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A new “report card” designed to measure individual nations’ global citizenship in categories such as human rights, good governance and poverty reduction made its debut at a November 14 launch event hosted at the Middlebury in DC offices in Washington. The Global Citizenship Report Card is the outcome of a collaborative project led by Ron Israel, founder and director of the Global Citizens’ Initiative, with Kent Glenzer, dean of the Middlebury Institute’s Graduate School of International Policy and Management, serving as research director.

“The report card is designed to be an advocacy tool for the development community,” says Glenzer, “an asset we can use to encourage investments by donors and governments that promote good global citizenship. The biggest obstacle to progress on most of the major global issues we face is a lack of cooperation between countries to address these problems. With a problem on the scale of climate change, for example, nothing will happen unless countries collaborate.”

The report card is “a reporting system that assesses the ability of individual countries to function as global citizens, members of a community of nations that work together to solve global problems and uphold shared values.” This system includes scoring countries on the degree to which they are participating in international agreements, conventions and treaties.

“The project has been a great opportunity for our students to work in the classroom on things like strategies for aggregating qualitative data, and how to write about it,” says Glenzer. “It’s also been a nice opportunity to engage students across different MIIS programs like development, MPA, environmental policy and international education management.”

The report card concept was developed by Israel, whose search for an academic partner to develop the methodology and research underlying it led to the Institute, and Glenzer. The report cards assesses 53 countries in the categories of Human Rights, Environmental Stewardship, Good Governance, Poverty Reduction, Global Peace & Justice, and Gender Equity, and includes sections on methodology, results, and a detailed “domain report” describing findings for each of the countries.

“Ultimately,” says Glenzer, “I see this as a tool that could be used in K-12 and undergraduate education to educate people around the world about the concept of global citizenship and the importance of collaboration writ large across the globe.” The project’s first report is titled “The State of World Collaboration.” View the report card in full at www.theglobalcitizensinitiative.org.

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Jason Warburg
jwarburg@middlebury.edu
831.647.3156

Eva Gudbergsdottir
eva@middlebury.edu
831.647.6606