Teaching

Munk School of Global Affairs

GLA 1014 Global Development (2018- Present)

The course offers a broad introduction to the field of global development, with a focus on understanding contemporary development challenges and potential international responses. A central objective of the course is to think about development challenges and potential international responses broadly by looking beyond the aid system, and beyond national borders, to consider a broader set of international drivers of development outcomes. The course will be divided into three parts. The first part will focus on introducing students to key development challenges, to dominant perspectives on the drivers of improved development outcomes, and to the role of international donors in shaping development outcomes. The second part will focus on key thematic debates related to the drivers of economic growth, the connections between democracy and development, and efforts to strengthen service delivery and redistribution. Finally, the third part of the course will look beyond traditional aid and development debates to focus on climate change and sustainability, global public goods and public policy, the role of the private sector and the changing global context for development efforts.

GLA 2002 Tax and Development (2018)

This course interrogates the key tensions and challenges in the field of development through an in-depth exploration of one sub-field: tax and development. Key debates and issues in development are frequently presented in relatively broad terms. Doing so captures key challenges and trade-offs, but often offers few answers or ways forward. This course seeks to provide a more focused investigation of these key development debates and issues, through an applied deep dive into the field of tax and development. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of the rapidly emerging sub-field of tax and development – part of the broader ‘financing for development’ agenda – while using this sub-field to understand broader development debates as they occur in practice. Key overarching topics will include, among others: (a) the roles of capacity, policy, institutions and politics in shaping outcomes, (b) linking the local, national and international in understanding and addressing development challenges, (c) the financing for development agenda, local ownership and donor coordination, (d) linking research, evidence and practice in development, (e) effective design and implementation of reform programs, (f) pathologies of aid programs and delivery, and (g) ‘doing development’ in a changing global context. The course will draw on the instructor’s active involvement in research, policy formulation and implementation for tax and development programs, and will aim to design key assignments that feed directly into ongoing policy, research and reform processes.

GLA 1004 Global Policy Analysis (2010-2016)

Explores the processes of global policy development and change. Applies tools of policy analysis to explain and understand the forces that act on policy development and the impact and limits of global policies in producing political, legal, economic, social, and environmental change. The course will draw from the emerging literature on global public policy, which applies some of the same tools and methodologies as its domestic counterpart, but adapts them to policy development within the increasingly visible arena of global policy. It also pays explicit attention to the multiple nodes through which global policy is made and implemented, including national, transgovernmental, intergovernmental, non-state, and marketplace actors, networks, and institutions. In so doing, it encourages students to see policy development from multiple perspectives of different kinds of actors and networks, their influences and limits in producing policy change, and the processes through which policy is developed and put into action across – or transcendent of – national jurisdictions.

GLA 2002 Development Policy and Change (2011-2016)

This course introduces the key ideas, debates and actors that have shaped development policy at the international level. This is an enormous field, and the course is correspondingly selective, aiming to cover material that will allow students to thinking critically, creatively and holistically about development challenge and options moving forward. Following an opening class in which we will debate what, exactly, we man by ‘development’, the course has three main parts. The first part provides an introduction to four alternative ways of thinking about the key determinants of development focused, respectively, on investment, policy reform, institution building and political contestation. The goal is to provide alternative analytical lenses for thinking about how, and why, development happens, and what role the international community can play in supporting this process. The second part of the class then turns to looking at a handful of specific topics in development, for each of which we will interrogate their rationale, their design, their impact and major policy questions and issues. The topics are not exhaustive. Instead, the goal is to engage in comparatively in depth analysis of a selection of topics that are representative of a wider range of development interventions, and can thus highlight key issues, considerations and debates. The third part of the class focus more explicitly on the international community, and its role in promoting development. We will look first at major critiques of the aid system, and at options for reform, before concluding by thinking ‘beyond aid’ about the role of the international community, and global policy, in shaping development prospects around the world.

Department of Political Science

POL 301 African Government and Politics (2010-Present)

This year-long class is introduces students to the political dynamics of contemporary Africa. The course explores two related sets of issues: first, state formation and nation building and second, the origins and nature of the continent’s economic crisis. The course traces the historical development of the modern state system on the continent and the rise of contemporary African economies before moving on, in the second half of the year, to consider particular themes that characterize the nature of politics in Africa.

POL 410 The Political Foundations of Development: Elites, Revenue, Conflict and Aid (2010-2016)

This course explores the foundations of successful development by focusing on factors that explain the emergence of effective and responsive states. Development discourse has tended to be dominated by debates focused on ‘getting policy right’, ‘building capacity’ and ‘institutional design’. By contrast, an emerging field of inquiry has attempted to step back from these comparatively technical debates to identify the political origins of state capacity, institutions and accountability. This ‘state building approach’ has focused on elite politics and state-society relationships in order to better understand the incentives for states to be responsive and accountable to citizens. This seminar puts forth the argument that successful development depends on moving beyond a standard set of policies and institutions to better understanding the deep political foundations of effective developmental states. In exploring the foundations of state building this seminar has four broad parts. The first introduces the basis for a state building approach to development, focusing particularly the experience of the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) of East Asia. The second introduces an increasingly prominent body of research that traces state behavior to the need to address three basic challenges: resisting external threats, managing domestic conflict and raising revenue. The third looks in more depth at the connections between state revenue, governance and conflict. Finally, the fourth section focuses on various implications of a state-building approach for understanding the role of international actors in contributing to positive development outcomes.

Past Courses

Introduction to Economics for Non-Economists (at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex)