OUR WORK: Supporting Integrated Development

In our work, we connect people and ideas for integrated development. Integrated development rests on five pillars: attention to local context and institutional incentives, empowerment of local networks, cross-disciplinary collaboration, capacity building through pilots and experiments, and sustainability through learning.

• Attention to local context and institutional incentives. SUNY/CID’s development initiatives rest on a careful analysis of the complex cultural, political, organizational, and economic factors that bear on the policy cycle and reform processes. This entails understanding the concerns of different stakeholders, the winners and losers generated by particular reform paths, and the interplay of top-down and bottom-up strategies.
• Empowerment of local networks. We seek to empower people and networks in the communities and organizations where we work to lead efforts at strengthening and reforming key institutions. These colleagues often manage our projects abroad. They contribute to durable institutional development, policy networks, and communities of practice by helping to define and manage the development agenda. In this way, SUNY/CID’s technical assistance and training initiatives are intrinsically demand-driven and responsive to local needs.
• Cross-disciplinary cooperation. At SUNY/CID, we break down professional, disciplinary, and social barriers that otherwise impede the flow of information, reinforce social and political asymmetries, and prevent citizens, businesses, and NGOs from influencing the policy process. We facilitate experiential learning and active problem-solving that connect people across diverse institutions and social groups to act in common purpose. Our university affiliation enhances our capacity to build bridges between the social sciences, hard sciences, and the humanities in a search for impartial knowledge.
• Capacity building through pilots and experiments. Our large-scale projects strive to include smaller-scale pilot initiatives that encourage experimentation and learning that is supportive of practical local solutions. Facilitating the search for creative solutions on the ground allows SUNY/CID to assist our local partners in successfully adapting to a wide range of approaches to policy implementation.
• Sustainability through learning. SUNY/CID’s projects encourage policy communities and issue networks to engage in policy analysis, monitoring, and evaluation. This learning and empirically-based problem solving long outlive the closing date of our projects. With our colleagues at the University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, we have strengthened our own capacity to train emerging leaders in public management and policy analysis. We have also conducted study tours for visiting government and private officials, fellowships for foreign legislators at the New York State Assembly, and conferences on cutting-edge issues of governance.