Location: TRISS Seminar Room, C6.002
Date: 18th May 2017, 13:00-14:30
DESCRIPTION
Despite what today’s headlines might convey, life for most people in most developing countries has never been better. This should be rightly celebrated, but improving basic levels of human welfare from a low base was the easy part. To consolidate and expand these achievements, the key development challenge going forward is building the state’s capability to implement incrementally more complex and contentious tasks (e.g., justice, regulation, taxation, land administration). This is a fundamentally different type of challenge, however, one for which our prevailing aid architecture was not designed and on which achievements to date are modest (at best). A new approach is required, elements of which will be outlined.
Michael Woolcock
Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Development Specialist in the World Bank's Development Research Group, where he was worked since 1998. For eleven years he has also been a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on strategies for enhancing state capability for implementation, on crafting more effective interaction between informal and formal justice systems, and on using mixed methods to assess the effectiveness of 'complex' development interventions. In addition to more than 75 journal articles and book chapters, he is the co-author or co-editor of ten books, including Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia (with Patrick Barron and Rachael Diprose; Yale University Press 2011), which was a co-recipient of the best book prize by the American Sociological Association's section on international development, and, most recently, Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett; Oxford University Press 2017). He is a co-founder of the World Bank’s global Justice for the Poor program; from 2006-2009 he was the founding research director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester; and has recently returned from 18 months in Malaysia, where he helped establish the World Bank’s first Global Knowledge and Research Hub. An Australian national, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland, and has an MA and PhD in sociology from Brown University.
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