Professional Affiliation

Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, England

Expert Bio

Most of my work has focused on politics and state-society relations in less developed countries. Much of this has been on South Asia, mainly India. I have also written a political biography of a former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka and edited a collection of papers on the crisis there in the mid-1980s. And I have co-authored a book which focuses in part on Bangladesh. Over the years, however, I have been drawn increasingly into work comparing South Asia with other regions. One of these has been East and Southeast Asia. As an undergraduate, I specialized in China, and then taught for two years at a Chinese language university in Hong Kong. This led eventually to two years at a China research center in the 1980s, working with China specialists on comparisons of India and China. I later organized a research project on 'security, development and political accommodation' in East and Southeast Asia. Comparisons with sub-Saharan Africa have also been important. This has included a project on political institutions in less developed countries of the Commonwealth-which mainly entailed comparisons between South Asia and Africa. I have also compared experiments with democratic decentralization in South Asia and West Africa, and spent two extended spells in the new South Africa-studying elite perceptions of poverty and democratic decentralization there. I am an American, but most of my professional life has been spent in British universities. I prefer working in Britain, mainly because collaboration across disciplinary lines and between the humanities and social sciences-is much easier there (and in continental Europe) than in the U.S. For the last three years, I have coordinated a Ford Foundation project on 'civil society and governance' with research teams working in 22 countries. Most of those were less developed countries-in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America-but they also included the U.S., Poland, and Slovakia. That project, and several other related projects, provides the empirical basis for the study that I will pursue at the Woodrow Wilson Center. It assesses the promise and limitations of civil society as a force to tackle poverty in less developed countries. This is a topic on which comparatively little has been written, and the available literature on it tends to be rather theoretical. Hard evidence has lately become available, and it is on this that I will focus.

 

Expertise

Politics and state-society relations in less developed South Asia; civil society; democratic decentralization

Wilson Center Project

Civil Society and Poverty Reduction in Less Developed Countries

Project Summary

It is widely assumed in international development agencies and the (often theoretical) social science literature that civil society and 'good governance' serve the interests of poor people in less developed countries. This project will test that assumption against a mass of fresh empirical evidence from ten recent international research projects. It will develop 1) a realistic understanding of the promise and limitations of civil society and better governance for the poor, anchored in empirical evidence; and 2) policy proposals that can (in diverse contexts) maximize the contribution of civil society and improved governance to the well being of poor people.

Major Publications

• The Political Economy of Democratic Decentralization. The World Bank, 1999.
  
   
• Power, Poverty and Poison: Disaster and Response in an Indian City. Sage, 1990.
  
   
• Rethinking Third World Politics. (editor), Longmans, 1991.