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Richard Longhurst
Research Associate- Team
- Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction
- CV
- CV (Word doc)
- R.Longhurst@ids.ac.uk
- Tel
- +44 (0) 1273 915751
Biography
Richard Longhurst trained as an agricultural economist at London and Cornell Universities. This started a long standing interest in food policy, nutrition and development and after two years at the World Bank on nutrition policy, completed a doctorate in development economics at Sussex University in 1980 with field work in northern Nigeria, studying the dynamics of the family farm operation, household allocation of labour and child malnutrition. Thereafter he worked for FAO and the Ford Foundation and as a freelance consultant on agriculture, rural development, child health and humanitarian relief until the mid 1990s. He then became a manager and implementer of evaluation studies at the Commonwealth Secretariat and the International Labor Office. Evaluation work took him into a broader range of issues including aid policy, UN reform, gender, child labour, and mainstreaming human rights, as well as the performance management and measurement, and organizational reform agenda. He has also worked as a consultant for international organizations, being DFID, IFAD, IMO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, WFP and WHO.
More by accident than design he has divided appointments between international organizations and universities involving the Centre for International Child Health at London University and two periods at the IDS, where he has now returned as a Research Associate. This has enabled him to integrate agency experience with research. In the last year he has been a core team member of the IDS project on Agricultural Learning and Impacts Network (ALINe) funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, helping further his interests in evaluation methodology, a member of the ‘Seasonality Revisited' research team, re-engaged with his earlier work on policy approaches to eradicating child malnutrition, as well as advising ILO and UNAIDS on the implementation of external organizational evaluations.
He has just stepped down after eight years as Chair of the IDS Alumni Association.
Selected Projects and Recent Work
Selected Publications »»
- Lucas, H. and Longhurst, R. (2010) 'Evaluation: Why, for Whom and How?', IDS Bulletin 41.6, Brighton: Blackwell Publishing
- Devereux, S. and Longhurst, R. (2010) 'Incorporating Seasonality into Agricultural Project Design and Learning', IDS Bulletin 41.6:88-95, Brighton: IDS
- Longhurst, R (2010) 'Global Leadership for Nutrition: The UN’s Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) and its Contributions', IDS Research Summary of IDS Discussion Paper 390, Brighton: IDS
- Longhurst, R (2010) 'Global Leadership for Nutrition: The UN’s Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) and its Contributions', IDS Discussion Paper 390, Brighton: IDS
- Lipton, M. and Longhurst, R. (1989) 'New Seeds and Poor People', Journal of Development Economics 37.1-2:399-405
- Chambers, R., Longhurst, R. and Pacey, A. (1981) 'Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty'

