The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities

Contributors

Bina Agarwal is professor of economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. Currently she serves on the UN Committee for Development Policy and the Indian Prime Minister’s National Council for Land Reforms. Her publications include nine books and seventy professional papers on a range of subjects: land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; law; and agriculture and technological change. She has been visiting professor at Harvard University, the universities of Michigan and Minnesota, and New York University, and lectured worldwide. Recently she was awarded the Padma Shri by the president of India. Maurits Barendrecht is professor of private law at Tilburg University’s Tilburg Law and Economics Centre (Tilec) and a member of the Government Advisory Council on Social Infrastructure. Previously he was attorney at law with De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek in The Hague. His research focus is on legal conflict resolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. He is currently working on improving access to justice (www.measuringaccesstojustice.com and www. microjustice.org). Jorrit de Jong is a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research, teaching, and consultancy work focuses on innovations in governance. 287 Contributors 14-7501-1 BM 10/28/08 5:30 PM Page 287 De Jong is the former director of the Centre for Government Studies, at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is cofounder of the Kafka Brigade, an action research organization investigating excessive bureaucracy. De Jong has consulted with governments and NGOs, including the United Nations. A specialist in simulations games, he has taught in many executive education programs. Peter Kasbergen holds BA degrees in public administration and political science from Leiden University. As a freelance researcher he has worked among other organizations for the United Nations Population Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. His current academic research involves the viability of microfinance in the Netherlands. As the founder of Public Cinema, he produces short video clips for organizations in the public sector to communicate problems in governance issues, as well as their solutions. Albert Jan Kruiter studied public administration at Leiden University and was senior consultant at the Centre for Government Studies (CGS) there. Before joining the CGS he worked for the Netherlands School of Public Administration where he developed several education programs. In recent years he has been consulting with a variety of public sector organizations including ministries, NGOs, and local governments on innovation, evaluation, and governance-based issues. He published extensively on democracy in a networked society, which is also the main focus of his dissertation research. As of 2008 he continues his research in India. Maaike de Langen is a policy specialist on legal empowerment of the poor for the United Nations Development Program. Previous functions with UNDP include business analyst in New York and program officer for governance and human rights in Chad. She has been a researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Development (Leiden University), where she worked on a legal cooperation project between the Netherlands and Mali and did sociolegal research on local courts and on the effects of decentralization on land governance. Michael Lipsky is a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. He is also a senior program director at Demos, a public policy and advocacy organization based in New York, where he is primarily associated with Public Works: The Demos Center for the Public Sector. Lipsky is the author of many journal articles and several books, including Protest in City Politics (1970), the prize-winning Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980), and Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (1993, with S. R. Smith). Deborah L. Rhode is one of the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of legal ethics and gender, law, and public policy. An author of twenty books, she is the most frequently cited scholar in legal ethics. She heads Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and is the founding director of Stanford Univer288 contributors 14-7501-1 BM 10/28/08 5:30 PM Page 288 sity’s Center on Ethics. Professor Rhode has served as president of the Association of American Law Schools, chair of the American Bar Association Commission on Women and the Profession, and director of Stanford University...