Randall Kekoa Akee is the newly appointed Julie Johnson Kidd Professor of Indigenous Governance and Development and the new faculty director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School.
Akee, a Native Hawaiian, is returning to the HKS campus, having received his PhD in Political Economy and Government from the School in 2006. He previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies and served as the Chair of the American Indian Studies Department.
His research interests are labor economics, economic development, and migration. Akee has conducted research on return migration, determinants of human trafficking, the effect of changes in household income on children’s educational attainment, and the effect of political institutions on economic development. His current research focuses on income inequality and immobility by race and ethnicity in the United States, and he teaches Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building I.
Akee has worked on several Native American reservations, Canadian First Nations, and Pacific Island Nations, as well as in various Native Hawaiian communities. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Economic Studies and at the Institute for the Study of Labor.
HKS spoke to Akee about his research and his vision for the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development.
Q: What drew you to HKS?
I was a PhD student here and got my doctorate degree and where I focused on Indigenous Nations’ self-governance and economic development. I’ve done work over the last two and half decades on this topic, and when the opportunity came up to come back and take the lead, it was a dream come true. I know the history and the great accomplishments of the Harvard Project.
It is truly wonderful that there are so many dedicated resources available for this work; additionally, I’m excited to work with faculty from within HKS and other parts of the University. The Harvard Project has a really rich and vibrant history and I’m enthusiastic about being able to lead the project going forward.
“The way I’ve approached my research is that it should benefit Indigenous Native communities, but also there are lessons learned that are transferable.”
Q: How does your research and your work address the issues we face today?
I see it as dual in the sense that these populations are of great interest. There are lots of things to be learned internally for advocacy and improvement of programs and evaluation of existing policies, for instance.
There are also these lessons learned that have applications to the broader population. One of the things I’ve worked on in the last 12 years is the impact of universal basic income, this idea of cash disbursements to households without any sort of requirement. For instance, what is the impact of tribal casino cash transfers that come from tribal revenue and go out to tribal citizens?
We want to look at the impact on children. What happens to children in households when you eliminate poverty? That’s a universal question.
And it’s not just in the United States. It’s the world as a whole. What we found is, as you would expect, when households are less poor, children are better off. They stay in school longer. They are able to have stable, healthy mental health outcomes. They go to college at a higher rate.
And in this time, certainly living in poverty is never a good thing. We saw over the COVID-19 era that we were able to reduce child poverty by half by creating these child disbursements at the federal level. And when that program ended, poverty levels went back up.
The way I’ve approached my research is that it should benefit Indigenous Native communities, but also there are lessons learned that are transferable.
Q: What do you hope to bring to the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development?
I bring experience working with new data sets and exploring the world of administrative data, which often, for small populations in general, may be the only way to conduct research due to size. If we are talking about immigrant populations or other relatively small populations in the United States, such as American Indians, Alaska Natives or Native Hawaiians, they are often not represented in large enough numbers in standard national survey datasets; it makes conducting any statistical analyses quite difficult given the small samples. Using administrative data from the federal government or state agencies can be incredibly useful because they have the population of a state or the country as a whole and that allows for richer analysis.
That’s one of the things that I’ve invested heavily in in terms of my own time and efforts over the years is to seek out these types of data for use in research. It is an exciting opportunity for future research. Researchers have been accessing and using administrative data in other countries for a while now and this has been instructive in thinking about future research efforts.
Q: What do you hope your students get from your course?
The class we’re offering is called Nation Building, and it is a course that I’m co-teaching with Dr. Miriam Jorgensen, the Research Director at the Harvard Project. The course focuses on contemporary conditions of Indigenous and tribal nations and their successes in self-governance.
We will focus primarily on the continental U.S., but there will be some examples of Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and of some First Nations Peoples in Australia.
The course will examine the political and economic conditions in contemporary society across different tribal nations and communities and get a sense of the foundational factors that affect the well-being of tribal citizens and members. We will also look at how the government is run, and what components and institutions have to be in place for tribal leaders to be effective and improve the conditions for their citizens.
I’m very interested in encouraging and increasing the flow of students who are interested in economic development, governance, and public policy evaluation to continue in this area.
Q: What excites you about being at HKS?
What really excites me are the students and the faculty members here and the depth of knowledge and experience and stimulation that they create not just for me but for each other. That kind of community is just wonderful. I enjoyed it as a student, and I am certain I am going to enjoy it as a faculty member.
I’m also looking forward to sitting in on the weekly development seminar that I used to sit in as a student. It’s going to be mind boggling to experience that seminar from a faculty member’s perspective.
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Photographs by Lydia Rosenberg and courtesy of Randall Akee