麻豆精选

• PhD in Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2007
• MPP in Political and Economic Development, Harvard Kennedy School, 1999
• BSFS in International Economics, Georgetown University, 1997

Rachel M. Gisselquist joined the University 麻豆精选 in September 2024 as Professor in Governance and Development, and Director of the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC). 

For over two decades, the has bridged research and policy, working closely with international development agencies to inform policy and practice on issues of governance, social development, humanitarian response, and conflict. It has been best known for its 'Research Helpdesk', which provides rapid-response research on questions from donor agencies and partner governments. 

Professor Gisselquist’s research and publications address issues of state capacity and governance, foreign aid and development cooperation, inequality, ethnic and identity politics, and democratization. She has area expertise in sub-Saharan Africa. She specializes in comparative politics and works regularly across disciplines, in particular with development economics, political economy, public policy, and sociology. She has published 30+ articles and chapters, 2 edited books (with 2 co-edited books forthcoming), and over a dozen journal special issues and sections in well-regarded academic outlets such as World Development, Journal of Development Studies, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Professor Gisselquist is a known international expert in her field, having presented regularly to policy communities such as OECD-DAC, UN DESA, and OHCHR, and undertaken more public facing work, both opinion pieces and media interviews. In 2007-09, she co-authored the first two editions of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which has become a standard reference on governance.

During 2011-2024, Professor Gisselquist worked with the United Nations, based with the United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, Finland, most recently as a Senior Research Fellow. During 2019-2023, she served as a member of the Senior Management Team and of the Steering Group of the research programme on inclusive economic development in Southern Africa, a multi-year partnership of UNU-WIDER, the South African National Treasury, and South African Revenue Service, together with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and European Union. In addition, she was responsible for a portfolio of over a 1.3 million USD of research projects. Among other UNU roles, she served as Chair of the UNU Ethics Review Board.

Currently she is a co-Principal Investigator for the project The Impact of Inequality on Growth, Human Development, and Governance-@EQUAL, which is supported by a 1.5 million Euro grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and carried out as a collaboration of the University of Copenhagen, UNU-WIDER, the Central Institute for Economic Management in Vietnam, and Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique.

Professor Gisselquist is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow of UNU-WIDER and serves on the editorial boards of the Cambridge University Press Elements Series in Development Economics and Policy Studies.

She holds a PhD (MIT), Master of Public Policy (MPP, Harvard), and Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS, Georgetown).

• International Development 30282 (Masters level)

Rachel's research addresses governance in developing countries and emerging democracies and is driven by three broad questions:

1. Looking from below, what drives the politicization – and de-politicisation – of ethnic and other social identities among individuals and groups, and how does this impact governance?
2. Looking from above, how do international forces enable and constrain the domestic policy space in relation to democracy, governance, and development within countries? 
3. What policy levers are available to international and domestic actors to influence positively these processes and outcomes? Rachel organizes her answers to these three questions into projects that fall into three main areas:

Ethnicity, class, and the politics of representation: Rachel's early research was framed explicitly within constructivist and instrumentalist traditions and interrogated prevailing assumptions regarding ethnic divisions. Her doctoral work asked why ethnicity, rather than class, is instrumentalized in electoral politics in emerging democracies and highlighted, among other factors, the importance of the interaction between ethnic and economic categories – an interaction Rachel continues to study in her work.

Rachel's research has also challenged the widely accepted hypothesis that ethnic diversity undermines public goods provision and governance. She argues that the central research puzzle is not so much ‘how does diversity undermine governance?’ but ‘under what conditions does it lead to positive and negative outcomes?’ (see Gisselquist, Leiderer, & Niño-Zarazúa, 2016).

Dimensions of inequality: Rachel's interest in ethnic inequality has developed to focus on its patterns and alleviation, including the factors that drive variation in ethnic inequality in the short to medium term. She is currently finalizing an edited book that explores diverse policies aimed at alleviating ethnic inequality, with focused consideration of 8 country case studies. Rachel also has ongoing work on affirmative action policies and, with colleagues, has been building a comprehensive dataset comparing the origins, controversies, and perceived success of affirmative action policies in education, employment, and political representation across countries (see Gisselquist, Kim, Schotte, and Srikanth 2024). For more on several of Rachel's recent projects in this area, see:

• Addressing Group-based Inequalities
• The Politics of Group-based Inequalities: Measurement, Implications, and Possibilities for Change

Rachel's research in this area has also led her to consider the conceptualization of inequality more broadly. In the ‘@EQUAL’ project, Rachel and her colleagues study how inequality is understood, perceived, and acted upon across diverse contexts. They draw on cross-country and within-country quantitative analysis, alongside evidence from lab-in-the-field experiments and survey work in Vietnam and Mozambique. For more, see:

• The Impact of Inequality on Growth, Human Development, and Governance (@EQUAL)

The state, foreign aid, and democracy promotion: Rachel's recent work in this area considers the role of the state in mediating the impact of foreign aid and global shocks. In her earlier work, together with colleagues, Rachel questioned the critical scholarly view that sees aid’s impact on state-building as overall negative and argued that this perspective needs to be softened. For more, see:

• Research and Communication on Foreign Aid – Governance and Fragility theme

Rachel continues to study aid’s effectiveness in fragile contexts and has a co-edited book (with P. Justino and A. Vaccaro) forthcoming with Oxford University Press, entitled Fragile Aid: Development Cooperation in Weak and Conflict-Affected States. In her other recent work on aid, Rachel has studied the relationship between aid and democracy. For more, see:

• The State and State-building in the Global South: International and Local Interactions
• Effects of Swedish and International Democracy Support

Extending her work in a different direction, Rachel has also looked at how different dimensions of the state matter for development outcomes. She has a co-edited book (with A. Vaccaro), How States Respond to Crisis: Pandemic Governance Across the Global South, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, as well as a second edited book manuscript (with A. Kundu and K. Sen) in final stages, The Subnational State and Crisis Response: Understanding Pandemic Governance Across India.

Methods: Rachel's methodological approach is eclectic and question-driven. She has published on the use of case studies and experiments in theory development; the conceptualization and measurement of complex concepts, such as governance; and the quality of statistics in Global South countries.