Assessing changes in HIV-related legal, policy environments in Sub-Saharan Africa

This month Dr. Laura Ferguson presented at the Southern California Law and Social Science Conference on Regulation, Law and Social Science sponsored by the Southern California Legal Empirical Studies (SCELS), USC Price School of Public Policy, USC Gould School of Law, and USC Dornsife’s Political Science Department. As part of the “Regulation and Impacts Beyond our Borders” panel, Dr. Ferguson presented “Assessing Changes in HIV-related Legal and Policy Environments in Sub-Saharan Africa,” which discussed lessons learned from the program’s recent mid-term evaluation of a UNDP project. Dr. Ferguson outlined the methodological challenges inherent in assessing legal change and suggested some novel ways of approaching this work. Discussion focused on how additional data analysis might yield further useful innovations for understanding interim indicators along the pathway to legal change.