Alicia Harley

Alicia Harley is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard Kennedy School, where she leads the Capacity Building for Sustainable Development (C4SD) initiative. Her research articulates six strategic capacities that enable the pursuit of sustainable development under deep uncertainty: the capacities to promote equity, measure progress, adapt to shocks and surprises, transform development pathways, govern cooperatively, and link knowledge with action. She is currently writing a book integrating scholarship and practice on building and maintaining the capacities needed to foster sustainable development in the face of uncertainty and entrenched interests.

The C4SD initiative combines insights from research and real-world experience to help put sustainability into practice. It runs a bi-weekly virtual seminar series bringing together leading scholars and practitioners to share lessons on building capacity for sustainable development. The seminars are open to the public, and recordings of past sessions are available online.

Her empirical work on the capacity to promote equity centers on agricultural innovation systems in South Asia, examining how the sociotechnical design of technologies and institutions can be reoriented so that the poorest and most vulnerable farmers benefit from new technologies. Related projects include a multi-village study of smallholder technology access in Bihar, India; a cross-state comparison of drip irrigation policy in India; and a cross-national comparison of solar irrigation policy across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. She also leads a project examining the tensions between adaptation and transformation in the US Virgin Islands.

She is editor of sustainabilityscience.org, an open-access platform for teaching materials and scholarship in sustainability science, and serves as a Councilor on the Board of Directors of the National Sustainability Society. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard.

The six capacities for sustainable development.
Vignettes of the six capacities necessary for the pursuit of sustainable development: to promote equity, to measure progress, to adapt to shocks and surprises, to transform development pathways, to govern cooperatively, and to link knowledge with action.

Selected publications

Building Capacities for Sustainable Development — a series of working papers with William C. Clark, forming the foundation of a forthcoming book.

Other selected work