Woolcock, Michael

Person:
Woolcock, Michael

Development Research Group

Fields of Specialization

Social development, Research methods, Institutions, Poverty, Community Driven Development, Governance, Conflict

ORCID

0000-0001-8041-2504

External Links

RePEc

Departments

Development Research Group

Last updated: March 19, 2025

Biography

Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group, where he was worked since 1998. For sixteen of these years he has also been an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on strategies for enhancing state capability for implementation, on crafting more effective interaction between informal and formal justice systems, and on using mixed methods to better understand the effectiveness of "complex" development interventions. In addition to more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, he is the co-author or co-editor of thirteen books, including Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia (with Patrick Barron and Rachael Diprose; Yale University Press 2011 – a co-recipient of the 2012 best book prize by the American Sociological Association's section on international development), Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett; Oxford University Press 2017), and co-lead author (with Samuel Freije-Rodriquez) of the World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020: Reversals of Fortune. He was the Von Hugel Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2002), a founding member of the Brooks World Poverty Institute (now the Global Development Institute) at the University of Manchester (2006-2009) and of the World Bank’s first Global Knowledge and Research Hub, in Malaysia (2015-2017). An Australian national, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland, and has an MA and PhD in comparative-historical sociology from Brown University.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 41

Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-15) Barron, Patrick; Cord, Louise; Cuesta, José; Espinoza, Sabina A.; Larson, Greg; Woolcock, Michael
All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Development can promote societies where all people can thrive, but the change process can be complex, challenging, and socially contentious. Continued progress toward sustainable development is not guaranteed. The current overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, rising levels of conflict, and a global economic slowdown are inflaming long-standing challenges—exacerbating inequality and deep-rooted systemic inequities. Addressing these challenges will require social sustainability in addition to economic and environmental sustainability. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. The book emphasizes social sustainability’s four key components: social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. It posits that •Social sustainability increases when more people feel part of the development process and believe that they and their descendants will benefit from it. •Communities and societies that are more socially sustainable are more willing and able to work together to overcome challenges, deliver public goods, and allocate scarce resources in ways perceived to be legitimate and fair so that all people may thrive over time. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.
Ten Consequential and Actionable ‘Social’ Contributions to the Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-19) Rao, Vijayendra; Woolcock, Michael
Understandings of what is unique and consequential about ‘social’ development vis-à-vis other sectoral domains have evolved considerably over the past eight decades, with the present articulations enjoying broad acceptance in theory while often being ignored in practice. Although administrative imperatives within large organizations may require social development to have a stand-alone operational portfolio, this paper argues that its impact would be greatly enhanced if its distinctive contributions were incorporated into everyday activity in all development sectors. The paper outlines 10 such actionable ‘social’ contributions, making a case for why and how they matter – intrinsically and instrumentally – across mainstream concerns regarding development processes and outcomes, in poor and rich countries alike.
A Learning Agenda for Community-Driven Development: Responding to Complex Contextual, Evaluation, and Inference Challenges
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-28) Barron, Patrick; Fernandes, Patricia; Winkler, Stephen; Woolcock, Michael
Governments and nongovernmental organizations around the world utilize Community-Driven Development (CDD) approaches to address complex and overlapping development challenges. Despite consistent evidence on some impacts of CDD—especially improvements in basic services—there is significant variation in most outcomes and several unanswered questions. This paper argues that the central task to advance learning on CDD (and similar complex development interventions) is identifying the conditions under which it works and the design and implementation choices that will make it most effective within a given context. The paper provides an overview of CDD, background on the existing evidence, and identifies gaps in CDD’s impact across four broad types of outcomes—cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. The paper concludes by outlining a set of priority research questions that will advance learning on CDD and provides guidance on the empirical approaches and tools required to answer these research questions. The proposed learning agenda focuses on understanding variations in project design, implementation modalities, and context, arguing that increased knowledge in these domains will help to optimize the impacts of current CDD projects, inform the design of new projects, and develop an understanding of what project designs are most scalable in different contexts.
What Data-Rich Assessments of Socioeconomic Inequality and Mobility in Rich Countries Overlook in Poor Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-27) Van Der Weide, Roy; Woolcock, Michael
Advances in the scale and sophistication of individual income data compiled across high-income countries have enabled researchers to measure inequality and intergenerational mobility at a highly granular level and over long periods of time. The edited volume Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth (Chetty et al (2022), comprising 23 empirically rich studies, provides a comprehensive stocktaking of the recent empirical evidence. This paper reviews the volume’s key findings obtained for high-income countries and raises several questions that extend to low-income countries. What stands out is that income and wealth inequality are increasing, while intergenerational mobility is declining, across most high-income countries. This begs the following questions. Is the Kuznets curve due for a revision How can countries achieve (and maintain) higher levels of socioeconomic mobility as they develop To what extent do inequality and mobility trajectories unfold in different ways for countries at varying levels of economic development How and why do certain subgroups within societies consistently remain at the bottom of the income distribution Finally, what policy measures that redress inequality and enhance mobility are likely to be both more effective and politically supportable
Reconciling Multi-Level Rights-Based Commitments in Development: Assessing the Legal and Administrative Imperatives of Responding to Education, Health Care, and Environment Protection Challenges
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-22) Narh, Bernice Nuerkey; Woolcock, Michael
The principles of sovereignty, equality, and self-determination – which have long been the basis for nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states – have more recently been widened to condemn outside interference by national governments in the affairs of indigenous communities within their territories. These same principles, however, may equally be employed as arguments by sovereign states to justify their engagement in the affairs of indigenous communities residing within their borders, thereby creating the potential for considerable legal, ethical, and political tension. States are urged to respect the autonomy of indigenous people as well as their right to develop, preserve and transmit their history, traditions, and values to future generations; yet states also owe obligations towards indigenous people to facilitate their enjoyment of certain established rights, even as the provision of these obligations may be incompatible with indigenous peoples’ established practices, values, interests, priorities, and beliefs. Multilateral agencies face a similar dilemma in their engagements with national governments: when to respect the sovereignty of national governments and when to champion international law and covenants (e.g., regarding the rights of women and sexual minorities) Drawing on cases from education, health care, and environment protection, this paper proposes an analytical framework for articulating and reconciling competing rights-based development commitments in low-income countries, where the presence of multilateral agencies and intensifying imperatives to attain global development goals generates forces exacerbating (potentially) competing national and sub-national commitments.
Examining Business Reform Committees: Findings from a New Global Dataset
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-06-24) Georgieva, Dorina; Eknath, Varun; Woolcock, Michael
Reform committees (also known as reform councils) are institutional mechanisms or structures tasked with holding policy discussions pertaining to (and making specific recommendations on) regulatory issues, to monitor improvement efforts and ensure regulatory coherence between agencies while enhancing regulatory quality. This paper presents novel granular data on business reform committees for 160 economies collected over 2020–22. The paper presents 35 questions and 238 variables grouped into three pillars: (i) mandate and scope, (ii) organizational structure and operational framework, and (iii) stakeholder engagement and communication. The dataset is unique in that it covers a large number of developing economies and presents detailed insights into the goals, structures, and components of reform committees while contributing to debates on strategies for promoting better regulations. Reform committees are heterogeneous structures, prevalent in lower-middle-income economies, followed by upper-middle-income economies. Most economies with a functioning reform committee state that their mandate is to improve competitiveness globally by improving the business regulatory/legislative framework, going beyond improvements of the business environment for domestic companies. In more than 50 percent of the economies the priorities are set at the ministry level, most commonly the Ministry of Finance or equivalent, followed by the Prime Minister’s office. However, reporting lines can be very different—across a quarter of the economies, the chair of the reform committee reports to the President or the head of state, while in close to one-fifth the chair reports to the Prime Minister. In most economies, public sector representatives are members of both the steering board and the working groups. These findings provide new insights into the scope, mandate, and functioning of business reform committees at different income levels and across different regions; they also provide a robust foundation on which subsequent research efforts can build.
The Sounds of Development: Musical Representation as A(nother) Source of Development Knowledge
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-01-12) Lewis, David; Rodgers, Dennis; Woolcock, Michael
The experience of development, as well as understandings of and responses to it, are uniquely rendered via popular culture generally, and popular music in particular. Music has been a medium of choice through which marginalized populations all over the world convey their (frequently critical) views, while in the Global North music has also long played a prominent (if notorious) role in portraying the plight of the South’s ‘starving millions’ as an emotional pretext for soliciting funds for international aid. We discuss the relationship between music and development in five specific domains: the tradition of Western ‘protest’ music; musical resistance in the Global South; music-based development interventions; commodification and appropriation; and, finally, music as a globalized development vernacular. We present our analyses not as definitive or comprehensive but as invitations to broaden the range of potential contributions to development debates, and the communicative modalities in and through which these debates are conducted. Doing so may lead to enhancing the relevance and coherence of development debates for a greater range of key stakeholders of development by making them more open, authentic, and compelling.
Measuring What Matters: Principles for a Balanced Data Suite That Prioritizes Problem-Solving and Learning
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Bridges, Kate; Woolcock, Michael
Responding effectively and with professional integrity to the many challenges of public administration requires recognizing that access to more and better quantitative data is necessary but insufficient. Overreliance on quantitative data comes with its own risks, of which public sector managers should be keenly aware. This paper focuses on four such risks. The first is that attaining easy-to-measure targets becomes a false standard of broader success. The second is that measurement becomes conflated with what management is and does. The third is that measurement inhibits a deeper understanding of the key policy problems and their constituent parts. The fourth is that political pressure to manipulate key indicators can lead, if undetected, to falsification and unwarranted claims or, if exposed, to jeopardizing the perceived integrity of many related (and otherwise worthy) measurement efforts. Left unattended, the cumulative concern is that these risks will inhibit rather than promote the core problem-solving and implementation capabilities of public sector organizations, an issue of high importance everywhere but especially in developing countries. The paper offers four cross-cutting principles for building an approach to the use of quantitative data—a “balanced data suite”—that strengthens problem-solving and learning in public administration: (1) identify and manage the organizational capacity and power relations that shape data management; (2) focus quantitative measures of success on those aspects which are close to the problem; (3) embrace a role for qualitative data, especially for those aspects that require in-depth, context-specific knowledge; and (4) protect space for judgment, discretion, and deliberation in those (many) decision-making domains that inherently cannot be quantified.
Alternative Paths to Public Financial Management and Public Sector Reform: Experiences from East Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-06-26) So, Sokbunthoeun; Woolcock, Michael; April, Leah; Hughes, Caroline; Smithers, Nicola; So, Sokbunthoeun; Woolcock, Michael; April, Leah; Hughes, Caroline; Smithers, Nicola
Reforming public-sector organizations--their structures, policies, processes and practices--is notoriously difficult, in rich and poor countries alike. Even in the most favorable of circumstances, the scale and complexity of the tasks to be undertaken are enormous, requiring levels of coordination and collaboration that may be without precedent for those involved. Entirely new skills may need to be acquired by tens of thousands of people. Compounding these logistical challenges is the pervasive reality that circumstances often are not favorable to large-scale reform. Whether a country is rich or poor, the choice is not whether, but how, to reform the public sector--how optimal design characteristics, robust political support, and enhanced organizational capability to implement and adapt will be forged over time. This edited volume helps address the “how” question. It brings together reform experiences in public financial management and the public sector more broadly from eight country cases in East Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Vietnam. These countries are at different stages of reform; most of the reform efforts would qualify as successes, while some had mixed outcomes, and others could be considered failures. The focus of each chapter is less on formally demonstrating success (or not) of specific reform, but on documenting how reformers maneuvered within different country contexts to achieve specific outcomes. Despite the great difficulty in reforming the public sector, decision-makers can draw renewed energy and inspiration, learning from those countries, sectors, and subnational spaces where substantive (not merely cosmetic) change has been achieved, and they can identify what pitfalls to avoid.
Toward Successful Development Policies: Insights from Research in Development Economics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Artuc, Erhan; Cull, Robert; Dasgupta, Susmita; Fattal, Roberto; Filmer, Deon; Gine, Xavier; Jacoby, Hanan; Jolliffe, Dean; Kee, Hiau Looi; Klapper, Leora; Kraay, Aart; Loayza, Norman; Mckenzie, David; Ozler, Berk; Rao, Vijayendra; Rijkers, Bob; Schmukler, Sergio L.; Toman, Michael; Wagstaff, Adam; Woolcock, Michael
What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13 short, nontechnical briefing notes prepared in response to this request, summarizing a selection of major insights in development economics in the past decade. The notes synthesize evidence from recent research on how policies should be designed, implemented, and evaluated, and provide illustrations of what works and what does not in selected policy areas.