Welcome to DLP’s new blog, which features opinions and voices on politics, power, policy and the emergence of, and support for, developmental leadership.
Posts are written by DLP’s team of researchers around the world, and will include contributions from other experts. We hope for this to be as interactive a process as possible, so please do leave comments and feedback. You can also subscribe via email or RSS, and share posts via the social media icons above.
Our aim is to stimulate debate and discussion on DLP’s core themes, many set out by our founder, Adrian Leftwich, in his paper, ‘Bringing Agency Back In: Politics and Human Agency in Building Institutions and States’.
The core themes include:
- The centrality of politics, including political leadership, to development
- The specificity of context, including different structures of power, authority and legitimacy
- The importance of human agency, or individuals’ and organisations’ capacity to take action, in influencing structures
- The centrality of developmental coalitions and collective action
- The interactions between politics and the bureaucracy, the private sector and civil society
- Institutional integrity, including anti-corruption
- The role of values, attitudes and ideas in developmental leadership
- How leaders emerge, focusing especially on women, young people, and the role of higher education
- The role of elites
- Leadership as a process
- International aid policy and operational implications.
DLP’s research challenges many aid paradigms in order to build a deeper understanding of institutional change. We’re interested in how effective states and legitimate institutions emerge, with a particular focus on home-grown leaderships, and in how both domestic and external actors can better ‘think and work politically’.
We hope you enjoy our new blog, and we look forward to the debate!
