Courses and Curriculum

One course (I-MPA 6010) that focuses on critical issues in governance and human well-being; another course (I-MPA 6040) that immerses students in the latest and best interdisciplinary thinking about cross-sector (government, business, and nonprofit) collaboration; and a third course (I-MPA 6060) that surveys competing theories and concepts concerning leadership ethics.

Five courses, each of which imparts academically well-grounded but practical and applied lessons in leadership and problem-solving—quantitative reasoning for real-time problem solving (I-MPA 6030); global issues in child residential and foster care (I-MPA 6045); economic reasoning for strategic decision-making (I-MPA 6055); either global public health and philanthropy (I-MPA 6080) or homelessness and housing (I-MPA 6081); and exploring existential threats to human well-being (I-MPA 6200).

Over the last 200 years or so, despite various significant setbacks, human beings all across the world have become more likely to live longer, healthier, wealthier, and better overall. However, global progress in human well-being has been neither linear, nor universal, nor stable. What must happen if the next century-long chapter in the annals of global human well-being is to be a tale of greater health, wealth, and happiness for all or most people worldwide?

While there is no simple answer, this course argues that human well-being is best promoted and preserved only under conditions of good governance. But what is governance, and what is good governance? How has the theory and practice of governance changed over the last several decades, and how should it develop into the future? How can public managers act more strategically and effectively in the face of existent crises and emerging threats? What sort of partnerships can and should public agencies enter into with non-governmental actors in order to define and solve critical problems? Through classic texts, case studies, and group discussions, this course will explore these and other questions while giving students the practical knowledge needed to become boundary-spanning public leaders.

Knowing how to understand and use quantitative data is, increasingly, a skill critical to success in the government, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors. While numbers, statistics, and graphs abound, leaders across these sectors struggle in knowing not only how to organize, parse, and analyze data, but also how to utilize it effectively and in real time to cope with adverse conditions, solve problems, and achieve desirable outcomes. This course is uniquely designed to enhance your ability to use data effectively for real-time problem-identification, definition, decision-making, and problem-solving. In this course, students are introduced to key concepts, principles, protocols, and analytical tools and techniques relevant to quantitative reasoning, statistical analysis, and three separate but related problem-solving leadership skills: (1) describing and forecasting general social, economic, and civic trends; (2) measuring performance and results; and (3) evaluating particular social, economic, and civic interventions or programs. Students learn and apply these skills in relation to several cases.

Leaders across the world increasingly recognize the necessity of working across boundaries through various forms of collaboration. Collaboration across the government, nonprofit and business sectors has become more prevalent and important, but, at the same time, also more complicated. This course helps students understand the theory, policy, and practice of cross-sector collaboration. Students learn the purposes collaborations may serve, the forms they take, what skills and techniques are required, and the steps involved in initiating, sustaining, and evolving them. Students also learn the characteristics of the three sectors, the roles and contributions each can make to successful collaborations, and the competitive forces that are often at work in the collaborative process—as well as their possible implications.

When governments are tasked with protecting vulnerable children in state care, they can respond by providing residential care or home-based care for those children. This course explores foster care and alternative care arrangements around the world, including the estimates for children in state care as well as how children arrived in state care such as due to death of a parent, natural disaster or crises, poverty or lack of resources, or primary caregiver inability to care for the child. The course examines residential care arrangements including medical treatment facilities, orphanages, and group homes, in addition to, home-based care arrangements such as kinship care or placement with a foster family in North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. The latter part of the course focuses on promising global child welfare practices and cross-sector collaboration partnerships with international, national, and regional public institutions, in addition to, business, nonprofit, and foundation partners. Finally, this course is conducted in part through integrated learning exercises that require students to draw directly on specific learnings from each of their other fall semester I-MPA courses.

Economic reasoning is key to strategic decision-making. This course has two parts. In Part I, students are introduced to important elements of economic reasoning, both at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. At the microeconomic level, topics include supply and demand, production and cost analysis, market structure and competition, market failure and the role of government. At the macroeconomic level, the course covers topics such as measuring aggregate output, economic growth, unemployment and inflation, and international trade.

In Part II, students practice applying these economic principles to the range of strategic decisions business firms face. Why business firms? Together with the government and the nonprofit sector, the business sector has a profound bearing on human well-being. For socially responsible business leaders, the challenge is to formulate successful strategies that grow firm profits, and satisfy its employees, shareholders, and customers, while also benefitting, or at least not adversely affecting, wider communities, whether local, regional, national, or transnational. Especially when facing less scrupulous business competitors, aggressive government regulators, or adversarial nonprofit advocates, civic-minded business leaders grapple with this challenge every day. How can business leaders formulate strategies to gain and sustain a competitive advantage at home or abroad? By applying economic reasoning, we will discuss firm decisions on prices, quantities, and costs, and firm decisions regarding which industries and geographic markets to enter. Moreover, we will examine how firms interact with each other through competition and collaboration. In addition, we will explore how these decisions are affected by the forces and trends in the overall macro economy.

In a world filled with multiple and competing human well-being needs, not all of which can be addressed or acted upon fully or at once, which human well-being goals or purposes ought to matter most, which problems ought to be considered most deserving of attention and action, and which goals, purposes, or problems should be treated as top priorities with respect to their claims on attention, resources, and action? Under what, if any, conditions, should accomplishing certain human well-being ends be thought to justify policy or programmatic means that involve largely or wholly sacrificing other goals, purposes, or human well-being ideals and interests in the bargain? Students explore how, whether, and to what extent effective boundary-spanning leadership is, ought to be, or can be made synonymous with moral or ethical boundary-spanning leadership, and by which understanding(s) of “morality” and “ethics.” Through classic and contemporary readings and case studies, students study several different philosophical and religious writings and traditions that might usefully inform the moral reasoning of present or future leaders who seek to promote human well-being by solving local, regional, national, or global problems.

Note: Students take either I-MPA 6080 or I-MPA 6081.

Globally, more than half of all children under age five who die of pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria reside in Africa. More generally, by many public health indices, including rates of life-threatening infectious diseases, access to healthcare delivery, life expectancy, and rates of foodborne illnesses, Africa faces huge and still largely unmet public health challenges. Millions of people in Africa die each year from diseases that can be prevented by access to certain medicines and mitigated by participation in particular programs. Focusing mainly on malaria in Africa, and with a special case-based focus on Tanzania, during the first half of the course, students describe, analyze, and evaluate multiple and competing anti-malaria approaches and programmatic initiatives. Philanthropy is a huge part of the story behind efforts to address global public health challenges and other major and persistent threats to human well-being. But what, exactly, is “philanthropy,” and what economic and other factors matter the most in determining its extent and efficacy in meeting unmet human needs? During the latter half of this course, students explore the economics of global philanthropy, concluding with a case study on philanthropy in India.

Note: Students take either I-MPA 6080 or I-MPA 6081.

Despite decreases in rates of extreme poverty across the globe since 2000, billions of people still live on the equivalent of less than US $5 a day, and food insecurity, untreated infectious diseases, and myriad other poverty-related problems have persisted and, in some cases, worsened. In this course, we explore perhaps the most visible dimensions of deep poverty: homelessness and inadequate affordable housing. We begin by examining the multiple and competing definitions of these threats to human well-being and different ways in which international bodies, national governments, advocacy organizations, and independent academic and other analysts have measured them. We then review the evidence on solutions to homelessness, looking at the history of addressing homelessness and what the research tells us does and does not work. We next proceed to examine each problem as it has variously manifested itself in each of five places: Hong Kong, India, Tanzania, Venezuela, and the United States. Students conclude with an effort to identify and assess public-private or “collaborative governance” programs, whether international, national, or local, that address homelessness and/or the inadequate or unaffordable housing problems in any two of those nations.

Note: Students take either I-MPA 6095 or I-MPA 6096, each a 2 c.u. course that counts toward the 12 credits required for graduation.

The elderly population of Asia is projected to exceed 900 million by the year 2050. In East and Southwest Asia, public health policies are just beginning to support "healthy aging in place," and pension systems are not yet well-developed. In this group-organized capstone course, students learn about global aging and explore the humanitarian, economic and public health dilemmas posed by eldercare in East and Southwest Asia. By 2040, China alone is projected to have more than 400 million people age 60 or older. Students do individual and task group projects regarding how leading Chinese governmental bodies have defined the eldercare challenge; promoted "public-private partnerships" (or "PPP") programs; advanced community-based "healthy aging in place”; addressed the need for more geriatric medical practitioners and nursing professionals; and more. The last segment of the course is a multi-week research and writing project in which students describe, analyze, and assess China's subpopulation of "three needs" elderly citizens, and identify, evaluate, and prescribe reforms to existing PPP eldercare programs. The course concludes with a student-led presentation of the class's capstone report before a distinguished, multilingual, and multinational group of experts and leaders from the worlds of government, business, and the nonprofit sector.

Note: Students take either I-MPA 6095 or I-MPA 6096, each a 2 c.u. course that counts toward the 12 credits required for graduation.

In 2024, coal accounted for about 10 percent of electricity generation in the U.S. and about 53 percent of electricity generation in China. Coal mining involves uniquely difficult and dangerous working conditions, complicated production technologies, and often highly variable financial returns. In the U.S., the struggle for coal mine health and safety goes back more than a century. By the 2000s, federal legislation had yielded meaningful yet marginal mining health and safety improvements. In 2025, a new presidential administration eliminated frontline mining health and safety government regulators’ and managers’ authority to impose any requirements on mining companies that might be construed to exceed the requirements explicitly outlined in federal regulations. Compared to the U.S., China’s coal mine health and safety saga is shorter but no less checkered. Since the mid-2010s, mining-related deaths from on-site accidents and other causes have fallen dramatically, and China has adopted batteries of evidence-based laws intended to improve mining health and safety. Students do individual and task group projects regarding how leading American and Chinese governmental bodies, national, provincial/state, and district-level/local have legislated and acted on mining health and safety. The course concludes with student-led presentations before a distinguished, multilingual, and multinational group of experts and leaders from the worlds of government, business, and the nonprofit sector.

Note: This is a capstone course.

Global leaders must work across three different types of boundaries: interpersonal boundaries, which involve relations with people who differ from oneself demographically, personality-wise, and otherwise; institutional boundaries, which involve working across government, nonprofit, and business organizations; and international boundaries, which involves both individual and institutional engagements that are carried on across national borders. This course introduces students to the latest and best empirical research literature on leadership. Students explore how to identify one’s own leadership-relevant traits, skills, and signature strengths, and how to learn from past and present global leaders whose careers arguably exemplify ethical and effective boundary-spanning leadership. Each student researches and presents a ten-point "Mini-Biographical Analysis" (M-BA) of a single significant global public leader. Students also meet with leaders in government, academia, international organizations, and business, who inspire and empower the I-MPA students by sharing their leadership experience.

As defined by the Stanford University Existential Risks Initiative, “existential risks, or global catastrophic risks, are risks that could cause the collapse of human civilization.” In the growing scientific literature on the subject, the most commonly cited examples of existential risks or, as we shall define them in this course, “existential threats,” include pandemics; catastrophic accidents related to Artificial Intelligence (AI); the effects of extreme climate change; and nuclear weapons proliferation. In this course, we impart an intellectual framework for defining “existential threats,” understanding how they arise, persist, change, and discerning how best to cauterize, contain, and cope with them. Our framework is in tension with certain other leading frameworks on the subject, and students will be entreated, encouraged, and expected to challenge it. We explore pandemics, climate change, AI, and nuclear weapons proliferation, with a special focus on climate change. Guided by the co-instructors, senior staff teaching associates, guest experts, and the assigned course readings and videos, each student will draw on the full range of skills-based and other learnings in the program and prepare an ETA (Existential Threat Assessment) memo focused on a threat other than the ones covered in the course.