Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a Stanford law professor and expert on administrative law and governance, public organizations, and transnational security, will lead the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The announcement was made in Feb. 11 by Provost John Etchemendy and Ann Arvin, Stanford’s vice provost and dean of research.

“Professor Cuéllar brings a remarkable breadth of experience to his new role as FSI director, which is reflected in his many achievements as a legal scholar and his work on diverse federal policy initiatives over the past decade,” Arvin said. “He is deeply committed to enhancing FSI’s academic programs and ensuring that it remains an intellectually rich environment where faculty and students can pursue important interdisciplinary and policy-relevant research.”

Known to colleagues as “Tino,” Cuéllar starts his role as FSI director on July 1.

Cuéllar has been co-director of FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) since 2011, and has served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. In his role as FSI director, he’ll oversee 11 research centers and programs – including CISAC – along with a variety of undergraduate and graduate education initiatives on international affairs.  His move to the institute's helm will be marked by a commitment to build on FSI’s interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

“I am deeply honored to have been asked to lead FSI. The institute is in a unique position to help address some of our most pressing international challenges, in areas such as governance and development, health, technology, and security,” Cuéllar said. “FSI’s culture embodies the best of Stanford – a commitment to rigorous research, training leaders and engaging with the world – and excels at bringing together accomplished scholars from different disciplines.”

Cuéllar, 40, is a senior fellow at FSI and the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at the law school, where he will continue to teach and conduct research. He succeeds Gerhard Casper, Stanford’s ninth president and a senior fellow at FSI.

“We are deeply indebted to former President Casper for accomplishing so much as FSI director this year and for overseeing the transition to new leadership so effectively,” Arvin said.

Casper was appointed to direct the institute for one year following the departure of Coit D. Blacker, who led FSI from 2003 to 2012 and oversaw significant growth in faculty appointments and research.

Casper, who chaired the search for a new director, said Cuéllar has a “profound understanding of institutions and policy issues, both nationally and internationally.”

“Stanford is very fortunate to have persuaded Tino to become director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,” Casper said. “He will not only be an outstanding fiduciary of the institute, but with his considerable imagination, energy, and tenacity will develop collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.”

Cuéllar – who did undergraduate work at Harvard, earned his law degree from Yale and received his PhD in political science at Stanford in 2000 – has had an extensive public service record since he began teaching at Stanford Law School in 2001.

Taking a leave of absence from Stanford during 2009 and 2010, he worked as special assistant to the president for justice and regulatory policy at the White House, where his responsibilities included justice and public safety, public health policy, borders and immigration, and regulatory reform.  Earlier, he co-chaired the presidential transition team responsible for immigration.

After returning to Stanford, he accepted a presidential appointment to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a nonpartisan agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.

Cuéllar also worked in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, focusing on fighting financial crime, improving border coordination and enhancing anti-corruption measures.

Since his appointment as co-director of CISAC, Cuéllar worked to expand the center’s agenda while continuing its strong focus on arms control, nuclear security and counterterrorism. During Cuéllar’s tenure, the center launched new projects on cybsersecurity, migration and refugees, as well as violence and governance in Latin America. CISAC also added six fellowships; recruited new faculty affiliates from engineering, medicine, and the social sciences; and forged ties with academic units across campus.

He said his focus as FSI’s director will be to strengthen the institute’s centers and programs and enhance its contributions to graduate education while fostering collaboration among faculty with varying academic backgrounds.

“FSI has much to contribute through its existing research centers and education programs,” he said. “But we will also need to forge new initiatives cutting across existing programs in order to understand more fully the complex risks and relationships shaping our world.”

In addition to Casper, the members of the search committee were Michael H. Armacost, Francis Fukuyama, Philip W. Halperin, David Holloway, Rosamond L. Naylor, Douglas K. Owens, and Elisabeth Paté-Cornell.

Retraction: In June 2012, Stanford researchers Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid retracted the research findings explained in the following article. Their findings, presented in the essay, "Does development assistance for health really displace government health spending? Reassessing the evidence," contained errors in statistical model choice and reporting. The essay was published May 8, 2012, by the journal PLoS Medicine. The researchers erroneously concluded that there was no significant displacement of foreign aid. When they discovered their mistake, they informed editors at PLoS Medicine and moved to correct the record. The editors agreed with the need for the retraction and accepted the authors’ explanation of their error. The retraction can be read at www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001214.

When a 2010 study concluded that about half the money given to international governments for providing health care services isn’t used as intended, skeptics who argued that foreign aid is largely wasted were handed a powerful piece of data to bolster their claims.

But Stanford researchers Rajaie S. Batniji and Eran Bendavid say those findings are flawed. In an article featured in the May 8th edition of PLoS Medicine, Batniji and Bendavid say the two-year-old study by researchers at the University of Washington should not be used to guide decisions about how much money to give and who should get it.

“We can’t say that there’s absolutely no displacement of foreign aid, but these earlier findings are too tenuous for the basis of policy,” said Batniji, an affiliate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Batniji and Bendavid, an affiliate of FSI’s Stanford Health Policy and an assistant professor of medicine, are taking on the 2010 study – which appeared in the Lancet – at a critical time for foreign assistance programs.

The United States, which gives about half of all the world’s health aid, plans to chop its $10 billion budget by about 4 percent in the coming fiscal year. That’s the first cut in more than a decade. And officials have shown no signs of switching their preference of bypassing national governments as recipients of health aid, funneling more than half of U.S. support to non-governmental organizations instead.

Batniji and Bendavid decided to re-analyze the data used by the University of Washington researchers after meeting with policymakers who pointed to the study as a cautionary tale of foreign governments that waste and mismanage money earmarked for health programs.

“People were citing the Lancet piece, saying this was starting to shape how they thought about giving money,” said Batniji, who is also a resident physician at Stanford Medical Center. “But when we started asking questions about what the actual displacement looks like, the answers didn’t seem very compelling or reasonable.”

Taking a fresh look at the same numbers used for the 2010 study – public financing data culled from the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund – the researchers saw a different story emerge about the use of foreign aid in the health sector.

Once Batniji and Bendavid excluded conflicting and outlying data, such as huge discrepancies between WHO and IMF estimates and information about countries that were getting very small amounts of money from other countries, “there was no significant displacement of foreign aid,” Bendavid said.

The Stanford researchers’ findings are poised to influence a debate among policymakers and donors over whether it’s more efficient to give international assistance slated for health spending to government agencies or NGOs.

“We want to free donors of feeling that if they give money directly to governments, the money will be offset and used for an unintended purpose,” Batniji said. “The concern about displacement really amplifies the demands we make on governments for how they use the money. And that is at odds with a recent movement to let foreign governments set their own agendas for how to spend money.”

The research conducted by Batniji and Bendavid was supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund and the Dr. George Rosenkranz Prize awarded to Bendavid in 2010.

Philanthropist and software giant Bill Gates spoke to a Stanford audience last week about the importance of foreign aid and product innovation in the fight against chronic hunger, poverty and disease in the developing world.

His message goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing work of researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Much of that work is supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.

Four FSI senior fellows – Larry Diamond, Jeremy Weinstein, Paul Wise and Walter Falcon – respond to some of the points made by Gates and share insight into their own research and ideas about how to advance and secure the most fragile nations.

Without first improving people’s health, Gates says it’s harder to build good governance and reliable infrastructure in a developing country. Is that the best way to prioritize when thinking about foreign aid?

Larry Diamond: I have immense admiration for what Bill Gates is doing to reduce childhood and maternal fatality and improve the quality of life in poor countries.  He is literally saving millions of lives.  But in two respects (at least), it's misguided to think that public health should come "before" improvements in governance.  

First, there is no reason why we need to choose, or why the two types of interventions should be in conflict.  People need vaccines against endemic and preventable diseases – and they need institutional reforms to strengthen societal resistance to corruption, a sociopolitical disease that drains society of the energy and resources to fight poverty, ignorance, and disease.  

Second, good governance is a vital facilitator of improved public health.  When corruption is controlled, public resources are used efficiently and justly to build modern sanitation and transportation systems, and to train and operate modern health care systems.  With good, accountable governance, public health and life expectancy improve much more dramatically.  When corruption is endemic, life-saving vaccines, drugs, and treatments too often fall beyond the reach of poor people who cannot make under-the-table payments. 

Foreign aid has come under criticism for not being effective, and most countries have very small foreign aid budgets. How do you make the case that foreign aid is a worthy investment?

Jeremy M. Weinstein: While foreign aid may be a small part of most countries’ national budgets, global development assistance has increased markedly in the past 50 years. Between 2000 and 2010, global aid increased from $78 billion to nearly $130 billion – and the U.S. continues to be the world’s leading donor.

The challenge in the next decade will be to sustain high aid volumes given the economic challenges that now confront developed countries. I am confident that we can and will sustain these volumes for three reasons.

First, a strong core of leading voices in both parties recognizes that promoting development serves our national interest. In this interconnected world, our security and prosperity depend in important ways on the security and prosperity of those who live beyond our borders.

Second, providing assistance is a reflection of our values – it is these humanitarian motives that drove the unprecedented U.S. commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS during the Bush Administration.

Perhaps most importantly, especially in tight budget times, development agencies are learning a great deal about what works in foreign assistance, and are putting taxpayers’ dollars to better use to reduce poverty, fight disease, increase productivity, and strengthen governance – with increasing evidence to show for it.

Some of the most dire situations in the developing world are found in conflict zones. How can philanthropists and nongovernmental organizations best work in places with unstable governments and public health crises? Is there a role for larger groups like the Gates Foundation to play in war-torn areas?

Paul H. Wise: As a pediatrician, the central challenge is this: The majority of preventable child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and in much of the world occur in areas of political instability and poor governance. 

This means that if we are to make real progress in improving child health we must be able to enhance the provision of critical, highly efficacious health interventions in areas that are characterized by complex political environments – often where corruption, civil conflict, and poor public management are the rule. 

Currently, most of the major global health funders tend to avoid working in such areas, as they would rather invest their efforts and resources in supportive, well-functioning locations.  This is understandable. However, given where the preventable deaths are occurring, it is not acceptable. 

Our efforts are directed at creating new strategies capable of bringing essential services to unstable regions of the world.  This will require new collaborations between health professionals, global security experts, political scientists, and management specialists in order to craft integrated child health strategies that respect both the technical requirements of critical health services and the political and management innovations that will ensure that these life-saving interventions reach all children in need.

Gates says innovation is essential to improving agricultural production for small farmers in the poorest places. What is the most-needed invention or idea that needs to be put into place to fight global hunger?

Walter P. Falcon: No single innovation will end hunger, but widespread use of cell phone technology could help.

Most poor agricultural communities receive few benefits from agricultural extension services, many of which were decimated during earlier periods of structural reform. But small farmers often have cell phones or live in villages where phones are present.

My priority innovation is for a  $10 smart phone, to be complemented with a series of very specific applications designed for transferring knowledge about new agricultural technologies to particular regions.  Using the wiki-like potential of these applications, it would also be possible for farmers from different villages to teach each other, share critical local knowledge, and also interact with crop and livestock specialists.

Language and visual qualities of the applications would be key, and literacy problems would be constraining.  But the potential payoff seems enormous.