Many Roads to Justice: The Law Related Work of Ford ... - UNDP

1 6 6 CA S E ST U D I E S1981, with the availability of additional funding, Foundation supportwas concentrated in the fields of international relations, economics,and law, reflecting the salient features of China’sreforms. Annual commitments grew during the 1980s, and inJanuary 1988, the Foundation became the first private foreignfoundation to open an office in China. T h e r e a f t e r, grant programswere expanded to include rural poverty and resource management,reproductive health, and culture.By that time Foundation staff had already gained severalyears of insight on the needs and priorities of China’s rapidlychanging legal system. Much of that insight was provided byCASS, the government-organized research institute that is one ofthe Foundation’s earliest and most long-standing grantee partnersin China. CASS also remains the Foundation’s official sponsor,allowing it, as a foreign organization, to maintain offices inChina. Other early grantee partnerships were established with thesmall and newly revived legal education community at severalleading universities.Some of the early considerations in the Foundation’s law programmingare recalled by Peter Geithner, who initiated theF o u n d a t i o n ’s law grantmaking in China and was later its first representativethere. “As our grant budget grew we were able toexpand from efforts at mutual understanding to actual programs.The question then was: what programs? We recognized from thestart that we should take the long view, and legal education waschosen.” Former Program Officer Mark Sidel, who served from1988 to 1990, articulates a similar strategy concerning that initialchoice: “We believed the growing legal research and teachingcommunity would have a major multiplier effect on other futurelaw programs.”A subsequent evolution in the program led to a more focusedconcern with rights and governance, from merely rebuilding alegal system to “providing Chinese with access to an expandedrange of ways of thinking about and using law to protect rights andpromote effective, responsive governance,” says former ProgramO fficer Jonathan Hecht, who served from 1990 to 1994. Chang,who joined Ford in Beijing in 1994, says programming has continuedto support efforts to build a legal culture in which law appliesto and is respected by both government and citi-