Research
Brown has a long tradition of research in the area of development and inequality. In the social sciences, some 30 faculty have research interests in this area. GPD is committed to supporting and promoting a wide range of research initiatives by faculty, students, and our partner institutions in development and inequality. As broad and as wide as current interests are, there are six areas where existing work and opportunities for new collaborations are of special interest. Each area has been designated as a GPD initiative and is described below:
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Democratic Governance and Participation
Patrick Heller (Sociology) and Richard Snyder (Political Science) Institutions in the developing world often reflect the interests of the powerful and privileged and, as such, fundamentally distort political and economic incentives (American Political Science Association, 2008). This is a particular challenge to democratic governance in the developing world. Even in the more consolidated democracies, minorities, … Read more -
Global Governance and Inequality
Barbara Stallings (Watson Institute) The final initiative links questions of intranational inequality to international inequality. It thus forms the larger context in which the other four initiatives are embedded. Research on globalization over the past two decades has increasingly focused on examining transnational flows and emerging forms of global governance. In areas as diverse as … Read more -
Global Inequality, Climate Change, and Environmental Protection
Timmons Roberts (Sociology and the Center for Environmental Studies) Environmental crises first strike the poor and dispossessed, who have the least resources to avoid or prepare for, cope with, and recover from natural and technological disasters like climate change and chemical contamination events. Inequality and the environment are recurring themes for major research initiatives across … Read more -
Markets and Social Inequality
Andrew Foster (Economics) It is hard to overstate the importance of markets in determining the changing patterns of inequality that have emerged in the last two decades. Sustained economic growth in Brazil, India, and China, which has raised incomes of 2 billion of the world’s poor and thus reduced inequality across nations, has been led … Read more -
Public Health and Social Disparities
Daniel Smith (Anthropology) Large inequalities in access to health care and health outcomes in the developing world are well documented but not always well understood. Public health research has revealed the magnitude of the problem and has linked the resulting patterns to differences in gender, race, and class, but we know relatively little about the … Read more -
Urban Transformation and Inequality
John Logan (Sociology; Director of Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences) Urbanization in much of the developing world is outpacing job growth as well as the capacity of city governments to provide basic services and facilities to new urban residents. This has created new patterns of social and spatial exclusion, most notably the spread of … Read more