Courses

Exactly how governance, economic growth, and poverty reduction are interrelated is a subject of much controversy.  The first part of this course will explore questions such as “What is governance?”  “What does good governance mean?”  “How is it measured?”  “What is the relationship among governance, growth, and poverty reduction?”  “Does good governance necessarily mean democratic governance?”  From there, the course will move on to selected topics central to the good governance agenda, including public sector reform, corruption, and decentralization.  The course will end with a look at global influences on developing country governance, including the contested role of aid and the dilemmas posed by fragile states.  Students will be asked to choose a developing country for which they will develop governance diagnostics and analyses, and a governance action plan by the end of the semester.  Two papers, the country governance action plan, and short oral presentations will be part of the class requirements.

This course covers the theory and provides practical applications of fiscal decentralization, intergovernmental transfers, local resource mobilization and local borrowing. Special attention is paid to the practical aspects of designing and implementing effective fiscal decentralization reforms to improve efficiency and accountability within the public sector.

This course is designed to teach the fundamentals of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for social programs.  All organizations implementing development programs put in place systems to track program accomplishments.  These M&E systems are driven by different objectives, such as accountability to donors for money spent, or learning about successes and challenges in implementation. The course is aimed at practitioners who wish to develop and/or understand methods for measuring the results of social programs.  This course will teach students how to set up M&E systems that foster data-driven decision making.  In addition to books and articles, we will use cases from donors, non-profits and others to cover technical aspects of M&E, including developing a comprehensive program logic, choosing ‘good’ indicators and targets, and designing an appropriate evaluation. 

Focuses on the policies, procedures, and skills needed for effective budgeting and financial management in the public sector. Core topics to be covered in the course include budget systems and controls, public sector accounting and costing, financial reporting for accountability, and capital budgeting and debt management. The course provides the analytical skills needed to understand the links between budgeting and the macro-fiscal framework, the political decision-making process, and the interests of citizens. The emphasis is on the theory and international practice of budgeting, with particular application to developing countries. Issues of program and performance budgeting, participatory budgeting and citizen accountability, and decentralized fiscal systems will be discussed.

This course will review the main literature, methods, conceptual tools and types of policy recommendations associated with Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis. Globalization has transformed how nations, firms, communities and workers compete in the international economy over the past half century. This course will trade the emergence of the GVC framework, which is arguably the most influential approach used to analyze globalization and its consequences for both developing and developed economies.  We will focus on the conceptual foundations of GVC analysis, the twin pillars of “governance” and “upgrading”, and we will review detailed GVC case studies related to Asia, Latin America and Africa, including original studies that have been carried out at the Duke Global Value Chains Center (Duke GVCC), one of the most renowned university-based GVC research centers in the world.  Since the early 2000s and especially after the 2008-09 financial crisis, virtually all of the main international development organizations, including the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, OECD, the U.S. Agency for International Development, UNIDO, UNCTAD, and the World Economic Forum, have used the GVC approach to guide their development agendas. We will evaluate the GVC research they have carried out, and analyze the most fruitful guidelines for development that emerge from this literature.

This course focuses on social development and the role of social policy as an important channel that policy makers at different levels use to address complex and interrelated issues affecting human well-being.  We analyze status, trends, problems and opportunities in social development in the world and in selected countries. The course is designed as a basic graduate level course for students interested in international development, particularly policy making for social development. 

The objective of this class is to introduce the multi-disciplinary field of Peace and Conflict Studies as a foundation for and complement to Peacebuilding for Sustainable Development. The course (1) Introduces the field of Peace and Conflict Studies and the possible sectors in which to apply your study; (2) Emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of peace and conflict studies and analyzes the nature and causes of conflicts within societies and internationally from a variety of perspectives, inquiries, and scales. (3) Provides students with the appropriate analytical frameworks to think critically about questions relating to the origins and dynamics of conflict, as well as the possibility of peace. (4) Provides a series of tools and techniques for students working in conflict settings. 

Covers the basic theory, policy and practice of public finance in these economies. It examines the economic roles and rationale for government and potential methods of financing government expenditures. The nature of fiscal policy and its relationship to macroeconomic policy is examined, including issues of foreign aid, debt financing and inflation. The course analyzes the approaches to pricing, financing and evaluating public sector outputs such as roads, water, education and electricity. It then reviews and analyzes taxes on trade, consumption, income, property and natural resources considering their economic efficiency and administrative costs and distributional impacts. The methods and importance of forecasting revenues are presented. Special topics include the design and role of tax incentives and environmental taxes.

The course is intended to enhance students’ abilities to explore the complex problems being faced by our world and to design innovative solutions to address those problems. Through readings, classroom discussion, experiential learning, and individual and team assignments, we consider concepts and frameworks for understanding and practicing effective social innovation. Class sessions combine lecturettes and guest speakers with interactive exercises designed to consider issues in areas such as education, healthcare,
children, economic development, and the environment. The course is intended for students interested in developing skills to act as entrepreneurial leaders, innovators, consultants, policy makers, philanthropists, impact investors, and changemakers in a wide variety of career fields.

A development project, or intervention, is often the most visible part of international development. This course focuses on the full cycle from identifying development challenges, prioritizing interventions within national development agendas, securing financing, developing the project, its implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. While the course uses common practices of multilateral institutions as the guide, it does so within the context of sovereignty of countries who are ultimately accountable to their citizens for the use of public funds and success of development interventions. Using specific country examples, the course provides a thorough view into the ‘who, how, and what’ of managing development intervention. Questions, such as who determines what gets funded, how development interventions are designed, what it takes to successfully implement them, and eventually how the outcomes of the interventions are evaluated, are core elements of the course.

Course studies the history, political institutions, and economic development of South East Asia. Topics include the history of the region including the pre-colonial period, forms of colonialism, the impact of World War II, the struggles for independence, nationalism, and communism, and the impact of the Asian Financial Crisis; tools of political economy to place the countries in a broader comparative perspective; and issues of great powers in South East Asia and the growing influence of political Islam in the region.

This course focuses on development finance against a background of limited resources and competing demands on available resources. The seminar adopts a Public Financial Management (PFM) perspective focusing on how governments can secure additional resources and use them to promote efficient and accountable development. The course begins by analyzing the main sources of ‘fiscal space’ that can be used to pay for additional spending—borrowing, domestic revenue, foreign aid and resource revenue and expenditure rationalization. It then focuses on challenges to ensure that the available fiscal space is used for development spending, with a particular focus on resource allocation through the budget process. The seminar also considers financing options for decentralization, private sector involvement, and innovative financing instruments. The course concludes by considering the institutional requirements for effective management of public resources and their implications for PFM reform, and explore how to mobilize the needed development finance to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

If a community is concerned about emerging or potential harmful effects of a development project sponsored by an international financial institution, what steps can it take? A relatively little-known and innovative governance accountability process, increasingly used, makes it possible for ordinary people adversely affected by some development projects to raise questions about whether IFI’s (World Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, IFC, Green Climate Fund et al) are adhering to their stated goals and policies. Over 5 workshop-style sessions, this mini-seminar will contextualize, simulate, and consider improvements related to two distinct real-world accountability mechanisms: the first centers on IFI Sanctions Procedures created to deter procurement-related fraud and corruption; the second centers on IFI Inspection Panels with the dynamics they generate for national governments, communities, local and international civil society organizations, and IFIs. In a hands-on workshop with a guest practitioner we will examine redacted documents submitted as part of a fraud investigation in procurement and learn the inside account of how investigations are conducted and sanctions applied (Sanctions Procedures). Similarly, in a couple case-based simulations, we will explore how communities and civil society have voiced serious concerns about development projects and the ways in which national governments and IFI staff have engaged the complaints (Inspection Panel). Crucially for innovation and people-centered design, we will anticipate the future trajectory of these institutions and the political economy of accountability: How will the (1) rise of alternative financing through China’s Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank; the (2) World Bank’s multi-stakeholder consultation process around “environmental and social safeguards” including—and excluding—human rights legal standards; the (3) US Supreme Court decision lifting absolute immunity for international organizations structurally impact these innovations? What future do these mechanisms have? How might they be improved? Frequently including guest practitioners who work in international financial institutions, this mini seminar will provide tools for public servants and development practitioners who partner with these IFIs, civil society, and communities to promote better governance through better accountability. Legal background is not required.

In this course we learn the backbone of the international human rights and humanitarian law framework and the ways it is helpful to use—or not—when faced with concrete cases of conflict, be it war or other forms of large scale suffering. We learn the political history of this legal framework to gain an unglorified, concrete and realistic idea of this law as it stands today. A central aim of the course is to help us, as co-learners, know about, and then be equipped to better navigate in our own professional lives, the three leading practitioner camps that have developed to promote conflict resolution and peacebuilding, including (1) conflict resolvers/transformers, (2) human rights advocates/lawyers and (3) humanitarian workers. How is conflict, and the various ways to address it, framed by each of these camps of practitioners? What sort of tradeoffs and priorities must we consider in any situation and stage of conflict? Is “peace versus justice” one of them? When might demands for human rights precipitate or fuel—as much as prevent or transform—conflicts? Are human rights essential for what the field of conflict resolution has termed “positive peace”? Or for “restorative justice”? Or should policymakers involved in multiple stages or types of conflict be more cautious about viewing rights as a remedy for conflicts? What practical measures have been developed for post conflict situations? Where lies the promise and the peril for key international institutions like the International Criminal Court, UN Special Rapporteurs, and the Human Rights Council and their various proceedings? And for national and subnational institutions like citizen-driven Gender Commissions or Truth and Reconciliation processes? How must we take into account the relevant power and cross-cultural considerations? Can we ourselves be productively inspired by the particular peace-building and conflict transformation work we learn about in the course of the class?
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To consider these and other questions of interest to the members of the class, we connect the contemporary legal framework for human rights and the three-camps approaches to real-world efforts underway by practitioners to reframe and transform conflict and build peace. There is no expectation that students have prior academic exposure to law; instead we are always enriched by whatever experience, including with the law, our class members, and practitioners who join us as guests, bring to the class.

Over the last 40 years our understanding of the what, the why, and the how of capacity development has continued to evolve. While there remain challenges in gaining agreement on which practices are most effective we have a great number of successes, failures, and lessons learned from which to pull. What we do know is that those efforts which are most enduring include a multi-pronged approach working at the various levels; individual, organizational, and environmental. During this course we’ll look at:
• the evolution of capacity development and the terms, events, and international policies that have influenced the conversation;
• various levels or dimensions of capacity development; individual, organizational, and environmental;
• the role of training, learning, and performance in developing capacity at the various levels;
• frameworks, assessments, and strategies for developing individual and organizational capacity;
• the role of systems thinking and practice in capacity development;
• fragile and conflict-affected states and capacity development; and
• gender, equity, and inclusion in capacity development.

This course is especially timely during the time of the pandemic COVID-19.  It focuses on social development and the role of social policy as one important channel that policy makers at different levels use to address complex and interrelated issues affecting human well-being.  We analyze status, trends, problems, and design approaches to address key social challenges in the world and in selected countries. The course covers key issues in three areas: education, health and social protection, as well as policy making for social development. It is a graduate level course for students interested in international development and particularly in policy making for social development.