Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 
Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus is a fortnightly series of articles on the role of art in public policymaking. This series invites WPI fellows and project leaders as well as external practitioners to contribute pieces on how artists have led policy change and how policymakers can use creative strategies.
In Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, World Policy Institute Senior Fellow Ian Bremmer illustrates a historic shift in the international system and the world economy—and an unprecedented moment of global uncertainty.
William Powers
Senior Fellow
Project: What's Your 12x12? A World Policy Institute Project on Smart Consumption
Expertise: Post-conflict humanitarian intervention; food aid; climate change and deforestation; ecological tourism; green trade; Bolivia; Liberia; West Africa; indigenous peoples; globalization.
William Powers' most recent book, Twelve by Twelve (New World Library) was released in May 2010 and already is in its second printing. He also is the author of two critically-acclaimed books from Bloomsbury/Macmillan. Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge, an on-the-ground account of Powers’ two years in Charles Taylor’s civil war Liberia, was a bestseller at Harvard’s bookstore and a Publisher’s Weekly notable book of 2005. Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization (2006) has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and in Newsweek and is now in its second printing.
For over a decade Powers has led development aid and conservation initiatives in Latin America, Africa, and Washington, D.C. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the socio-economic components of a project in the Bolivian Amazon that won the Roy Family Award for environmental partnership from Harvard's JFK School of Government.
His essays on global issues have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, The Sun, and the International Herald Tribune, and have been syndicated to three hundred newspapers around the world and translated into a dozen languages. Powers has appeared on programs such as NPR’s Living on Earth, Fresh Air, The Leonard Lopate Show, West Coast Live, Left Jab, World Vision Report, and Book TV. He has been keynote speaker/ presenter / panelist at dozens of events throughout the U.S. and in South America.
Powers has worked as a Fellow at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.; Head of Programs for Catholic Relief Services in Liberia; Chief of Party of a major USAID / Conservation International rainforest conservation program in Bolivia; and Facilitator of the DFID / IUCN-World Conservation Union forest law-enforcement, governance, and trade dialogues project in Liberia.
Education:
B.A. (honors) Brown University
M.S. (honors) Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
Languages:
Fluent in Spanish; near-fluent in German.
-Carol Haggas for Booklist Online
Tags: William Powers
