Shandana Khan Mohmand
Author Biography
Shandana Khan Mohmand is a social scientist and Research Fellow in the Governance Cluster, IDS. Her main area of research is the political economy of public policy and service delivery, focused on empirical analyses of democratisation, local politics, and informal institutions. She has contributed to both policy and social science research, using varied methodological strategies to investigate these issues in South Asia, the Western Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa. Her research has increasingly focused on the relationship between political participation, inequality, and accountability, including in her book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (2019, Cambridge University Press).
Colin Anderson
Author Biography
Colin Anderson is a Research Officer at IDS. His work focuses on citizen–state relations, including as Research Officer for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme, and the Learning with SPARK (Strengthening Public Accountability for Results and Knowledge) action research programme on civic action for more inclusive fiscal governance. He has particular interests in the development and use of social accountability approaches and their impacts on governance relationships, and the actions of international donors in these relationships. Colin has worked in youth and community development work, civil society advocacy, and public policy management in the UK and Cambodia.
Max Gallien
Author Biography
Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of development, and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a Research Fellow at IDS and the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) and a Senior Fellow with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
Tom Harrison
Author Biography
Tom Harrison is a Research Fellow in the Governance Cluster at IDS. He is a political scientist whose work focuses on the governance and politics of development. His research interests include the authority and capacity of the state, the politics of bureaucracy, development planning, the role of the centre of government, the politics of climate change mitigation, and non‑governmental organisation–state relations. Tom’s current research looks at how approaches to thinking and working politically and working adaptively can be applied to our understanding of the politics of bureaucracy.
Anuradha Joshi
Author Biography
Anuradha Joshi is a Senior Research Fellow in the Governance Cluster at IDS. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her interests lie in understanding state–society relations, on collective action, accountability, and service delivery. She currently co-directs the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)-funded five‑year research programme focused on social and political action for empowerment and accountability in fragile, conflict-, and violence-affected settings (Action for Empowerment and Accountability – A4EA).
Miguel Loureiro
Author Biography
Miguel Loureiro is a Research Fellow and convenor of the MA Governance, Development and Public Policy at IDS. His research primarily focuses on state–citizen communication and state responsiveness. Miguel teaches, trains, and conducts research with and on bureaucrats across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Brazil.
Giulia Mascagni
Author Biography
Giulia Mascagni is Research Fellow at IDS and Research Director of the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD). Her research focuses on tax administration and tax policy in low‑income countries generally, and in particular on policy evaluation and empirical analysis. Giulia has worked mostly with African countries and has several years of experience in Ethiopia and Rwanda in particular. She is also Associate Fellow at the Bologna Institute for Policy Research, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Europe, and Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Giovanni Occhiali
Author Biography
Giovanni Occhiali is a Research Fellow at IDS and development economist for the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD). He works on various projects related to tax administration and compliance, tax and governance, and co-leads ICTD’s capacity-building programme. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and prior to joining ICTD, he was a Researcher at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and an Overseas Development Institute Fellow at the National Revenue Authority of Sierra Leone. His research focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, and outside of the field of taxation his main interests are energy economics and
industrial policies.
Vanessa van den Boogard
Author Biography
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), where she leads the research programmes on informality and tax and civil society and tax. She specialises in the politics of informal taxation and revenue generation, the political economy of development, and conflict and state-building. Vanessa is a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and received her PhD from the University of Toronto.
The pandemic is in many ways a crisis of governance. It has created a set of unique challenges that underscore the need for governments to collect revenue more efficiently and equitably; and to spend it more inclusively, transparently, and accountably, especially on the most vulnerable and marginalised populations. In this article, we suggest a set of governance interventions to help create conditions for building effective and inclusive institutions that can support efforts to build back better. We propose that the impact of the pandemic can be dealt with through a mix of some interventions that deal with the immediate impacts of the crisis, and other interventions that can transform development in the longer term.