Yaacov Vertzberger, born in Borsh, Romania, in 1947. Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
My work at NIAS during my fellowship period was focused on two projects. The primary one was an extensive long-term research project that is planned to result in a book on Strategic Policy Reform: Endurance, Learning and Change in National Industrial Policies. It takes a bold and complex approach to the analysis of the relationship between social learning and policy change in turbulent policy environments. This has extremely important implications for effective governance in the twenty-first Century.
The project’s design consists of a three-tier structure. The first, which is the heart of the study, is of a theoretical analysis of the incentives for learning and the consequences of learning for policy change. The second tier applies the theory of strategic policy reform to a specific set of policies for economic development B national industrial policies. The third and last tier is a set of country-specific policies in Asia, Latin America and Europe to test and revise the initial theoretical analysis. My work at NIAS was centered on the construction of a theory of policy reform which, for all practical purposes, shapes and drives the whole project.
My secondary project takes a hard critical look at progress made in research on Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) during the last forty years, and will result in an article that is part of a larger two edited volumes enterprise to be published by Michigan University Press in 2001.