Buffett Q&A: Bringing People into Policy with Biju Rao, Buffett Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner in Residence
For this installment of our Buffett Q&A series profiling faculty and scholars in the Roberta Buffett Institute community, we spoke with Vijayendra “Biju” Rao. After working for 27 years as a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, he served as a Distinguished Practitioner-Scholar in Residence for the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Elliott Scholars Program. In his work, Rao focuses on how social, cultural, and political contexts shape the lives of people living in poverty as well as ways to further engage people in policy.
What led you to want to teach some of our Elliott Scholars?
The opportunity presented itself when the Roberta Buffett Institute approached me to teach an Elliott Scholars course. For me, it was a way of getting out of my World Bank hat and into the next stage of my life.
I used to teach at Williams College and the University of Michigan, and I just loved it. When I became a researcher without teaching, which I did for so many years, I really missed that part of the interaction.
Undergraduates ask very fundamental questions. They're not asking questions that come from being jaded or trying to get a job at the end. It's really fundamental stuff: What do we learn? Why is this taken for granted? That process, particularly with bright undergraduates as you have at Northwestern, can really make you rethink how you think, how you research, and what questions you ask.
What led you to want to teach some of our Elliott Scholars? Could you tell us a little bit about the course that you were working on with our undergrads?
The course I'm teaching is how to bring people into policy. My critique is that officials need to do a much better job in bringing people in. For instance, when you allocate resources to a city, why should the mayor and the representatives who are elected by citizens be the only ones to make decisions about how that money is spent? Shouldn't they be engaging directly with regular folks? It has to be done in conjunction with a conversation with citizens. That's really what the course is about.
We are talking about not just poor countries but countries all over the world where this is happening in different ways. They all have interesting models that we can learn from. Hopefully by the end of it, as young as these students are, they came out of it with a better understanding of how the world works and how it could be made better. We also reflected a bit on what role they might be able to play and how it might shape their careers.
Do you have one piece of advice or information that you'd want to share with students who are interested in working in your field?
The first thing I would say is that we need to stop making a distinction between international development and US development. All countries face similar problems.
It's all policy. It's not like you become a specialist in a national development. That world is gone. We have to really contextualize the solutions to the context at hand. One piece of advice I would give is to have a skill set that you can contribute. If it's building a bridge, learning how to deal with all the challenges that climate change is throwing at us, learning to improve how democracy functions, or how participatory decision-making functions. If you get that skill set, then you can participate in better policymaking because you have something to offer.
Could tell us about a memorable takeaway from class?
I think what I'm happiest about is the journey the students have taken. Some of them started out by saying, “I am freaked out. Everybody seems so smart. This is not for me.” And I'm finding them so much better than where they were, now not struggling. They're writing these term papers that are at the level of what a World Bank official would be doing, and they’ve come from zero. They've become far more sophisticated as to how they understand the world, I feel, because of that.
That's the magic. When it works, it's beautiful for the professor, and I hope for the students. I’m so glad I did this.