Ian Klaus is the founding director of Carnegie California. He is a leading scholar on the nexus of urbanization, geopolitics, and global challenges, with extensive experience as a practitioner of subnational diplomacy.
Ian has built and led a number of global research efforts focused on bringing localized knowledge into a cohesive whole. He co-led and served as the series editor for the Summary for Urban Policymakers, a landmark report that distilled over 8,000 pages of IPCC science into eighty pages of accessible, policy relevant material for urban policymakers at the city, provincial, and national levels.
As a practitioner, Ian has extensive experience advancing and implementing policy. He served as the deputy U.S. negotiator for Habitat 3, as senior adviser for global cities at the U.S. State Department, and as a member of the Policy Planning Staff. More recently, he helped lead the development of both the Urban 20 and Urban 7, the G20 and G7 urban-focused engagement groups. He served as an adviser to the National Intelligence Council on the urban elements of the most recent Global Trends report.
He was a senior fellow in global cities and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ian has also been a member of the World Economic Forum’s advisory board on the future of urban development, the Creative Cities Working Group at Stanford University, a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ernest May Fellow for history and security studies at the Kennedy School of Government.
He holds an MA from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD in international history from Harvard University. He has published widely on the implications of urbanization for global challenges. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Washington Post and frequently in Bloomberg. He is the author of The Belt and Road City (Yale, 2024 with co-author), Forging Capitalism (Yale, 2014), and Elvis is Titanic(Knopf, 2007).
2024 is a critical year for democracy around the world, and Californians understand democracy to be an international, national, and local issue. Carnegie California’s new survey shows that Californians are widely supportive of a U.S. foreign policy that advances democracy and human rights.
The 2024 Carnegie California Global Affairs Survey reflects Californians’ heightened concerns about ongoing conflicts and critical elections, including in the United States. It arrives at a tense moment in American democracy and during a critical election year for many of the world’s leading democracies.
The bill exposed divisions within the AI community, but proponents of safety regulation can heed the lessons of SB 1047 and tailor their future efforts accordingly.
We are in an era in which states seek to demonstrate their power and values through the construction of new cities. This new wave of development is global: in Egypt with the New Administrative Capital, in Indonesia with Nusantara, in Kenya with Konza Techno City and Tatu City, and in California’s Solano County.
This sixty-minute debate will feature four leading voices—two pro, two con—addressing this proposition before our local and global audience: “If SB-1047 in its current form becomes law, it will do more good than harm.”
How groundbreaking infrastructure projects will shape cities and geopolitics.
An exploration of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to reshape international order and how it has catalyzed a new era of infrastructural geopolitics.
On April 16, scientists, academics, and other experts will convene in Riga, Latvia, for the scoping meeting for the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, to be included in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Subnational jurisdictions are grappling with the tangible impacts that AI is beginning to have. Their efforts provide an important space to learn best practices for policy going forward.
To Push Back, the West Must Invest More in Urban Life
