Institute for Policy Studies - Programs
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Programs coordinated by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Local, National, Global influence
From the IPS website history page:[1]
- From the start, IPS has operated simultaneously at the local, national and global levels.
- Local: Since 1980, IPS has run an evening school for activists in Washington, DC. From the start, IPS has also worked with local officials and has brought groups of such officials to Washington to amplify their message.
- National: Much of IPS's policy work is aimed at the national level, and IPS has always worked closely with, and provided analysis and model pieces of legislation to, progressive members of Congress. Currently, IPS advises the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which, with more than 70 members, is the largest non-party Caucus.
- Global: IPS founded the Transnational Institute (TNI) in 1973 to bring together public scholars from around the world to tackle the growing divide between rich and poor nations and peoples around the world. Since then, IPS has been involved in international networks of researchers and activists to oppose corporate-led globalization (and U.S. intervention) and to propose citizen-based alternatives. Under the Bush Administration, IPS has helped catalyze the global peace movement, which the New York Times referred to as the "second superpower."
- Building on Letelier’s work on a New International Economic Order, IPS has been a leader of economic justice movements around the world. Richard Barnet’s 1974 examination of the power of multinational corporations, Global Reach, is still required reading in many college courses, as is his follow-up book with IPS director John Cavanagh, Global Dreams (published in 1994). Cavanagh was a leader of the movement to cancel developing country debts in the 1980s, as well as the Alliance for Responsible Trade and the International Forum on Globalization in the 1990s. Through these and other networks, IPS has promoted just, sustainable trade and investment policies. Under the Bush administration, these networks have helped win important advances in debt cancellation and in scuttling plans for a hemispheric trade pact.
- In 2007, IPS developed a detailed "Just Security" agenda that proposes non-military solutions to the core challenges of climate chaos, global poverty, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and regional wars.