International Development

Pathway Leader:

Colin Marx c.marx@ucl.ac.uk

Team members:

Loraine Bacchus Loraine.Bacchus@lshtm.ac.uk

Subir Sinha ss61@soas.ac.uk Michael Jennings mj10@soas.ac.uk

Sara Stevano  ss129@soas.ac.uk ; Costas Lapavitsas cl5@soas.ac.uk

John Morton  J.F.Morton@greenwich.ac.uk

Meera Tiwari m.tiwari@uel.ac.uk 

Punam Yadav p.yadav@ucl.ac.uk ;Hassan Haghparast-Bidgoli h.haghparast-bidgoli@ucl.ac.uk

Elaine Unterhalter elaine.unterhalter@ioe.ac.uk 

Jasmine Gideon (Staff) J.Gideon@bbk.ac.uk

Prospective candidates can contact the pathway leader or team members for further information.

Training Routes

See table below for training routes and institutions available for this pathway.  

ESRC studentships at the UBEL DTP are structured around the following routes: 1+3, +3, 2+3 and +4 funding. Please note that not all routes are available in all institutions or pathways. Click here for further information on funding routes. 

Pathway	Institution	Training Route	(1+3)	(2+3)	(+3)	(+4)
International Development	SOAS	Development Economics	x		x
International Development	SOAS	International Development	x		x
International Development	LSHTM	Global Health and Development	x		x
International Development	UEL	NGO and Development Management	x		x
International Development	UCL	Development Planning	x		x
International Development	UCL	Education and International Development	x		x
International Development	UCL	Global Change and Health	x		x
International Development	UCL	Global Health and Development	x		x
International Development	Birkbeck	International Development	x		x
International Development	Birkbeck	Sustainable Business and Sustainable Development	x		x
International Development	Greenwich	Climate, Environment and Development			x

The International Development (ID) pathway draws upon London’s unique concentration of academic institutions, funding agencies and local and international NGOs to offer an unrivalled concentration of expertise in and around ID. All participating institutions are strongly committed to interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative research and fieldwork, and seek to contribute to policymaking in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Research is rooted in a range of disciplines, including anthropology, culture and media studies, economics, education, epidemiology, gender and sexuality studies, geography, mathematics, medicine, political ecology, policy analysis, political economy, political science, sociology, and sustainability and climate change. This approach to research and policy intervention allows us to produce scholarship that blends innovative approaches with rigorous empirical analysis across a range of contexts. Within these parameters, each institution retains distinctive strengths:

• The SOAS Departments of Development Studies and Economics are internationally recognised for their distinctive and original approaches to the political economy of development, development economics, violence and conflict, migration, labour, political ecology, inequalities, social reproduction, industrial policy, the politics of development including trade unions, social movements populism and authoritarianism, and related topics.
• The UCL Development Planning Unit (DPU) is one of the foremost development planning schools in the anglophone world. The DPU’s research agenda focuses on social, physical, economic and political changes in a globalising and urbanising world, across diversity, social complexity and planned intervention; states and markets; urban transformations; and environmental justice, urbanisation and resilience. 
• The UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) delivers world-class interdisciplinary research on global health and development, with particular strengths in women’s, children and adolescents’ health, infectious diseases,  non-communicable diseases, the health effects of climate change, and the health of vulnerable populations.
• The IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society offers the largest concentration of research in education and international development in the UK, with specific expertise in gender, migration, health and wellbeing, planning, teacher development, education systems, higher education pedagogies, and critical policy analysis.
• International Development research at UEL is centred in the School of Social Sciences and the Centre for Social Justice and Social Change.  Its work is interdisciplinary, with a focus on grassroots organisations, collectives and commons, gender, the third sector, urban and rural poverty, the North-South poverty debates, faith and development, and humanitarian interventions.
• The LSHTM Department of Global Health and Development (GHD)focuses on novel and policy-relevant research and training that concerns health issues with a global reach, predominantly from the perspective of lower-and-middle-income countries. The work spans health policy and systems research, economic evaluation, anthropological approaches to global health, gender violence and violence in childhood and medical humanitarianism.
• The Centre for Society, Environment and Development (CSED) is within the University of Greenwich Natural Resources Institute. NRI facilitates social-scientific and interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange on key issues of global development. This will include increasing understanding of, and developing solutions for:
  • the impacts of climate change on the rural poor, their opportunities for adaptation, and what fair climate change mitigation policies would look like
  • gender inequalities in the Global South and the other inequalities that intersect with them
  • processes of innovation and learning within smallholder agriculture so as to sustainably increase productivity, food security and livelihood security
  • state fragility and conflict in the Global South and their causal linkages to climate vulnerability environmental degradation and food insecurity, as well as developing new approaches from political ecology and the analysis of culture to understand these and other social and environmental challenges.

  CSED builds on the world-leading research done by NRI social scientists on critical challenges facing the globe, and in particular poor people in the Global South. This involves using our advanced methodological expertise, quantitative, qualitative and participatory, and our first-hand experience in research in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We are committed to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, both within the social sciences and between the social and the natural sciences. We have the vision of synthesising our research into world-leading publications, while engaging with policy-makers, civil society and citizens of the Global South and contributing to public debates.

  CSED operates as an umbrella for four Research Groups:

  • Climate Change
  • Innovation and Learning in Agriculture
  • Gender and Social Difference
  • Political Ecology, Arts and Culture

Studentship Competitions

UBEL offers fully funded and co-funded ESRC studentships. Follow link below to discover current opportunities.

Click Here