as New York, where Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) were expected to win big victories. Only 19 percent of eligible New Yorkers voted, compared with 53 percent in New Hampshire.

Lack of organization and campaigning drove turnout down across the board, as all primary states combined averaged a turnout rate of 29 percent. Poor organization particularly afflicted the caucuses, which require campaign organizations to mobilize supporters to give up an entire evening. While 16 percent of eligible Iowans attended caucuses, the combined attendance rate for the four states holding caucuses for both political parties was a meager 6 percent.

The silver lining is that continued voter interest buoyed participation where competition and organization failed. Turnout likely would have been much worse if the nominees already had been decided.

As we move forward from Super Tuesday, those states that did not crowd to the front of the line will now find themselves being courted a little more graciously and intensely by the campaigns. This should help increase voter participation. However, the nomination battles are still coming rather fast and furiously, so the campaigns still can’t give the extended engagement they do for the early states. Some campaigns are now facing hard choices as to where they can spend their limited remaining resources. Except for perhaps a few intensely fought competitive states remaining, voter turnout has thus likely peaked in this election cycle.

We expected Super Tuesday to soar into the stratosphere. Instead, it was more of a flop, a cheap imitation of Iowa and New Hampshire. When the dust settles after this primary season and we look back at how the parties nominate their candidates, we will still be searching for a way to have more equitable involvement by voters in all states.

Event Information

The failed coup in Turkey on July 15 to 16, organized by factions within the Turkish military in an attempt to overthrow the government of President Erdoğan, represents both a victory and a new trial for Turkish democracy. Although the Turkish citizenry brought the country back from the brink of anarchy and civil war, many analysts see last week’s events as a consequence of the political instability and discord that has been mounting for years as Erdoğan has consolidated powers, marginalized the opposition, and redefined Turkey’s democracy. How will the president react in the aftermath of the coup? Will the democratic backsliding intensify, or can the thwarted coup offer new opportunity for reconciling the deeply-polarized nation?

The upheaval and political instability in Turkey also holds significant implications for Turkey’s foreign policy and the fate of a neighboring region already in turmoil from the war in Syria and insecurity in Iraq. The West desperately needs a stable, democratic, and predictable partner in its NATO-ally Turkey to address the many challenges besetting the region and to fight the Islamic State (or ISIS). How will recent events affect regional stability and Turkey’s cooperation with the West on security issues, including the resettlement of Syrian refugees? What does the failed coup mean for the coalition against ISIS engagement in Syria?

On July 20, the Foreign Policy program (FP) at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider these questions and other domestic and international consequences of the coup attempt in Turkey. Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe Fiona Hill introduced and moderated a wide-ranging conversation featuring FP Senior Fellows Shadi Hamid, Kemal Kirişci, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ömer Taşpınar.

After the discussion, the speakers took questions from the audience.

Video

• Turkey coup attempt was a shock
• Institutional collapse of Turkey unprecedented
• Disaster averted in failed Turkey coup
• Incirlik Air Base not irreplaceable
• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Audio

• Turkey after the coup attempt: Implications for Turkish democracy, foreign policy, and the future of the Syrian War

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160720_turkey_coup_transcript

A key objective of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to assist its member countries in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UNDP pursues this objective in various ways, including through analysis and advice to governments on the progress towards the MDGs (such as support for the preparation and monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies, or PRSs, in poor countries), assistance for capacity building, and financial and technical support for the preparation and implementation of development programs.

The challenge of achieving the MDGs remains daunting in many countries, including Tajikistan. To do so will require that all development partners, i.e., the government, civil society, private business and donors, make every effort to scale up successful development interventions. Scaling up refers to “expanding, adapting and sustaining successful policies, programs and projects on different places and over time to reach a greater number of people.” Interventions that are successful as pilots but are not scaled up will create localized benefits for a small number of beneficiaries, but they will fail to contribute significantly to close the MDG gap.

This paper aims to assess whether and how well UNDP is supporting scaling up in its development programs in Tajikistan. While the principal purpose of this assessment was to assist the UNDP country program director and his team in Tajikistan in their scaling up efforts, it also contributes to the overall growing body of evidence on the scaling up of development interventions worldwide.

Downloads

• Download Full Paper

Editor's Note: The "Scaling up in Agriculture, Rural Development and Nutrition" publication is a series of 20 briefs published by the International Food Policy Research Institute. To read the full publication, click here.

Taking successful development interventions to scale is critical if the world is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and make essential gains in the fight for improved agricultural productivity, rural incomes, and nutrition. How to support scaling up in these three areas, however, is a major challenge. This collection of policy briefs is designed to contribute to a better understanding of the experience to date and the lessons for the future.

Scaling up means expanding, replicating, adapting, and sustaining successful policies, programs, or projects to reach a greater number of people; it is part of a broader process of innovation and learning. A new idea, model, or approach is typically embodied in a pilot project of limited impact; with monitoring and evaluation, the knowledge acquired from the pilot experience can be used to scale up the model to create larger impacts. The process generally occurs in an iterative and interactive cycle, as the experience from scaling up feeds back into new ideas and learning.

The authors of the 20 policy briefs included here explore the experience of scaling up successful interventions in agriculture, rural development, and nutrition under five broad headings: (1) the role of rural community engagement, (2) the importance of value chains, (3) the intricacies of scaling up nutrition interventions, (4) the lessons learned from institutional approaches, and (5) the experience of international aid donors.

There is no blueprint for when and how to take an intervention to scale, but the examples and experiences described in this series of policy briefs offer important insights into how to address the key global issues of agricultural productivity, food insecurity, and rural poverty.

The challenge of rural poverty and food insecurity in the developing world remains daunting. Recent estimates show that “there are still about 1.2 billion extremely poor people in the world. In addition, about 870 million people are undernourished, and about 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiency. About 70 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and many have some dependency on agriculture,” (Cleaver 2012). Addressing this challenge by assisting rural small-holder farmers in developing countries is the mandate of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an international financial institution based in Rome.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development is a relatively small donor in the global aid architecture, accounting for approximately one-half of 1 percent of all aid paid directly to developing countries in 2010. Although more significant in its core area of agricultural and rural development, IFAD still accounts for less than 5 percent of total official development assistance in that sector.1 Confronted with the gap between its small size and the large scale of the problem it has been mandated to address, IFAD seeks ways to increase its impact for every dollar it invests in agriculture and rural development on behalf of its member states. One indicator of this intention to scale up is that it has set a goal to reach 90 million rural poor between 2012 and 2015 and lift 80 million out of poverty during that time. These numbers are roughly three times the number of poor IFAD has reached previously during a similar time span. More generally, IFAD has declared that scaling up is “mission critical,” and this scaling-up objective is now firmly embedded in its corporate strategy and planning statements. Also, increasingly, IFAD’s operational practices are geared towards helping its clients achieve scaling up on the ground with the support of its loans and grants.

This was not always the case. For many years, IFAD stressed innovation as the key to success, giving little attention to systematically replicating and building on successful innovations. In this regard, IFAD was not alone. In fact, few aid agencies have systematically pursued the scaling up of successful projects. However, in 2009, IFAD management decided to explore how it could increase its focus on scaling up. It gave a grant to the Brookings Institution to review IFAD’s experience with scaling up and to assess its operational strategies, policies and processes with a view to strengthening its approach to scaling up. Based on an extensive review of IFAD documentation, two country case studies and intensive interactions with IFAD staff and managers, the Brookings team prepared a report that it submitted to IFAD management in June 2010 and published as a Brookings Global Working Paper in early 2011 (Linn et al. 2011).

Download the paper (PDF) »

Downloads

• Download the paper

Event Information

The year 2015 will be a milestone year, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda by world leaders in September; the Addis Ababa Accord on financing for development in July; and the conclusion of climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris in December. The draft Addis Ababa Accord, which focuses on the actions needed to attain the SDGs, highlights the key role envisaged for the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the post-2015 agenda. Paragraph 65 of the draft accord notes: “We call on the international finance institutions to establish a process to examine the role, scale, and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda.”          

Against this backdrop, on April 18, 2015, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings held a private roundtable with the leaders of the MDBs and other key stakeholders to discuss the role of the MDBs in supporting the post-2015 development agenda.

The meeting focused on four questions:

1. What does the post-2015 development agenda and the ambitions of the Addis and Paris conferences imply for the MDBs?


Given the ability of the MDBs to leverage shareholder resources, they can be efficient and effective mechanisms for scaling up development cooperation, particularly with respect to the agenda on investing in people and to the financing of sustainable infrastructure. New roles, instruments and partnerships might be needed.

2. How can MDBs best take advantage of the political attention that is being paid to the various conferences in 2015?   


The World Bank and selected regional development banks have launched a series of initiatives to optimize their balance sheets, address other constraints and enhance their catalytic role in crowding in private finance. And new institutions and mechanisms are coming to the fore. But the responses are not coordinated to best take advantage of each MDB’s comparative advantage.

3. What are the key impediments to scaling up the role and engagement of the MDBs?


Views on constraints are likely to differ but discussions should cover policy dialogue, capacity building, capital, leverage, shareholder backing on volume, instruments on leverage and risk mitigation, safeguards, and governance. 

4. How should the MDBs respond to the proposal to establish a process to examine the role, scale and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda?   


A proactive response and engagement on the part of the MDBs would facilitate a better understanding of the contribution that the MDBs can make and greater support among shareholders for a coherent and stepped-up role.

Event Materials

• Participant List
• MDB PostEvent Summary

So we’ve almost reached the end of the year 2015, which could go down in the history of global sustainable development efforts as one of the more significant years, with the trifecta of the approval of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the agreement on the Addis Agenda on Financing for Development (FfD) and the (shortly to be completed) Paris COP21 Climate Summit. Yet, all will depend on how the agreements with their ambitious targets are implemented on the ground.

Effective implementation will require a theory of change—a way to think about how we are to get from “here” in 2015 to “there” in 2030. The key problem is what has very appropriately been called by some “the missing middle,” i.e., the gap between the top-down global targets on the one hand and the bottom-up development initiatives, projects, and programs that are supported by governments, aid agencies, foundations, and social entrepreneurs.

One way to begin to close this gap is to aim for scaled-up global efforts in specific areas, as is pledged in the Addis Agenda, including efforts to fight global hunger and malnutrition, international tax cooperation and international cooperation to strengthen capacities of municipalities and other local authorities, investments and international coopera­tion to allow all children to complete free, equitable, inclusive and quality early childhood, primary and secondary education, and concessional and non-concessional financing.

Another way is to develop country-specific national targets and plans consistent with the SDG, Addis, and COP21 targets, as is currently being done with the assistance of the United Nations Development Program’s MAPS program. This can provide broad guidance on policy priorities and resource mobilization strategies to be pursued at the national level and can help national and international actors to prioritize their interventions in areas where a country’s needs are greatest.

However, calling for expanded global efforts in particular priority areas and defining national targets and plans is not enough. Individual development actors have to link their specific projects and programs with the national SDG, Addis, and COP21 targets. They systematically have to pursue a scaling-up strategy in their areas of engagement, i.e., to develop and pursue pathways from individual time-bound interventions to impact at a scale in a way that will help achieve the global and national targets. A recent paper I co-authored with Larry Cooley summarizes two complementary approaches of how one might design and implement such scaling-up pathways. The main point, however, is that only the pursuit of such scaling-up pathways constitutes a meaningful theory of change that offers hope for effective implementation of the new global sustainable development targets.

Fortunately, over the last decade, development analysts and agencies have increasingly focused on the question of how to scale up impact of successful development interventions. Leading the charge, the World Bank in 2004, under its president Jim Wolfensohn, organized a high-level international conference in Shanghai in cooperation with the Chinese authorities on the topic of scaling up development impact and published the associated analytical work. However, with changes in the leadership at the World Bank, the initiative passed to others in the mid-2000s, including the Brookings Institution, ExpandNet (a group of academics working with the World Health Organization), Management Systems International (MSI), and Stanford University. They developed analytical frameworks for systematically assessing scalability of development initiatives and innovations, analyzed the experience with more or less successful scaling-up initiatives, including in fragile and conflict-affected states, and established networks that bring together development experts and practitioners to share knowledge.

By now, many international development agencies (including GIZ, JICA, USAID, African Development Bank, IFAD and UNDP), foundations (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation) and leading development NGOs (including Heifer International, Save the Children and the World Resources Institute), among others, have focused on how best to scale up development impact, while the OECD recently introduced a prize for the most successful scaling-up development initiatives. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is perhaps the most advanced among the agencies, having developed a systematic operational approach to the innovation-learning-scaling-up cycle. In a collaborative effort with the Brookings Institution, IFAD reviewed its operational practices and experience and then prepared operational design and evaluation guidelines, which can serve as a good example for other development agencies. The World Bank, while yet to develop a systematic institution-wide approach to the scaling-up agenda, is exploring in specific areas how best to pursue scaled-up impact, such as in the areas of mother and child health, social enterprise innovation, and the “science of delivery.”

Now that the international community has agreed on the SDGs and the Addis Agenda, and is closing in on an agreement in Paris on how to respond to climate change, it is the right time to bridge the “missing middle” by linking the sustainable development and climate targets with effective scaling-up methodologies and practices among the development actors. In practical terms, this requires the following steps:

• Developing shared definitions, analytical frameworks, and operational approaches to scaling up among development experts;
• Developing sectoral and sub-sectoral strategies at country level that link short- and medium-term programs and interventions through scaling-up pathways with the longer-term SDG and climate targets;
• Introducing effective operational policies and practices in the development agencies in country strategies, project design, and monitoring and evaluation;
• Developing multi-stakeholder partnerships around key development interventions with the shared goal of pursuing well-identified scaling-up pathways focused on the achievement of the SDGs and climate targets;
• Developing incentive schemes based on the growing experience with “challenge funds” that focus not only on innovation, but also on scaling up, such as the recently established Global Innovation Fund; and
• Further building up expert and institutional networks to share experience and approaches, such as the Community of Practice on Scaling Up, recently set up by MSI and the Results for Development Institute.

To achieve the desired outcomes of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the global targets from the Paris COP21 Climate Summit by 2030, governments will have to find ways to meet the top-down objectives with bottom-up approaches. A systematic focus on scaling up successful development interventions could serve to bridge this gap, or what’s been called the “missing middle.” However, the question remains how to actually address the challenge of scaling up.

When Arna Hartmann, adjunct professor of international development, and I first looked at the scaling up agenda in development work in the mid-2000s, we concluded that development agencies were insufficiently focused on supporting the scaling up of successful development interventions. The pervasive focus on one-off projects all too often resulted in what I’ve come to refer to as “pilots to nowhere.” As a first step to fix this, we recommended that each aid organization carry out a review to be sure to focus effectively on scaling up. 

The institutional dimension is critical, given their role in developing and implementing scaling up pathways. Of course, individuals serve as champions, designers, and implementers, but experience illustrates that if individuals lack a strong link to a supportive institution, scaling up is most likely to be short-lived and unsustainable. “Institutions” include many different types of organizations, such as government ministries and departments, private firms and social enterprises, civil society organizations, and both public and private external donors and financiers.

The Brookings book “Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People” explores the opportunities and challenges that such organizations face, on their own or, better yet, partnering with each other, in scaling up the development impact of their successful interventions.

Over the past decade I have worked with 10 foreign aid institutions—multilateral and bilateral agencies, as well as big global non-governmental organizations—helping them to focus systematically on scaling up operational work and developing approaches to do so. There are common lessons that apply across the board to these agencies, with one salutary example being the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which has tackled the scaling up agenda systematically and persistently.

Following are eight takeaway lessons I gleaned from my work with IFAD:

1. Look into the “black box” of institutions. It is not enough to decide that an institution should focus on and support scaling up of successful development interventions. You actually need to look at how institutions function in terms of their mission statement and corporate strategy, their policies and processes, their operational instruments, their budgets, management and staff incentives, and their monitoring and evaluation practices. Check out the Brookings working paper that summarizes the results of a scaling up review of the IFAD.
2. Scaling needs to be pursued institution-wide. Tasking one unit in an organization with innovation and scaling up, or creating special outside entities (like the Global Innovation Fund set up jointly by a number of donor agencies) is a good first step. But ultimately, a comprehensive approach must be mainstreamed so that all operational activities are geared toward scaling up.
3. Scaling up must be championed from the top. The governing boards and leadership of the institutions need to commit to scaling up and persistently stay on message, since, like any fundamental institutional change, effectively scaling up takes time, perhaps a decade or more as with IFAD.
4. The scaling up process must be grown within the institution. External analysis and advice from consultants can play an important role in institutional reviews. But for lasting institutional change, the leadership must come from within and involve broad participation from managers and staff in developing operational policies and processes that are tailored to an institution’s specific culture, tasks, and organizational structure.
5. A well-articulated operational approach for scaling up needs to be put in place. For more on this, take a look at a recent paper by Larry Cooley and I that reviews two helpful operational approaches, which are also covered in Cooley’s blog. For the education sector, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings just published its report “Millions Learning,” which provides a useful scaling up approach specifically tailored to the education sector.
6. Operational staffs need to receive practical guidance and training. It is not enough to tell staff that they have to focus on scaling up and then give them a general framework. They also need practical guidance and training, ideally tailored to the specific business lines they are engaged in. IFAD, for example, developed overall operational guidelines for scaling up, as well as guidance notes for specific area of engagement, including livestock development, agricultural value chains, land tenure security, etc.  This guidance and training ideally should also be extended to consultants working with the agency on project preparation, implementation, and evaluation, as well as to the agency’s local counterpart organizations.
7. New approaches to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) have to be crafted. Typically the M&E for development projects is backward looking and focused on accountability, narrow issues of implementation, and short-term results. Scaling up requires continuous learning, structured experimentation, and innovation based on evidence, including whether the enabling conditions for scaling up are being established. And it is important to monitor and evaluate the institutional mainstreaming process of scaling up to ensure that it is effectively pursued. I’d recommend looking at how the German Agency for International Development (GIZ) carried out a corporate-wide evaluation of its scaling up experience.
8. Scaling up helps aid organizations mobilize financial resources. Scaling up leverages limited institutional resources in two ways: First, an organization can multiply the impact of its own financial capacity by linking up with public and private agencies and building multi-stakeholder coalitions in support of scaling up. Second, when an organization demonstrates that it is pursuing not only one-off results but also scaled up impact, funders or shareholders of the organization tend to be more motivated to support the organization. This certainly was one of the drivers of IFAD’s successful financial replenishment consultation rounds over the last decade.

By adopting these lessons, development organizations can actually begin to scale up to the level necessary to bridge the missing middle. The key will be to assure that a focus on scaling up is not the exception but instead becomes ingrained in the institutional DNA. Simply put, in designing and implementing development programs and projects, the question needs to be answered, “What’s next, if this intervention works?”

In 2015 the international community agreed on a set of ambitious sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the global society, to be achieved by 2030. One of the lessons that the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG s) has highlighted is the importance of a systematic approach to identify and sequence development interventions—policies, programs, and projects—to achieve such goals at a meaningful scale. The Chinese approach to development, which consists of identifying a problem and long-term goal, testing alternative solutions, and then implementing those that are promising in a sustained manner, learning and adapting as one proceeds—Deng Xiaoping’s “crossing the river by feeling the stones”—is an approach that holds promise for successful achievement of the SDGs.

Having observed the Chinese way, then World Bank Group President James Wolfensohn in 2004, together with the Chinese government, convened a major international conference in Shanghai on scaling up successful development interventions, and in 2005 the World Bank Group (WBG ) published the results of the conference, including an assessment of the Chinese approach. (Moreno-Dodson 2005). Some ten years later, the WBG once again is addressing the question of how to support scaling up of successful development interventions, at a time when the challenge and opportunity of scaling up have become a widely recognized issue for many development institutions and experts.

Since traditional private and public service providers frequently do not reach the poorest people in developing countries, social enterprises can play an important role in providing key services to those at the “base of the pyramid.”

In parallel with the recognition that scaling up matters, the development community is now also focusing on social enterprises (SEs), a new set of actors falling between the traditionally recognized public and private sectors. We adopt here the World Bank’s definition of “social enterprises” as a social-mission-led organization that provides sustainable services to Base of the Pyramid (BoP) populations. This is broadly in line with other existing definitions for the sector and reflects the World Bank’s primary interest in social enterprises as a mechanism for supporting service delivery for the poor. Although social enterprises can adopt various organizational forms—business, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations are all forms commonly adopted by social enterprises—they differ from private providers principally by combining three features: operating with a social purpose, adhering to business principles, and aiming for financial sustainability. Since traditional private and public service providers frequently do not reach the poorest people in developing countries, social enterprises can play an important role in providing key services to those at the “base of the pyramid.” (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Role of SE sector in public service provision

Social enterprises often start at the initiative of a visionary entrepreneur who sees a significant social need, whether in education, health, sanitation, or microfinance, and who responds by developing an innovative way to address the perceived need, usually by setting up an NGO, or a for-profit enterprise. Social enterprises and their innovations generally start small. When successful, they face an important challenge: how to expand their operations and innovations to meet the social need at a larger scale. 

Development partner organizations—donors, for short—have recognized the contribution that social enterprises can make to find and implement innovative ways to meet the social service needs of people at the base of the pyramid, and they have started to explore how they can support social enterprises in responding to these needs at a meaningful scale. 

The purpose of this paper is to present a menu of approaches for addressing the challenge of scaling up social enterprise innovations, based on a review of the literature on scaling up and on social enterprises. The paper does not aim to offer specific recommendations for entrepreneurs or blueprints and guidelines for the development agencies. The range of settings, problems, and solutions is too wide to permit that. Rather, the paper provides an overview of ways to think about and approach the scaling up of social enterprise innovations. Where possible, the paper also refers to specific tools that can be helpful in implementing the proposed approaches. 

Note that we talk about scaling up social enterprise innovations, not about social enterprises. This is because it is the innovations and how they are scaled up that matter. An innovation may be scaled up by the social enterprise where it originated, by handoff to a public agency for implementation at a larger scale, or by other private enterprises, small or large. 

This paper is structured in three parts: Part I presents a general approach to scaling up development interventions. This helps establish basic definitions and concepts. Part II considers approaches for the scaling up of social enterprise innovations. Part III provides a summary of the main conclusions and lessons from experience. A postscript draws out implications for external aid donors. Examples from actual practice are used to exemplify the approaches and are summarized in Annex boxes.

Downloads

• Download the full paper (PDF)

The Supreme Court today decided that Congress meant what it said when it enacted the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA requires people in all 50 states to carry health insurance and provided tax credits to help them afford it. To have offered such credits only in the dozen states that set up their own exchanges would have been cruel and unsustainable because premiums for many people would have been unaffordable.

But the law said that such credits could be paid in exchanges ‘established by a state,’ which led some to claim that the credits could not be paid to people enrolled by the federally operated exchange. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts euphemistically calls that wording ‘inartful.’ Six Supreme Court justices decided that, read in its entirety, the law provides tax credits in every state, whether the state manages the exchange itself or lets the federal government do it for them.

That decision is unsurprising. More surprising is that the Court agreed to hear the case. When it did so, cases on the same issue were making their ways through four federal circuits. In only one of the four circuits was there a standing decision, and it found that tax credits were available everywhere. It is customary for the Supreme Court to wait to take a case until action in lower courts is complete or two circuits have disagreed. In this situation, the justices, eyeing the electoral calendar, may have preferred to hear the case sooner rather than later to avoid confronting it in the middle of a presidential election.

Whatever the Court’s motives for taking the case, their willingness to hear the case caused supporters of the Affordable Care Act enormous unease. Were the more conservative members of the Court poised to accept an interpretation of the law that ACA supporters found ridiculous but that inartful legislative drafting gave the gloss of plausibility? Judicial demeanor at oral argument was not comforting. A 5-4 decision disallowing payment of tax credits seemed ominously plausible.

The Court’s 6-3 decision ended those fears. The existential threat to health reform from litigation is over. But efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act are not at an end. They will continue in the political sphere. And that is where they should be. ACA opponents know that there is little chance for them to roll back the Affordable Care Act in any fundamental way as long as a Democrat is in the White House. To dismantle the law, they must win the presidency in 2016.

But winning the presidency will not be enough. It would be mid 2017 before ACA opponents could draft and enact legislation to curb the Affordable Care Act and months more before it could take effect. To borrow a metaphor from the military, even if those opposed to the ACA win the presidency, they will have to deal with ‘facts on the ground.’

In advance of President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba and Argentina, three Brookings scholars participated in a media roundtable to offer context and outline their expectations for the outcomes of the trip. Richard Feinberg and Ted Piccone discussed Cuba–including developments in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, the Cuban economy, and human rights on the island–and Harold Trinkunas offered insight on Argentina, inter-American relations, and the timing of the visit.

Read the transcript (PDF) »

Richard Feinberg:

The idea is to promote a gradual incremental transition to a more open, pluralistic and prosperous Cuba integrated into global markets of goods, capital, and ideas. It is a long-term strategy. It cannot be measured by quarterly reports.

Ted Piccone:

...the key [is] to unlock a whole set of future changes that I think will be net positive for the United States, but it is going to take time, and it is not going to happen overnight.

Harold Trinkunas:

Cuba is really about moving, among other things, a stumbling block to better relations with Latin America, and Argentina is about restoring a positive relationship with a key swing state in the region that was once one of our most important allies in the region.

Downloads

• Download the transcript