An Emphasis on Governance

Someone once asked Barbara Bodine if she thought Iraq would ever have a democracy that we’d recognize. She said, “I hope not, I want it to be a democracy that Iraqis would recognize.”

Bodine, the new executive director of the Governance Initiative in the Middle East, has 30 years of diplomatic experience in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, including serving as U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001.

That experience caused her to be very careful in choosing how she describes the initiative and its work. Noting that the word democracy has taken on some negative baggage, as well as the fact that it often defaults to describing the structure of government, she chose the word governance instead.

“When we’re talking about governance, what we’re talking about are the core values underneath the issues of accountability, transparency, participation, rule of law, and what I call mobility: Can you change your social and economic status, basically the American dream of working your way up?” she asks. “When you address those issues, then you have what is really a functioning government and society.”

The Governance Initiative is working in cooperation with Dubai, to set up an independent school of government there to address those issues. But Bodine also hopes to use the initiative to recruit more practitioners and scholars from the region to the Kennedy School to utilize its resources to determine how best to structure governments appropriate for the 21st century.

“If we recognize that most people don’t want to go back to the seventh century, and we accept that foreign models aren’t going to work and the status quo is not tenable, the question then becomes: How do you move forward? What does a 21st-century, Islamic-based governing system look like?”

That’s a question, she says, for the Mid-Career students that she hopes to recruit.

“These are the people who are clearly going to be the next generation of leaders,” she says. “My hope is that they can spend a year to reflect, think, interact, and go back out. Personally, I think that’s one of the strongest things the Kennedy School has [to offer.]”