Joseph P. Kalt

Joseph P. Kalt is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also serves as faculty chair of Harvard's Native American Program and co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, which he co-founded with Stephen Cornell in 1987.

Since 2005, he has served as a visiting professor at The University of Arizona's Eller College of Management. Kalt is widely recognized for his work on economic development on American Indian reservations and among First Nations in Canada. He is a principal author of The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination (with the Harvard Project) and Rebuilding Native Nations (ed. by Miriam Jorgensen), and is co-editor and a primary author of What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in the Economic Development of American Indian Reservations (with Stephen Cornell).

He has represented various tribes in the negotiation of contracts, the rewriting of tribal constitutions, the reform of tribal governments, the mediation of disputes, the design of tribal enterprises, and the securing of compensation for treaty violations and land confiscation. Kalt has testified as an expert on behalf of numerous tribes in federal and tribal courts, and has testified frequently before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He also served as advisor to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Kalt received the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development's First American Leadership Award in 2005 for his contributions to research in public policy affecting Native peoples. Kalt received his Ph.D. (1980) and M.A. (1977) in economics from UCLA, and his B.A. (1973) in economics from Stanford University.