Effective States research centre receives major funding boost

12 Oct 2016

DFID has awarded The Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID) an additional £3.1 million to extend their pioneering research until 2019

This brings the total award of funding for ESID to £9.3 million over nine years.

Based at the University’s Global Development Institute, ESID is a global partnership spanning 16 countries investigating how politics shape development. They are discovering what kinds of politics can help secure development for the majority and not just the few.

Investigating the politics of health, education, natural resources, and gender amongst others, their research aims to impact on policy and practice so that people’s lives are improved.

ESID uses the multi-levelled concept of political settlements – the balance or distribution of power between contending social groups and social classes on which any state is based. They identify how development is shaped by personalised settlements that exchange favours for political support and show how outcomes differ between dominant and multiple party settlements. They also examine the crucial role of ideas and transnational influences in the politics of development.

This next phase of funding will enable us to both broaden and deepen ESID’s core research questions around state capacity and elite commitment, and to push at the margins to explore new challenges. Future research will focus on the areas where our most powerful insights have been generated including economic growth, natural resource governance and women’s empowerment.

DFID’s Head of Profession for Governance, Stefan Kossoff said “There is a tremendous appetite for ESID’s research products and ESID has produced some of our most operationally useful and accessible research findings. Their work on growth has been hugely influential in transforming the way DFID conceptualises the growth challenge in our partner countries.”

Chief Executive of ESID, Professor David Hulme said “For the past five years, ESID has been at the cutting edge of understanding how politics shape development and what this means for governments, civil societies and development partners. This award shows our research is more relevant than ever and we are very excited about the potential for the next phase.”