News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
When I first suggested the topic of this blog to a friend, he said it was an oxymoron. Design and government? Thinking and government? If design thinking is all about putting people first, many do not believe that policies really put people first. The design thinking process involves many steps […]
As a fresh faced civil servant on her first posting to Bangalore in 2003, it thrilled me to bits to read the motivational etching on the Vidhana Soudha, Bengaluru’s postcard monument that houses the State Legislature. It says in native Kannada first: Sarkarada kelasa Devara Kelasa and below it, the […]
The United States must increase infrastructure investments and improve infrastructure quality and efficiency in order to best serve its citizens. Ranked ninth out of 137 in infrastructure quality on the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum, the U.S. may seem to be excelling in the area of infrastructure. […]
It seems reasonable to assume that progressive policies help each other along. That, for example, programmes to improve transparency and lower corruption go hand in hand with efforts to encourage more women to stand for political office. But is this assumption justified? And what if the opposite were sometimes the […]
The ‘National Football League’ (NFL) – the premier body of American Football – is a behemoth organisation with its own constitution, by-laws and processes for governing the sport. But recent events have cast shadows over the integrity of the organisation. In this blog post, I argue that two recent player […]
This January the Blavatnik School of Government welcomed 31 Lemann Fellows and four MPP alumni to its ‘Integrity and Values in Government’ executive training course. The first of its kind at the School, the three-day course comprised seminars and lectures discussing the concepts of integrity and corruption, as well as […]
As Prime Minister Theresa May seeks to form a new government, following an election in which her Conservative Party lost its parliamentary majority, she knows that, within days, she will also need to get down to the nitty-gritty of negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union. Preparations for the Brexit […]
Early this year, Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi suspended a government officer in Puducherry, one of the six Union Territories of India, for sending an obscene video in a WhatsApp group dedicated to improving the administration, of which she and other senior bureaucrats were members. Soon the Chief Minister banned the […]