HKS Prof. To Be Guggenheim Fellow

John G. Ruggie, director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his research on transnational human rights standards.

Ruggie is one of 190 fellows selected this year to receive a portion of the $8.2 million in fellowship grants, an average of $40,000 for each fellow. Ruggie will be using his funding to take a sabbatical from teaching beginning on July 1 to conduct research and interviews for his upcoming book.

“I plan to write a book on how to improve human rights performance of companies, focusing particularly on transnational corporations,” Ruggie said.

Ruggie said he plans to evaluate not only the voluntary, but also the national and international legal measures that can help achieve human rights compliances from businesses. In his book, he said he also hopes to explore how current enforcement practices can be improved.

Ruggie, a professor of international relations at the Kennedy School and a Harvard Law School affiliate, has held the position of the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights since 2005.

At the UN, he helped establish the UN Global Compact, an initiative to engage the private sector in promoting human rights, labor, environmental, and anti-corruption standards. The Global Compact is now the largest initiative of its type, Ruggie said, with a membership of over 4000 companies around the world.

However, Ruggie said he’s ready for a respite from policy work.

“I have been doing a lot of work on the ground. I want to sit back and reflect on it and do a book,” Ruggie said.

Jane A. Nelson—director of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at the Kennedy School and a former UN co-worker of Ruggie—said that Ruggie’s work is “increasingly important in today’s world, where corporations are very influential and have enormous scope”.

“Developing new frameworks for governance is going to be very important,” Nelson said.

She emphasized that Ruggie’s versatile roles, both in policy and academe, have made him one of the most qualified people to address human rights frameworks.

“I think he’s a wonderful example of someone who bridges the academic community with the world of public service,” Nelson said. “He hasn’t just read textbooks or written them, but he has brought together different perspectives and consulted hundreds of people from different sectors and governments.”