My 2005 IPF Fellowship Research Topic is 

Corporate Social Responsibility in the Romanian Higher Education 

Proposed Project Overview

Present societal challenges have showed the limited capacity of the state to address essential social problems and have raised the question of responsibility. Is it just the state responsible for the well being of its citizens? Where do nonprofits fit within the social challenges landscape? Should the for-profit sector play a part in this matter? Recent evolutions showed the increased need for cooperation among the three sectors, highlighting, on the one hand their common responsibility to address social challenges and, on the other hand, the increased chances for success of a collaborative approach.

A long process of transforming the formal education system in Romania into a modern process capable of educating the future elites of the country is needed. Waking up the subdued civic responsibility of the Romanian people is still a challenge, but the increased numbers of people engaging in various types of participatory activities breeds hope. However, active citizenship is not enough supported by various social actors and participatory policy or decision making processes are rather the exception than the rule in Romania. Responsible citizenship is not among the values that children are taught to embrace and the formal education no longer encompasses activities aimed at developing such responsible citizenship behavior, like volunteer engagement at the community level for instance.

The U.S. has been a model to look up to in terms of active citizenship and socially responsible behavior and also in terms of social appraisal of any form of social responsibility. The project I proposed for the three month International Junior Public Policy Research Scholarship at Woodrow Wilson Center aims to explore the incentives to responsible citizenship encompassed in the U.S. educational policy as curriculum requirements and/or as incentives for admission to various levels of study. More specifically, the project will analyze the educational policy documents at federal and/or state level, mapping mechanisms such as community or volunteer work curriculum requirements, selection criteria for admission to under/graduate level etc. and will look into the possibility of adapting some of the mechanisms to Romania. Reality shows that the reactive approach of finding low-cost solutions to social problems is no longer a successful one. The trend is now towards identifying and effectively employing policy tools and mechanisms to address the cause rather than the effect. Romanian policy actors (government, for-profits and nonprofits) need to develop their policy-making capabilities and learn from similar experiences around the world.

This project is based on the belief that exposure to socially responsible practices through the formal education system will help educating the future socially responsible elites, increasing the quality of the policy making process in Romania and employing the educational policy as a tool bridging societal gaps for the benefit of the society overall.