THE POLICY PRACTICE - Key Persons
Facilitator, negotiator and strategic planner in complex political and social environments. Governance, anti-corruption and human rights; Timor-Leste.
Aderito is an expert in the fields of good governance, anti-corruption and human rights. He is an experienced facilitator, negotiator and strategic planner, with proven ability to deliver results in complex political and social environments.
After Timor-Leste's independence, Aderito was elected as a member of Timor-Leste's Constituent Assembly where he played a key role in drafting Timor-Leste's first constitution; and chaired the Assembly's Systematization and Harmonization Committee.
He was elected by Timor-Leste's National Parliament as the first Commissioner of the country's Anti-Corruption Commission (2010-14) where he led a staff of 50 and achieved excellent results.
Aderito has consulted for national and international NGOs, private companies as well as the UN system in Timor-Leste. He worked as law and sociology lecturer in Timor-Leste from 2002 to 2007; and at the Australian National University in 2009. Prior to this, he was a lawyer for human rights NGOs in Indonesia, including the Institute for Police Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) in Jakarta.
Job Titles:
- Manager
- Principal
- Researcher
Public policy and institutional analyses; political economy of development; governance; economic growth; strengthening the private sector and markets; agriculture and rural development.
Alex Duncan has worked as a development practitioner, researcher, manager, and consultant economist in many parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, and at strategic level for several development agencies. Most of his current work is on the political economy of development, and he has had a particular long-term interest in eastern and southern Africa. His background is in agriculture and rural development. He has worked for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank and Oxford Policy Management. He is a Senior Research Associate of the African Studies Centre, Oxford University.
Fifteen years of UK partnership with Nigeria on debt management: lessons for DFID's wider approach to building capability
In April 2023, Alex Duncan revisited South Sudan for the first time in 40 years since working there for four years as an agricultural economist. This is a lecture he gave at Juba University on the work that was then started, the lessons learned and the implications for the present.
Alex is the Business Manager of the Policy Practice, with over 15 years of experience in programme management.
Alex Scoines is the Business Manager of the Policy Practice. Prior to this, she was a programme manager for IMC Worldwide, responsible for large programmes (such as (IFC) Compass Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation, and Ideas to Impact). Her other roles have included Deputy Deployments Manager of humanitarian experts in CHASE-OT (UK Department for International Development); Institute for Development Studies Knowledge Management team; and helping set-up the support team for the UK Government Stabilisation Unit. She has an MA in International Development and Education from the University of East Anglia and a BSc in Population Studies from the London School of Economics.
Political economy analysis and thinking and working politically; the politics of reform and what this means for international engagement; conflict and fragilty; political settlements; inclusion; anti-corruption; democratisation.
Alina has 15 years of experience on the politics of reform and what this implies for more effective engagement and ways of working among international actors. Her expertise and extensive publications cover: governance and institutional change; state- and peace-building and (post) conflict transformations; conflict and fragility; political settlements and the politics of inclusion; anti-corruption efforts; democratisation; and political economy analysis and thinking and working politically.
Originally from Mexico, Alina was Principal Research Fellow in ODI's Politics and Governance Programme. She remains affiliated with ODI as a Senior Research Associate. Alina is also Director of the global Thinking and Working Community of Practice, and co-Chair of its Steering Committee.
Energy policy and technology and innovation policy in the public, private and NGO sectors from the perspective of political economy and instutional analyses. Aid programme review and lesson learning.
Andrew Barnett is an economist with over 25 years of experience of development. He is internationally known for his work on energy, research and technology policy in developing countries. He has experience of international development assistance as a government economist, commercial consultant, research manager, and policy researcher. In addition to consultancy he has worked at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and the Institute of Development Studies at the Sussex University, and for the IDRC of Canada.
Governance; accountability, transparency and participation; civil society sector; criminology; criminal justice; anti-corruption; corruption in forestry sector; whistleblowers protection; corruption risk assessment; Ukraine.
Democratisation, democracy assistance and governance; EU governance policies; nexus between governance and security.
Anna Khakee is a specialist on democratisation and democracy promotion. Her consultancy has also focused on human security and on how to reconcile democratic institutions and mechanisms with security threats. She has worked as a consultant to Amnesty International, Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre, FRIDE, Euro-Mediterranean Study Commission (EuroMeSCo), Swedish Ministry of Justice, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), amongst others. She has conducted training/lecturing at College of Europe, DiploFoundation, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, IEMed, University Institute of Lisbon, United Nations University for Peace, and Université Aix-Marseille. For six years, she was a member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Board of Selection for the co-funding of development projects under Malta's Official Development Assistance (ODA) funds. Dr. Khakee has published widely, including in international journals such as Journal of North African Studies, Mediterranean Politics, Mediterranean Quarterly, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and East European Politics and Societies. She has worked on projects covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Nigeria and Rwanda.
Policy and operational research and analysis; evidence review and evaluation with a focus on governance, peace building, health, and humanitarian assistance.
Anna Paterson has worked for 20 years on policy and operational research and analysis, evidence review and evaluation, with a focus on governance and peacebuilding. She is a political scientist by academic background with an early career as an analyst on Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. She has a strong focus on peacebuilding, conflict and security, beginning as a field researcher for an Afghan NGO and in a subsequent PhD. Anna is a former staff member of the FCO (2002-04) and of DFID (2009-12). As a consultant, she has led and co-led several research, monitoring, and major evaluation assignments on governance, peace and security in Central Asia, East and West Africa, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe for a range of clients such as FCDO, Danida, Norad, USAID, the World Wildlife Fund and the World Health Organisation. Over recent years, Anna has developed an increasing focus on governance and evidence use in public health, especially in humanitarian contexts.
High level facilitator and team leader. Citizen engagement and social accountability; gender equality and social inclusion, civil society strengthening; social development governance; monitoring, evaluation and learning.
Cultural political economy; public service delivery; politically-smart, locally-led development programming.
Food security and livelihoods; political economy analysis; diaspora and transnational studies; cash-based programming; organisational reviews and evaluations. Somali peoples and Horn of Africa.
Dr Nisar Majid is an associate at the Policy Practice. He has over 20 years of experience in international research and development, including food security and livelihoods analysis, political economy analysis, diaspora and transnational studies, cash-based programming and organisational reviews and evaluations. He has a special interest in the Somali peoples and areas of the Horn of Africa as well as in the wider diaspora.
Nisar's early working life was in food security and livelihoods analysis, where he specialised in the household economy analysis (HEA) methodology. He has worked with government and international food security information (and early warning) systems in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, and was regional (East Africa) food security and livelihoods advisor for Save the Children (UK), based in London.
His PhD thesis, completed in 2007, was entitled Livelihoods, Development and the Somali diaspora and was set within a literature on conflict, development and migration. In 2016 he co-authored the book, Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011-12 (London: Hurst), under a study for Tufts University.
He has been involved in a variety of organisational and technical reviews and evaluations for a range of international agencies, including the European Union, the UK Department for International Development (now FCDO), United Nations Agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of the Red Cross & Red Crescent, and many other non-Governmental Organisations. He has conducted studies for the Rift Valley Institute (RVI), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Chatham House.
He was Research Director for the LSE Conflict Research Programme for 3 years (2018-21), a 5-country research programme where he led the Somalia portfolio.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Executive Director
- Energy Governance in Developing Countries - a New Approach / 2021 / Authors
- Power Shift: Politics and the Energy Transition in Emerging Markets. 0001 / Authors
- TPP Director
Political economy of fuel subsidy and power sector reforms; structural transformation, investment climate and growth; politically smart aid programmes.
TPP Director, Neil McCulloch, has just launched a book on "Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies - the politics of saving the planet", published by Practical Action Publishing. The book explains what fossil fuel subsidies are, how they inflict harm and what steps are being taken to reduce them. It also shows why subsidies persist and why existing efforts have been so ineffective. Drawing lessons from countries which have tried to remove fossil fuel subsidies, it explains that the fundamental challenge to reform is not technical, but political. The book lays out a new agenda for action on fossil fuel subsidies, showing how a better understanding of the underlying political incentives can lead to more effective approaches to tackling this major global problem.
This policy brief from TPP Director Dr Neil McCulloch is based on his book "Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies - the politics of saving the planet", published by Practical Action Publishing.
On 4 February 2021, the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut (AUB), in collaboration with The Policy Practice (TPP) and the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) consortium, hosted a webinar entitled ‘Models for tackling Lebanon's electricity crisis'. This briefing paper summarises the views of the key speakers and discussants. It draws together the key threads of the discussion - identifying the commonalities and the points of disagreement - and provides some tentative suggestions about the way forward for the sector.
In Lebanon, the current crisis has exposed the fragility of Electricité de Zahlé (EDZ's) model, which relies on both discounted power provided by Electricité de Lebanon (EDL) and subsidized diesel fuel imports to run EDZ's own power plant, which are both now in short supply. In this policy brief, the team has estimated the savings from a medium-sized Solar PV plant of 63 MW in Zahle area, covering 20% of the demand currently supplied by diesel-based power generation. They also tackled the challenges facing the implementation of utility-scale renewables in Lebanon and what the Government should do to enable such investments in renewables and proceed forward.
Dr. Neil McCulloch is a Director of The Policy Practice. His main area of focus is on the political economy of reform in the energy sector. This has included work on corruption in the electricity sector in Lebanon; power sector reform in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan; energy access in India; coal phase out in Indonesia; fuel subsidy reform in Indonesia, Nigeria and Zambia; and electricity market reform in Guinea, Mali and Togo. Previously, Dr. McCulloch was the Director of the Economic Policy Program at Oxford Policy Management and, before that, the Lead Economist of the Australian Aid program in Indonesia. He has also led the Globalisation Research Team in the Institute of Development Studies in the UK and was a Senior Economist for the World Bank in Indonesia.
The World Bank's 2019 report on Rethinking Power Sector Reform recognises that many of the key challenges in power sector reform result from the political economy of the sector. However, the report is weak in some areas. This Policy Brief makes recommendations to the World Bank and other development partners.
Global efforts to improve energy access and quality and to tackle climate change need a different approach to addressing poor energy governance. Written by TPP and Chemonics International, this paper outlines the size and nature of the energy challenge, with a focus on electricity. It describes the investments that are currently being made to improve the quality of power and access to electricity - and the growing evidence that investments often fail due to poor energy governance.
TPP Director, Neil McCulloch supported work led by Marc Ayoub of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut to produce a documentary on the challenges facing solar power development in Lebanon, drawing lessons from Jordan and Yemen. The work was funded by the Natural Resource Governance Institute. The documentary, in Arabic with English sub-titles, was launched on 6 September 2022 and broadcast on Lebanese television. It can be viewed here. An accompanying Policy Brief was also produced which can be downloaded here.
Governance, security & justice; gender equality and inclusion; and social protection. Policy development, programme design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and research.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Consultant
- Project Manager
- Researcher
agricultural research, development and innovation; climate resilient food systems; UK engagement with China; China and international development
James Keeley is a researcher, consultant and project manager specialising in food and agricultural development (particularly in Africa), China as an international development actor and UK engagement with China on shared challenges and global public goods. He was previously Head of the Programme Management Office for AgriTT, an FCDO funded trilateral cooperation programme in the agricultural sector with Chinese and Malawian and government partners, with pilot projects in Malawi and Uganda and management of a Research Challenge Fund. Before this he was Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) where he was China lead and worked on agriculture, climate and sustainability themes for clients such as DEFRA, DFID and the Ford Foundation. He was a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, working on policy processes for genetically modified crops in China and Zimbabwe and soils management in Africa. James has expertise in project monitoring and evaluation. He has also worked on health related assignments. He writes and presents regularly for Oxford Analytica on China policy issues. He is co-author of ‘Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: cases from Africa' (Earthscan).
Job Titles:
- Principal
- Deputy Chair of the Board of Trustees of Farm Africa
- Economist
Jonathan Kydd is an economist with a focus on rural and agricultural development. He has a long track record as a researcher, teacher and consultant in Africa, in Bangladesh, in Eastern and Central Europe, and to a lesser extent in East Asia and Central and South America. The intellectual framework for his research in recent years has been new institutional economics. He has also been a a university leader and senior manager (until 2013 as Dean of London University's |international Programmes,) focussed on internationalisation of higher education with a strong focus on access, high standards and innovative pedagogy. As a policy advisor and non-executive director, he has senior experience in major commercial, government, political, educational and charitable organisations. He has broad-spectrum generalist experience of essential management skills for leadership in large organisations, including financial literacy, senior experience of issues in IT, media relations, internal communications and human resources.
Jonathan Kydd is Deputy Chair of the Board of Trustees of Farm Africa, a charity which works with smallholder farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and Chair of Farm Africa's Programme Advisory Committee. Since August 2014 he had been chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Development Studies.
In 2007 The Policy Practice issued two Policy Briefs on Tackling the Political Barriers to Development: the New Political Economy Perspective and Making the New Political Economy Perspective more operationally relevant for development agencies.
Peacebuilding and state building; democratisation; local governance; conflict resolution; policy management; Horn of Africa.
Post-conflict environments; human rights; sexual and gender based violence; rule of law; security sector reform; humanitarian assistance.
Governance and political economy analysis; natural resource governance and climate change; migration and refugees; crisis, conflict and resilience.
Governance and development; political economy analysis; ethnographic and fieldwork-based research; governmental institutions; policy analysis and forecasting; policing; state-public relations.
Olly Owen is an anthropologist with a strong interest in political economy, particularly the workings of state institutions. His consultancy portfolio centres on governance work and institutional change in Nigeria. He is a Lecturer in African Studies and Anthropology at St Anne's College, Oxford. With an academic background in social anthropology (Cambridge University) and African politics (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), he has specialised in the West Africa sub-region. Following three years as sub-Saharan Africa risk analyst for Global Insight (now IHS) in London, he relocated to Nigeria and worked as a journalist and development consultant. From 2007-2011 he researched and wrote a fieldwork-based doctoral thesis on the Nigerian Police Force at Oxford University's Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology before being awarded a two-year Research fellowship in International Development. Concurrently, he worked on consultancies for private, public and third-sector bodies such as Control Risks, Transparency International, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Ekiti State Government, Nigeria. From 2015 to 2018 he was ESRC Future Research Leaders fellow at Oxford Department of International Development, engaged in a three-year research project looking at tax reforms and changing ideas of social contract in Nigeria. He is also the Research Director of the Nigeria Tax Research Network, supported by the Gates Foundation.
The UK's engagements in Nigeria are a showcase for the gradual integration of a thinking and working politically (TWP) approach into development practice.
Conflict resolution, mediation and peacebuilding; humanitarian relief, development and resilience in conflict-peace transition; politics, economy and governance; security sector; Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.
Institution building in the civil society sector; social accountability; corporate social responsibility; anti-corruption.
Social development; gender; social inclusion; training and facilitation; policy, strategy, programme design, review and evaluation.
Experienced facilitator of group planning/strategic processes, workshops and conferences; coordinator of The Policy Practice political economy analysis trainings.
An experienced development economist and qualified lawyer who has worked closely with governments of several countries affected by fragility and conflict on a range of economic policy reforms. She has a Master of Public Administration degree from Columbia University and a LLB from the University of Cape Town
Political economy of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: institutions of rural development and economic change; federalism, nationalism and regional geopolitics; fragility, rule of law, conflict, gender and power.
Governance; citizen engagement; gender & social inclusion; political economy analysis.
Governance; political economy analysis; project monitoring and evaluation; policy planning and strategy; voice and accountability; agriculture and rural livelihoods; micro-credit and enterprise development; community mobilization and capacity building for local NGOs; Nigeria.
Human rights and the rule of law; legal frameworks for counter-terrorism; criminal justice capacity building and international cooperation; civil society; transposition of international legal frameworks.
William Kingsmill has been a Principal at the Policy Practice for twelve years. He has focussed on applying economic analysis and political economy analysis (PEA) to pressing development problems and opportunities for a wide range of clients, including the UK government, the Australian Government, UNICEF, and the World Bank, among others. He has undertaken recent assignments in the East Caribbean, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Somaliland, and St Helena. He has led training workshops on applied PEA for a number of organisations. He focusses particularly on development policy, public policy making, growth and private sector development, including agriculture and extractive industries, public administration reform, and small island states.
Before joining the Policy Practice, William was Senior Governance Advisor to Obialgeli Ezekwesili, Vice President for the Africa Region, at the World Bank. His work at the Bank focused in particular on governance issues in resource rich economies and the role of new partners in Africa, including China. Prior to that he worked at the then UK DFID for nearly 30 years, ultimately as acting Director for Policy. He was head of the Growth and Investment Group 2006-08. He was Country Director for DFID in Nigeria 2003-05, and before that he worked for DFID in London as a Senior Economic Adviser. He was based in the Caribbean 1996-99, and in East Africa 1989-93. He worked for the European Commission in Brussels on the design and implementation of the new European-Mediterranean Partnership 1994-96. From 1983-85 William worked for the Botswana Government the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Water Affairs. He has a BA in Economics, and MA in Public and Industrial Economics from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Britain. He was a VSO in Papua New Guinea 1978-79.
A reliable and financially sustainable electricity supply is a pre-requisite for successful development, in Africa, as elsewhere.
Reforming the business environment needs to be understood not only as a technical challenge but, as importantly, as a challenge to the political economy.
Development policy and strategy; policy making; political economy analysis; anti-corruption; accountability, transparency and participation; growth and private sector development; public administration; the resource curse; small island economies.