Dr. Richard Blue taps into five decades of experience to give insight into international social development issues.

With a smile and blunt opinions, Dr. Richard Blue gave a primer on what it’s like to travel the world in the name of international social development.

A retired Senior Foreign Service Office, and trained political scientist, Dr. Blue was the kick-off in the Guest Speaker Series in International Social Development on the IUPUI campus on Feb. 24th.

The series was organized by Dr. Carmen Luca Sugawara of the Indiana University School of Social Work. The IUPUI 40th Anniversary Celebration Steering Committee and the IU Schools of Public and Environmental Affairs, Liberal Arts and Center for Service and Learning have teamed with the with the School of Social Work to host the series.

In introducing the lecture series, Sugawara noted that globalization is increasingly shaping our communities, affecting our social institutions and even changing our taste.” All disciplines need to reshape their curriculum to address the challenges of globalization, she added.

“We begin our series of lectures with a topic that is fundamental to what we do in social development – program evaluation and civil society work,” she said.

Blue’s career spans five decades as a Foreign Service office, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, and as a representative of the Asia Foundation for Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. He currently serves as an international development consultant with Social Impact, a firm based in Arlington, Va.

Sugawara pointed out  Blue has deep and wide experience in a range of international development sectors; he is a leader in the field of international development evaluation, focusing most recently on civil society and the rule of law programs. His work has taken him to Eastern Europe, Russia, South and Southeast Asia. Blue holds a Ph.D. in Government and International Relations from Claremont University.

While the U.S. paid little attention to civil society needs in the 1960s and 1970s that changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cold war in the late 1980s and 1990s, Blue explained. Civil society, in essence, is that set of associations formed voluntarily by citizens to promote the public good. People come together in these groups and work in ways that don’t involve the state necessarily and they advance the public interest and the values of the citizenry, Blue explained.

Assisting and helping countries develop such associations is laudable, but not always easy, Blue noted. One factor he discovered was that nonprofit organizations were overly influence by obtaining grants and after the money ran out the interest in working on a particular issue faded away.

Similarly, evaluating programs to better understand what the actual impact of a program was makes a lot of sense, but too often, program evaluators don’t have the time or resources to take a thorough look at the effectiveness of a program.

The Guest Speaker Series in International Social Development is expected to present two more speakers this coming fall.