Global Leadership and Problem-Solving

Catalog description

Over the last 200 years, despite wars, famines, and plagues, human beings in virtually every corner of the globe have become more likely to live longer, healthier, wealthier, and better overall. But global progress in human well-being has been neither linear nor universal. For instance, measured at living on just $5.50 a day per person, nearly 3.5 billion people still live in extreme poverty. Moreover, humankind now faces several unprecedented existential threats to human life itself, including nuclear weapons proliferation, global warming, and the persistence or spread of drug-resistant infectious diseases including ones once thought to be nearly eradicated. This course is co-sponsored by Penn’s Fox Leadership International (FLI) program and its College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS). Drawing on FLI’s graduate professional curriculum in leadership and public administration, this course is designed to help students explore how diverse governance institutions—families and social networks; neighborhood or community groups; nonprofit or social sector organizations; for-profit firms; and, most importantly, government institutions themselves—can act, either independently or in tandem with each other, and either within or across regional or national borders, to maintain or improve human well-being. Students sample and assess multiple and competing approaches to reforming public administration (also referred to as “public management”) and “creating public value,” including through public-private partnerships and “collaborative governance.” Through directive but wholly independent research, students are guided in optional critical reflections on several global human well-being challenges (elder care with a focus on China; economic development in Latin America; and energy with a focus on India), and required written reflections on several others (public-private…