Michael Woolcock
Chair IHTM External Advisory Committee. Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group
Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group, where he has worked since 1998. For seventeen of these 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 transformations in local social institutions during the development process, and on using mixed methods to assess the effectiveness of "complex" interventions. In addition to more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters, he is the author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, including Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia (with Patrick Barron and Rachael Diprose; Yale University Press, 2011) and Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett; Oxford University Press, 2017). An Australian national, he has most recently co-edited three scholarly volumes on case studies, popular culture, and the future of multilateralism, and a forthcoming book on development’s role in both intensifying and (potentially) resolving humanity’s greatest challenges.