Oct 20
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I’ll be giving talks at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) on October 22-23, as part of their fortieth anniversary celebrations. My October 22 talk at CIDE is titled “Democracy in Crisis?” I’ll draw on recent writing including book reviews and my comment on Francis Fukuyama’s article in Foreign Affairs. See also my recent oped in the Winnipeg Free Press.
On October 16, I’ll be giving a talk based on my book The Logic of Discipline at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions. Details here.
I’ll be presenting this paper, No Simple Fix: Fiscal Rules and the Politics of Austerity, at the annual symposium of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies on September 11. The symposium will be held at the Indiana Maurer School of Law. More about the journal.
I participated on a panel on “national security surveillance after Snowden” at the ABA annual meeting in Boston on June 8. The panel was organized by the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Learn more about the panel. Here is an ABA write-up of the session. I drew mainly on the background notes for my talks on transparency in New Zealand and Australia in May.
Public Sector, the magazine of New Zealand’s Institute of Public Administration, has published excerpts from my May lecture on Technocrats or populists: Who gained influence during the Global Financial Crisis? Read the article.
May 14:
Technocrats or Populists: Who gained influence during the global financial crisis?
Victoria University of Wellington
Meeting with Hon. Bill English, New Zealand’s Minister of Finance, May 13
May 16:
Keeping Government Secrets in the Information Age
Australia-New Zealand School of Government, Wellington
May 20:
Governance discussion: How should public policy studies change in the Asian Century?
Melbourne School of Government
May 21:
Keeping Government Secrets in the Information Age
Australia-New Zealand School of Government, Melbourne
May 21:
The End of Protest
Melbourne Social Equity Institute
Lecture at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, May 27
May 23:
Keeping Government Secrets in the Information Age
University of Tasmania Law School on May 23
May 27:
Keeping Government Secrets in the Information Age
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore
Talk to the LKY Doctoral Conference on Asian public policy issues. Read the summary of the conference and my comments here.
These notes were prepared for forthcoming talks at the Australia-New Zealand School of Government in Wellington on May 16 and Melbourne on May 21; at the University of Tasmania Law School on May 23; and at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore on May 27.
We all recognize that excessive secrecy is a threat to democracy. But technological changes of recent years have fundamentally changed the nature of the “secrecy problem.” Today, we need a new way of thinking about secrecy that recognizes the advent of systems of public surveillance and control that span the public and private sector; that are supported by durable alliances of politicians, bureaucrats and politicians; and whose design and operation are practically unintelligible to most citizens. Read more
These notes were prepared for a talk at Victoria University of Wellington on May 14. Many scholars of public administration characterize the three decades between 1978 and 2008 as a period when we reconsidered the best way to organize public services. In fact, the stakes were higher than that. The essential question was an old one: in a democratic system, should power be put in the hands of technocrats, or citizens and their elected representatives? There was certainly a powerful global movement for democratization during that period. But there was an equally powerful, and ultimately more successful, movement for the shift of power into the hands of technocrats. Read more
I’ll be giving two talks for the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in May. The title is Keeping government secrets in the information age. The first talk is in Wellington, New Zealand on May 16: details here. And the second talk is in Melbourne, Australia on May 21: details here.
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I’ll be giving a talk on America’s First Great Depression at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union in Brussels on July 8. The current issue of Consilium, the internal staff magazine of the Council of the European Union, has a short article relating to the talk.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
