Person:

Bilmes, Linda

The United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKO), established in in the aftermath of World War II, play a crucial role in conflict resolution throughout the world. This paper reviews and analyzes 288 audits of UN peacekeeping missions over a five-year period. It discusses key operational and managerial weaknesses identified across multiple deployments in conflict zones around the world. The paper recommends specific administrative and operational changes that could materially improve the cost-effectiveness and overall impact of future peacekeeping missions.

Engaged scholarship brings universities and external partners together to create knowledge for mutual benefit. Together, faculty, students, and external partners define problems, undertake analysis, and share findings. A defining characteristic of engaged scholarship is reciprocity—participants share benefits as well as costs. This paper explores engaged scholarship as a growing part of the HKS curriculum. More students are calling for engaged scholarship opportunities. More faculty are offering engaged scholarship courses. The school is developing resources to help faculty assume new, more externally focused roles. To date, however, relatively little attention has been given to how the school’s growing interest in engaged scholarship is impacting external partners: mayors, department managers, city council members, and school district superintendents. What does engaged scholarship require of them in terms of time and resources? From their perspective, what are the costs and what are the benefits? How might HKS better take their interests into account?

Housing costs across the nation and in Greater Boston are rising, and many policymakers have turned to Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) in an attempt to dampen these effects on their lowest-income residents. Yet design and implementation of IZ policy remains haphazard and often is not well-grounded in prospective analyses of its potential effects. We combine evidence from quantitative financial models and qualitative interviews to create guidelines for the design of IZ policy. We apply our analytic framework to two Greater Boston cities’ economic, political, and administrative environments: Revere and Lynn. We identify the potential for various policy levers to create affordable housing, and address the risks and limitations of IZ policy. We find that IZ policies are most effective when targeted at affordable rental units for low to moderate income residents, but IZ alone is unlikely to produce a substantial number of units priced for extremely low income households. Even appropriately-targeted IZ policies are unlikely to be successful without positive incentives, such as eliminating parking requirements and adding density bonuses, and are limited by their reliance on market conditions. Therefore IZ may not be appropriate for every community. Ultimately, we conclude that to realize the potential benefits of IZ, planners and policymakers must carefully tailor IZ policies to their local and regional context and supplement them with other affordable housing production policies.

The North South Rail Link (NSRL) is a proposed underground tunnel connecting Boston’s North and South Stations, eliminating the one-mile gap that divides the regional rail network and prevents through running across Greater Boston and the Northeast Corridor. This study evaluates the economic case for the NSRL by estimating costs and benefits incremental to full Regional Rail implementation and by examining alternative approaches to implementation. Projected incremental benefits substantially exceed incremental costs: under the Maximum Build scenario (two tunnels, four tracks), the NSRL generates 37.6 billion dollars in benefits against 8.0 billion dollars in incremental costs. By replacing terminal operations with through running, the project could reduce average passenger wait times by 71 percent, more than double rail ridership, and substantially expand regional access to employment. Improved connectivity could also encourage residential development around existing stations and broaden the geographic distribution of housing demand, although these effects depend on local land-use policies. Finally, the study introduces a potential phased implementation approach in which the tunnel is built to full Regional Rail specifications and begins with a frequent, dedicated shuttle between the two stations. This could generate benefits immediately upon completion and accommodate additional lines as the system is modernized.