This talk examines the question of whether and how bureaucratic effectiveness contributes to development, what makes for an effective bureaucracy and what are the building blocks of state capacity. The panel will review contemporary research, especially in economics, and connect this to discussions of bureaucratic systems and their relationship with politics.

Professor Adnan Q. Khan served as Research and Policy Director at the International Growth Centre at LSE and taught Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has spent more than 15 years in the policy world as a practitioner, policymaker and activist, and more than 10 years in the research world as a researcher, lecturer and as a catalyser of other people’s research.

Dr. Miguel Loureiro is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, primarily analysing and improving state-citizen relations. He works at the state-citizen interface both from a citizens’ perspective, examining accountability and empowerment relations, and the state’s perspective, identifying opportunities for state responsiveness.

Dr. Ali Cheema serves as the Director of the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre and is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Cheema is also a Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS Pakistan, co-founder of the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and a co-lead academic of the International Growth centre’s Pakistan programme.