Sustainable Public Policy Award

Context: Political and public policy changes are needed to move the world towards sustainability.

Project: We intend to educate, inform, and provoke debate within the public policy community, through a prestigious public policy competition, open to students at the leading public policy schools both in the USA and overseas.

Each year, we will choose a provocative topic, and through the medium of the competition, get students involved with these issues, reading about and researching all the data, so that they brainstorm out-of-box solutions which will be presented to experts for review.

They will address political, economic, and structural impediments to the implementation of the proposals and suggest solutions to these barriers, to the “politics of possibility”.

Political systems and principles that either foster or hinder the development or implementation of policy solutions will be evaluated

The academic community will be involved as well, as university professors coach and mentor their teams.

A new economic theory of sustainability will eventually need to be developed, which takes into account the physical constraints and limits of the planet, incorporation of externalities into business and economic models, interactions of various policy prescriptions, the rights of other species, evolving definitions of the quality of life, and the role and promise of technology.

Partners: We have partnered with the Heinz School of Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University, the first of several