Global Development

This program addresses the critical challenges of advancing sustainability, protecting critical environmental resources, fostering democracy and good governance, reducing social and economic inequality, and promoting innovation and economic progress. The program currently has projects that fall under the following key themes:

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Environmental Sustainability

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Related Projects

Anjali Thomas — The Politics of Water Scarcity and Water Access

Water is essential for human life, yet governments frequently leave vulnerable citizens to rely on informal channels for access. What can motivate governments to provide public services such as water to citizens trapped in informality? We theorize how accessing state services involves distinct strategic interactions between citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians at different formalization stages. A large factorial field experiment in Mumbai’s informal settlements reveals that a bureaucratic facilitation drive significantly improved citizens’ ability to access municipal water connections in policy-eligible settlements, but only when combined with a bottom-up political coordination campaign targeting elected officials. While bureaucratic assistance helped citizens through the petitioning stage of the formalization process, political pressure was needed to ensure service delivery in the infrastructural stage more open to political influence. Our findings illuminate how specific citizen empowerment campaigns reshape the incentives of otherwise reluctant bureaucrats and politicians to provide marginalized groups their basic human rights.

Associated Outputs

  • Nikhar Gaikwad and Anjali Thomas. “Getting on the Grid: A Field Experiment on Bottom-Up Political Pressure and Access to Essential Public Services” Accepted with Minor Revisions, American Journal of Political Science.
  • Co-PI on Grant Proposal to the Weiss Fund, Invitation to Revise and Resubmit.
Austin Beacham – Intersection of International and Domestic Governance in Conservation Policy

The conservation of natural areas, and the biodiversity they contain, is a key priority in combatting many environmental issues, including climate change. An international regime has developed around biodiversity conservation, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Ramsar Convention, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Additionally, many nongovernment, transnational actors work in this space, attempting to convince or pay governments to protect nature. This set of projects analyzes how these international institutions and actors interplay with domestic forces to determine conservation policy. In the first paper, I argue that integration into this international regime exerts positive pressure for protection, but that anti-protection interests are unevenly distributed within countries, leading to environmentally inefficient allocation of protection. In the second, I argue that transnational actors prioritize countries that both have high levels of biodiversity but are also reliable, high-capacity partners, leading to under provision of resources to countries that most need international assistance. In the third, I turn my attention to the international wildlife trade, arguing that CITES is a relatively effective international agreement, particularly at dampening increases in wildlife trade that stem from violent conflict due to increased scrutiny on these “conflict species.”

Associated Outputs

  • Conserving What’s Left: The International Environmental Regime and the Politics of Subnational Compliance. Invited to Revise and Resubmit at International Studies Quarterly.
  • Transnational NGOs and Delegated Governance: The Logic and Effects of Foreign Protected Area Management. Working Paper.
  • Endangered and Exported: The Impact of CITES and Conflict on US Wildlife Trade. Working Paper.
Austin Beacham— Other Forces Affecting Protected Area Policy

The last set of projects analyzes other, non-international governance aspects of the political economy of protected areas (locations set aside for the long-term conservation of nature). First, I analyze the influence of nation-wide dependence on natural resources, arguing that it can actually lead to more protected areas in democratic countries because of the negative externalities from resource extraction that spark a demand for protection from citizens. Second, coauthors and I argue that international conflict can lead to the protection of border areas as a means of monitoring and securing these often sparsely populated spaces. Lastly, another coauthors and I argue that natural disasters create a window of opportunity after which protection can be more likely.

Associated Outputs

  • Extraction, Green Mobilization, and Conservation: Natural Resource Dependence and Protected Area Designation. University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Working Paper Series, No. 22. November 2023. https://ucigcc.org/publication/natural-resource-dependence-and-citizen-mobilization/
  • Where is the National in National Parks? The Effect of International Conflict on Natural Protected Areas (with Cesar B. Martinez-Alvarez and Gino Pauselli). Working Paper.
  • Protecting Against Nature By Protecting Nature: Evidence from Europe on Natural Disasters and Conservation (with Niklas Hänze). Working Paper.

Democracy and Good Governance

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Related Projects

Michael Best — Digital Threats to Democracy

Enhancing civic engagement, strengthening democracy, and monitoring elections. What role does social media play in elections? How can we identify and respond to hate speech and disinformation designed to undermine democratic practice? Can we build systems that enhance transparency and good governance? How can ICTs help promote an innovative and effective civil society?

Austin Beacham – Contemporary Phenomena and Democratic Backsliding

The world is experiencing a period of profound democratic erosion across both established democracies and more weakly institutionalized democracies. This project analyzes the effects of modern, relatively unprecedented phenomena on the resilience of democratic institutions. In one paper, we focus on the deleterious effects of the spread of internet access for democracy. We argue that the spread of the internet can facilitate polarization, a known driver of democratic backsliding, especially when anti-pluralist (who do not genuinely believe in an open, democratic society) parties are in power. In another paper we turn our focus to climate change, arguing that climate-related natural disasters—which are increasing in frequency—can lead to democratic erosion when governments lack the capacity to effectively respond to them.

Associated Outputs

Kirk Bowman — Soccer and Global Politics

Soccer is the undisputed global game and an excellent lens to understand social, political, and economic phenomena. The explanatory power of the game is constantly expanding as the sport grows around the world. But soccer is more than just a lens. It is also a powerful actor in forging identity, influencing norms, shaping migration, challenging colonization, contributing to economies, boosting political popularity, and much more. Soccer is increasingly both a source of change and a tool of the status quo in critical issues of race, gender, the environment, peace, human rights, and soft power; often with contradictions.

Associated Outputs

  • Bowman, K.S. and John Boyd, editors. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful  Game in the 21st Century. Routledge. September 2025.
  • Bowman, K.S., Felipe Arocena and Alberto Fuentes Bloody Hell: How Soccer Transforms our World and Explains Society’s most Perplexing Puzzles. Bloomsbury. Manuscript submitted. (50% of contribution).
  • Bowman, K.S. and Eduard Goguillon (former MS and BS INTA student, JD UCLA). “The Causes and Consequences of the Americanization of the Beautiful Game in Europe.” K. Bowman and J. Boyd Eds. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful Game in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2025 (70% of contribution).
  • Bowman, K.S., Artis, J. and K. Ferguson (current INTA MS student and current INTA undergrad). “Critical Junctures, Path Dependency, and the Rise and Potential Demise of US Women’s Soccer.” K. Bowman and J. Boyd Eds. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful Game in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2025. (70% of contribution).
  • Bowman, K.S., and Candy Zeng (GT Undergrad). “Environmental Sustainability, Greenwashing in Soccer, and Innovative Solutions to Reduce Carbon Emissions from Team and Fan Travel.” K. Bowman and J. Boyd Eds. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful Game in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2025. (70% of contribution).
  • Bowman, K.S., Brooke Boucher, and Mbali Hlonwane. “Using Soccer Data from Professional Teams to Train Young Women Analysts: The Case of Pink Codrs and Kaizer Chiefs FC. K. Bowman and J. Boyd Eds. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful Game in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2025. (40% of contribution)
  • Bowman, K.S. and Boyd, J. “Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation.” K. Bowman and J. Boyd Eds. Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation: The Beautiful Game in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2025. (50% of contribution).

Associated Activities

  • Can Ultras Save Democracy: The Ultra Classification Project. Project initiated with Cas Mudde (UGA) and John Boyd (Michigan State). Ultras are fetishized and pathologized as hooligans and criminals, when this is not accurate for most of the tens of thousands of football Ultra groups. Ultras are poorly understood, and the term is never properly defined or operationalized. There are plenty of Uncivil Ultra groups, but also many Civil Society Ultra groups, and many shapeshifters (Gramscian) ultra groups that sometimes are civil and sometimes uncivil. A new VIP project, beginning in January 2026, and SoccerCon 2026 will advance the conceptualization of Ultras and begin the creation of a database, hosted at Georgia Tech, that catalogs Ultra groups based on more than a dozen dimensions. This data will be the source of at least one book. More importantly, this database can inform important policy discussions of lessons to increase the numbers of civil society Ultras and reduce the numbers of uncivil society Ultras. This project will also be a part of future study abroad programs
Anjali Thomas – Politics of Welfare Provision

While politicians often encourage citizens to avail of government programs, the impact of such behavior has remained largely explored. How do politicians’ endorsements influence citizens’ willingness to take up government programs? We argue that although politicians — like other elites – derive authority from their official positions, politicians’ authority is selective because electoral pressures compel politicians to favor their political supporters. We examine this argument using a field experiment in North India which randomly assigns citizens to receive videos of real-world state-level and local-level politicians endorsing a national health insurance program. We find, consistent with our selective authority argument, that politicians’ influence on citizens’ willingness to take-up the program depends on whether citizens belong to their support base. However, contrary to expectation, exploratory results suggest that local politicians’ influence does not stem from their perceived trustworthiness or expertise but rather from their ability to influence program implementation along personalistic lines.

Associated Outputs

  • “Selective Authority: Politicians’ Influence over Citizens’ Uptake of Government Welfare Programs” (with Charles Hankla and Sayan Banerjee)
  • PI: NSF Grant from Accountable Institutions and Behavior Program. $268,222
  • Invited Seminar at University of Virginia (Spring 2025).
Anjali Thomas — Resilience During Crises

Crises are known to disrupt the social and political contract between citizens and the state, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. What is less well understood is whether prior experiences interfacing with local governing institutions shape political responsiveness during hard times. We argue that while crises generally disrupt the social contract between marginalized citizens and the state, prior experience with navigating government bureaucracies and petitioning elected representatives should strengthen citizens’ likelihood of contacting political or state actors for assistance during crises and should also increase the likelihood of responsiveness of these actors. We test this argument in the context of the migration shock that engulfed residents of Mumbai’s vast informal settlements during the pandemic, forcing widespread urban-to-rural out migration during the lockdowns. We leverage a factorial field experiment implemented prior to the pandemic in Mumbai’s informal settlements. The experiment fielded two interventions: the first provided citizens with assistance with bureaucratic requirements involved with applying for a municipal water connection. The second assisted citizens with political coordination to mount collective pressure on government officials to demand piped water. Our findings show that households who received either or both interventions prior to the pandemic were more likely to contact state or political actors during the crisis. Moreover, citizens assigned to the bureaucratic assistance intervention prior to the pandemic were more likely to elicit political responsiveness. However, neither intervention working separately or in combination increased citizens’ satisfaction with state actors’ responsiveness during the crisis. We interpret these results in the context of low state capacity during crises, with implications for how and when crises can strengthen citizen state engagement in hard times.

Associated Outputs

  • How Prior Citizen-State Engagement Shapes Political Responsiveness During Crises (with Nikhar Gaikwad)
  • Upcoming presentations at APSA and GLD Annual Conference.

Innovation and Economic Progress

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Related Projects

Jennifer A. Hamilton — Tracking Leakages in the Local Distribution of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology

The leakage of development goods is a major challenge for governments and a preoccupation of development practitioners and academic researchers. Although commonly reported and lamented, such leakage is challenging to quantify and trace. We address this evidentiary blind spot by piloting the use of iBeacon technology to track how village elders distribute solar lanterns within off-grid communities in western Kenya. We provide evidence on the efficacy of the technology for detecting the lanterns and tracking their movement, finding substantial improvement in performance over previous generations of technology. In addition, we draw on survey data to understand why some households received lanterns and others did not. We find evidence consistent with the faithful execution of program guidelines, as well as evidence for the distribution of lanterns to households with needs along dimensions beyond our designated criterion. Our findings run against common depictions of local African elites as predatory actors and suggest the need to rethink the common equation of “leakage” with malfeasance.

Associated Outputs

  • Hamilton, Jennifer A., Nganga, Muthoni, and Posner, Daniel N. “Tracking the Leakage of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology.” (working paper, under review)
  • Hamilton, Jennifer A., Nganga, Muthoni, and Posner, Daniel N. “The Ethics of Field Experimentation Using Remote Monitoring Technology.” (working paper)
Michael Best – AI and Africa

Creating AI-driven solutions that meet the real needs of African communities and contribute to sustainable development and improved quality of life. How can people in Africa create AIs by and for their own communities? What makes an AI culturally relevant, resource aware, and context specific? How do we tailor LLMs to specific African contexts and languages?

Michael Best – Open Innovation Platform

Open and sustainable innovation and social entrepreneurship with global connectivity. How do we design a globally connected makerspace that is open, accessible, and welcoming? How do we apply global manufacturing innovations and hardware prototyping efficiencies towards sustainable systems?

Fei-Ling Wang – China’s Technology and Innovation

Associated Outputs

  • “Insecurity and Ambition: Dual Drivers of Chinese Innovation?” Daniel Aum, INTA PhD student, and Fei-Ling Wang, Defence and Peace Economics, Dec 2022-Jan. 2023.
Fei-Ling Wang – China’s Domestic Politics and Political Economy

Associated Outputs

  • China revealed in the house-purchasing dispute in Chiang Mai”, Lianhe Zaobao ( ), Singapore, January 27, 2025.
  • “The Institutional Fate of the Chinese Communist Party” (), co-authored with Qin Zhongyin, China Journal of Democracy (), New York, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2024: 34-49.
  • The China Record: An Assessment of the People’s Republic, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2023.
Alberto Fuentes – Divergent Economic Development Patterns Across Mexican States

In this project with Seth Pipkin, we offer a historical overview of the economic development patterns of four Mexican states – Queretaro, Jalisco, Baja California and Nuevo Leon – since the 1980s. The project describes their variation and offers an explanation focused on the industrial policy preferences of local developmental coalitions.

Associated Outputs

  • Fuentes, Alberto, and Seth Pipkin. “Sticky industrial policies and divergent value chain upgrading patterns: lessons from Querétaro and Jalisco, Mexico.” Business and Politics (2025): 1-22.
  • Fuentes, Alberto, and Seth Pipkin. “Appetite for Reform: When do Exogenous Shocks Motivate Industrial Policy Change?.” The Journal of Development Studies 58.6 (2022): 1081-1101.
  • Fuentes, Alberto, and Seth Pipkin. “Can partial growth coalitions build pathways out of the middle-income trap? The case of Querétaro, México.” Studies in Comparative International Development 59.3 (2024): 433-463.
  • Fuentes, Alberto, and Seth Pipkin. “Self-discovery in the dark: the demand side of industrial policy in Latin America.” Review of International Political Economy 23.1 (2016): 153-183.
  • Fuentes, Alberto, and Seth Pipkin. “Neither synthesis nor rivalry: Complementary policy models and technological learning in the Mexican and Brazilian petroleum and automotive industries.” Business and Politics 21.1 (2019): 113-144.
Alberto Fuentes – Soccer Book on Politics and Economics

In this project with Kirk Bowman and Felipe Arrocena, we use soccer as a lens to explore various theories in political science, sociology and management. My work includes a co-authored chapter with former student Linda Duong in the edited volume Soccer, Globalization and Innovation, as well as three chapters in the upcoming book Golazo.

Associated Outputs

  • Soccer, Globalization and Innovation (ed. Kirk Bowman and John Boyd). “The StationSoccer Social Innovation: Overcoming U.S. Youth Soccer’s Transportation Barrier.”  (Fuentes and Duong)
M.E. Kosal – Frugal Science as Disruptive Technology: Democratization of Emerging Technologies at Scale

Emerging and disruptive technologies are an area of great inquiry, study, and discussion in the scholarly and policy world. Most of these discussions focus on sophisticated, high-tech discoveries and innovations. This work examines a much less studied area of emerging technologies: innovation that makes sophisticated high-tech science available to large numbers of people in low resource environments. Developed largely in context of humanitarian, disaster response, and international development, the field of frugal science is analyzed as test case of such emerging technologies that are intentionally designed to be inexpensive and usable by large numbers of people without specific training or resources. Critical gaps, threats, opportunities, and mitigations critical to the advancement and future deployment of frugal science capabilities of concern are assessed.

Associated Outputs

  • “Frugal Science as Disruptive Technology: Democratization of Emerging Technologies at Scale,” International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Meeting, Chicago IL, 2-5 April 2025
Michael Best– Community Health and Digital Technologies

Health equity within and across communities is shaped by numerous social factors. These social determinants of health are often echoed and impacted by digital platforms. Effective public health responses must, therefore, consider a community’s digital ecosystem while developing equity-oriented sociotechnical systems and approaches. In this work, we have partnered with several community-based research coalitions to address issues of health equity that especially affect Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities in Georgia.

Michael Best– Low-Resource Language Technology

Many are welcoming and cheering for the recent advancement of language technology, such as the commercially available large language models (LLMs). As LLMs are trained on trillions of tokens from each language, how do we develop low-resource languages in this era, and how are users of low-resource languages affected?

Social and Economic Inequality

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Related Projects

Jennifer A. Hamilton — Prevalence, Causes, and Consequences of Internalized Racism in East Africa

Internalized racism is an individual-level psychological phenomenon wherein members of disadvantaged racial groups implicitly or explicitly adopt racist attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors instilled and perpetuated by dominant racial power structures. Colonial regimes promoted racial ideologies among African populations to diminish resistance to foreign rule, but these ideologies still affect contemporary African societies in many ways. Building on the work of African scholars and activists who first identified this phenomenon, this research develops social science tools to systematically measure internalized racism, its causes, and its consequences in East African countries. In doing so, it demonstrates how racial inequality is a social process that continues to impede material and psychological well-being.

Associated Outputs

  • Hamilton, Jennifer A. “Internalized Racism in African Settings: An Overlooked but Pernicious Social Malady.” (working paper, under review)
  • Hamilton, Jennifer A. “’A Legacy of Woes’: The Prevalence and Political Relevance of Internalized Racism in Post-Colonial Africa” (working paper)
Anjali Thomas – Gender Disparities

Several inter-related projects exploring the causes and consequences of gender disparities in politics and in the educational field.

Associated Outputs

  • “Do the Effects of Local Gender Quotas Spillover to Higher Tiers? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in India” (with Charles Hankla, Sayan Banerjee, and Arindam Banerjee). Forthcoming, Publius: Journal of Federalism
  • 2024. “Ethnonationalist Gender Norms: How Parties Shape Voter Attitudes to Women Candidates in India” (with Arindam Banerjee, Sayan Banerjee and Charles Hankla). American Journal of Political Science.
  • 2023. ”Electing Women in Ethnically Divided Societies: Candidates, Campaigns, and Intersectionality in Bihar, India” (with Arindam Banerjee, Sayan Banerjee and Charles Hankla). Comparative Political Studies
  • Pre-Analysis Plan: Holding Up Half the Sky? The Influence of State Actors on Gender Norms in Rural India (with Franziska Roscher, Charles Hankla and Sayan Banerjee)
Michael Best – Community Health and Digital Technologies

Health equity within and across communities is shaped by numerous social factors. These social determinants of health are often echoed and impacted by digital platforms. Effective public health responses must, therefore, consider a community’s digital ecosystem while developing equity-oriented sociotechnical systems and approaches. In this work, we have partnered with several community-based research coalitions to address issues of health equity that especially affect Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities in Georgia.

Michael Best– Low-Resource Language Technology

Many are welcoming and cheering for the recent advancement of language technology, such as the commercially available large language models (LLMs). As LLMs are trained on trillions of tokens from each language, how do we develop low-resource languages in this era, and how are users of low-resource languages affected?

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