Jorrit de Jong

Jorrit de Jong is the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. He is director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University.

Jorrit’s research, teaching, and engagement with practice focus on the challenges of making the public sector more effective, efficient, equitable, and responsive to social needs. A public management scholar, his academic research has been focused on building state capacity to solve social problems.

Since 2016, Jorrit has worked with over 445 mayors and their senior teams in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a year-long program, designed to help cities tackle pressing problems. It is a collaboration between the Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Jorrit has also designed and led field labs on neighborhood development, organized crime, human trafficking and other social issues that require multiple agencies to innovate together. A specialist in experiential learning, he has taught strategic management, government innovation, and public problem-solving in degree courses and executive education programs at Harvard and around the world.

He has written extensively, including the books The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities (Brookings 2008, co-edited); Agents of Change: Strategy and Tactics for Social Innovation (Brookings 2012, co-authored); and Dealing with Dysfunction: Innovative Problem Solving in the Public Sector (Brookings, 2016). Jorrit co-developed more than 60 teaching cases, simulation exercises, toolkits and learning modules on governance and leadership. He is currently completing two books: one on collaborative governance and a second on urban problem-solving.