Researching the politics of development
What is ESID?
The Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre is a global partnership that has investigated the kinds of politics that promote development.
View our findings
Funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, our research covered 26 countries, and we worked with research partners in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and the USA.
Led from the Global Development Institute (GDI), Europe’s largest global poverty and inequality institute, ESID worked to deepen the understanding of governance in the developing world in ways that impact on policy and practice so that people’s lives and livelihoods are improved.
Our overarching research question was:
“What kinds of politics can help to secure inclusive development, and how can these be promoted?”
Our three central research questions have been
- What capacities enable states to help deliver inclusive development?
- What shapes elite commitment to delivering inclusive development and state effectiveness?
- Under what conditions do developmental forms of state capacity and elite commitment emerge and become sustained? In particular, what role do power relations and ideas play here?
