Sense and Sustainability

July 9, 2014

From Maxwell Perspective...

Sense and Sustainability

MPA student James Hacker spent the past year balancing studies with his leadership role in an increasingly influential website.

MPA student James Hacker speaks at the MoneyToday conference in South Korea.

James Hacker is telling his audience to seize opportunity. He’s in Seoul, speaking to Korean journalists, business executives, and government ministers. “There’s lots of great research on sustainability, but it’s not accessible to the average person,” he says. “If you can translate this research into something that business leaders and policy makers can put into practice, that’s a space that nobody occupies in East Asia.”

Hacker is co-director and editor-in-chief of senseandsustainability.net, a U.S.-based website founded in 2011 to simplify academic research on sustainability-related issues for a decision-making lay audience. Hacker is also a current MPA student at Maxwell, where he conducts sustainability research, particularly as it relates to energy and the environment.

“James has a tremendous ability to take the technical details of economic reasoning, assimilate information from technical fields, and convey that to people who are not economists or scientists,” says faculty member Peter Wilcoxen, director of Maxwell’s Center for Environmental Policy and Administration.

Hacker came to Maxwell after four years of environmental and energy consulting at Deloitte, working with clients in the private sector and government, including energy-saving projects for the U.S. Navy and Department of Energy. He’s hoping the core administration skills in his MPA will allow him to have a more direct impact. As a consultant, he says, “you write a report and there’s no way to ensure that your client is going to follow through on it. I want to be in a position where I can take the lead on effecting change.”

He co-directs senseandsustainability.net with a Harvard graduate student he met during a year abroad at Oxford. “We want to get the information out of the Ivory Tower and into the hands of people who can do something with it,” says Hacker. “The idea that socially responsible business is not just good marketing but good business practice is relatively new. It’s fun to be on the frontier of that.”

“The idea that socially responsible business is not just good marketing but good business practice is relatively new.”
— James Hacker

Hacker was invited to Korea by the publisher MoneyToday Media, which holds an annual business conference, focused this year on business and sustainability. He helped organize TED Talk-style breakouts with speakers on innovation and sustainability. (The conference was in late April — two weeks before spring semester finals — and Hacker spent his 20 hours of travel finishing up coursework.)

“The conference was an amazing experience and I think we added some unique insight — couching topics like business model innovation, strategy development, and Big Data in bigger ideas of sustainability and shared value. Most of this was genuinely new thinking for the audience,” he says.

At Maxwell, Hacker has assisted Wilcoxen with research on geographic disparities in clean energy, while building a database of every electrical generator in the country. He was also one of two Maxwell representatives on the editorial team of the Journal of Public and International Affairs, a policy studies journal produced by students at colleges in the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs.

Along the way, he has brought real-world insight to the classroom. According to Wilcoxen, students in environmental policy classes don’t always understand private sector concerns and think solutions are simpler than is typically the case. “It’s very valuable,” says Wilcoxen, ”to have somebody like James, who’s been involved and can explain from practical experience why that isn’t true.”

In September, Hacker begins a position with the Legislative Analyst’s Office in his native California, providing objective analysis on policies going through the legislative process. “California is a very progressive state that typically leads the pack when it comes to clean energy so it’s a chance to get involved in cutting-edge policy work,” he says.

— Renée Gearhart Levy