It is with regret we announce the death of former IDS Director John Toye who passed away on the 12 November. John’s research interests included: public finance; the political economy of development; international economic institutions and the history of economic thought.
Early career
John Toye’s academic career began as a Research Fellow in Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1970–72. Then he was Graduate Assistant at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge from 1972–74. Later he was Research Officer at the Overseas Studies Committee at Cambridge from 1975–77, and Assistant Director of Development Studies at Cambridge from 1977–80.
He worked briefly as Director of Research Coordination at the Commodities Research Unit Ltd in London and New York from 1980–82, continuing as Non-executive Director from 1982–85. John took up an appointment as Professor of Development Policy and Planning and Director of the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea in 1982 and remained there until 1987 when he was appointed Director of the Institute of Development Studies and Professorial Fellow of the University of Sussex in Brighton, a position he held until 1997.
John Toye’s tenure at IDS
Adrian Wood, former IDS Fellow writes about John’s time at IDS:
‘When John arrived as Director in 1987, IDS was still suffering from the halving five years earlier of the core government grant that it had received since its establishment in 1966. Its response had been to create the workpoint system, which had filled the financial gap, but at a cost to the quality of the institute’s research.
John worked to improve this situation in two main ways. One was to obtain other and more secure sources of funding that would enable IDS to pursue a better-defined programme of academic research and at the same time reduce staff stress levels. He explored a wide range of possibilities – national, foreign and multilateral – with energy and determination but limited success. This was a period in which research funding was becoming less generous worldwide, in terms of both its quantity and the terms on which it was provided – as was true also of government funding of IDS, which shifted during John’s directorship from a ‘core’ grant to an ‘accountable’ grant tied to specific research areas, and later to competitive tendering.
Some of these changes in the funding environment fortunately assisted the other element of John’s strategy, which was to create an internal research management structure. The invariably high resistance of academics to any form of management was compounded in IDS by people’s fears that control from above would prevent them achieving their workpoint targets. With great skill, however, involving conversations with individuals as well as collective consultation, John eventually succeeded in organising IDS work into four research programmes, each headed by a senior member of its academic staff. This arrangement not only improved the coherence and impact of the institute’s research, but also reduced stress by linking staff members together in mutual support groups. His commitment to IDS and its staff, as well as the difficulties of the director’s job, were widely appreciated’.
After IDS, he was Director of the Globalisation and Development Strategies Division of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva from 1998–2000. Following that he was Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford and Visiting Fellow of St Antony’s College from 2000–03.
Research
His books include: Aid and Power: the World Bank and Policy-based Lending (1991), The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance and Development (2004) and Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in Development Theory and Policy (1987).
IDS Director Melissa Leach writes:
‘It is really sad to hear that John Toye has passed away. He was not only a brilliant development economist but an extremely nice man and an excellent, supportive leader. I remember him well as Director of IDS when I began here as a junior Fellow in 1990; his legacy has lived with us in the decades since and will surely be recalled well into the future’.