Charles Kenny is a senior fellow and the director of technology and development at the Center for Global Development. His current work focuses on gender and development, the role of technology in development, governance and anticorruption and the post-2015 development agenda. He has published articles, chapters and books on issues including what we know about the causes of economic growth, the link between economic growth and broader development, the causes of improvements in global health, the link between economic growth and happiness, the end of the Malthusian trap, the role of communications technologies in development, the ‘digital divide,’ corruption, and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. He is the author of the book "Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding, and How We Can Improve the World Even More" and “The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West.” He has been a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a regular contributor to Business Week magazine. Kenny was previously at the World Bank, where his assignments included working with the VP for the Middle East and North Africa Region, coordinating work on governance and anticorruption in infrastructure and natural resources, and managing a number of investment and technical assistance projects covering telecommunications and the Internet.
Students will gain a greater understanding of the changing nature of global economic production and output over the past half century as well as the relative importance of the factors behind those trends. They will examine the global data on shifts in norms, the decline in inter-state war and their relationship to broad social, environmental and economic change. (This may be data heavy but will not require econometrics). They will analyze priorities and risks highlighted in policy documents including US National Security Strategies over time in the context of global change. Individual students will focus coursework in on a particular (set of) policy implication(s) around a foreign policy tool/global policy issue (for example, USAID, EU trade policy, IMF/Basel reform, Pentagon strategy and budgeting or WHO pandemic preparedness). Students will create a set of proposals all targeted at the same specific senior national or international policymaker in development, trade, defense, migration or diplomacy designed to improve strategy, policy or practice in international relations to take account of the age of plenty. The emphasis of student engagement and assessment will be on short policy memo writing and presentation.