Meet M28 Kaoru Yokomori: Studying the Gap Between Policy Promises and Daily Life

What first got you interested in political science?

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My parents worked for international organizations helping developing countries build infrastructure, education, and public health systems. I spent my early childhood in Ghana and then Myanmar. In Myanmar, I saw kids my age knocking on our car window to beg for food\, and I visited a Rohingya refugee camp. I was five or six, so I didn't think "this injustice is unacceptable." But those scenes stuck with me. In the last year of elementary school, I wrote an essay saying I wanted to become a diplomat. I'm pretty sure I didn't know what a diplomat was.

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What led you to Minerva?

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Through middle and high school, I studied abroad three times: Mongolia with the Junior Red Cross (my first time meeting peers who wanted to take global problems back to their governments), six months in New Zealand, and Taiwan in my first year of high school.

Taiwan changed everything. I'd realized my information bubble was English-speaking and Westernized, so I learned Mandarin and took lectures in Chinese, including a national defense course that was mandatory in Taiwanese high schools. Talking to friends, their families, and teachers, I found there was no single view on US-China tensions. Opinions depended on family history, ethnicity, party support, and cultural background. 

If I actually want to solve the problem, I have to know the problem, and if I want to know the problem, I have to be integrated in the problem.

That's when I found Minerva.

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What question keeps you up at night?

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"Why doesn't government policy translate and actually address the problem that people face in daily life?" What they promise and what they achieve is very different.

I apply it to environmental metrics that don't work locally, to daily life in Taiwan under structural pressure, and to groups I care about most: women, the elderly, children, immigrants, and refugees.

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What do you do at the Minerva Policy Lab?

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The lab's mission is to make policy work more inclusive, since policy stages often include only high-level officials. We do three things:

1. Handbooks: We turn policy theories from class into plain-language workbooks that NGO practitioners can use to see where they are in the policy process.

2. Consulting: We advise youth advocacy groups in places like Kenya and Japan working on plastics, environmental awareness, and healthcare, and to work with the politica institutions they are placed.

3. Research: My part. We study why youth advocacy struggles. We found two barriers: measurement (social impact is hard to quantify, so groups can't prove their value to funders) and political culture (navigating the bureaucracy and unwritten norms needed to get a seat at the table).

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What was presenting at an academic conference like?

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I presented at the 6th International Conference on Environmental and Economic Impact on Sustainable Development in Bristol, UK, hosted by the University of the West of England. It was my first academic conference, and my talk grew out of our Policy Lab research on why youth advocacy groups struggle to turn standardized frameworks like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals into local impact, including the measurement and political culture barriers I described above. 

Nearly everyone else was a PhD student, a professor, or already working in the field. The topics ranged from microplastics and milk supply chains to agriculture in Ecuador.

I initially thought it was going to be a closed bubble of experts, but they were much more open to critiques and new ideas. Researchers from unrelated fields challenged each other's methods and research design in the Q&A, and I loved that.

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What are you up to as of late in Buenos Aires?

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Our Global Civic Project looks at how the city government handles heat waves. A friend invited me to join, and I wanted to see how policymakers think in one of Latin America's biggest cities. Right now we're in the literature review stage, accompanied by weekly interviews with people from diverse sectors. The government faces limited funding, weak public-private collaboration, inconsistent data, and poor coordination between ministry departments. We haven't proposed solutions yet, because understanding the right problem comes first.

The difference from class is the goal. We aim for a solution that keeps working after we leave the city.

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What has Minerva taught you?

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Mainly that learning by doing works, and that you can't wait until you feel ready. During my first summer at Minerva, we researched how isolated elderly people in Japan lose their sense of purpose after retirement. We spoke directly with researchers, NGOs, and government officials working on the issue. I never expected my understanding of my own country's biggest problem to change, but it did.

The importance of comprehensive collaboration across different sectors was the biggest learning that I got.

Minerva has also shown me what I still want to do. We get real access to people in the public sector, but I don't want to stay in the bubble of high-level officials. I came here to learn from the world, not only from textbooks, and I’d like to spend the rest of my time learning more directly from the communities affected by these policies: understanding their nuances, and building and delivering solutions with them.

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